wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew) (06/06/86)
///// Hello, Has anyone worked with Franklin's FDOS? It is fairly compatible with DOS 3.2 in that the IOB structure is the same, and the well-known entry points are are at the same addresses. We have a couple of old Franklin 1000s around the Lab.-- they are pretty simailar to the Apple II version 7 motherboard, except that they sport 64K of ram on the board (64K chips with upper 16K mapped into slot 0, and softswitch protocol) and an LSI disk control I.C. stuck on the motherboard. I was very impressed with FDOS, as it accomplished a BLOAD in 2 sec. that took 30 sec. in DOS 3.3. I suspect that FDOS does a full track(s) read, and then picks up needed sectors from RAM. Also, it might use buffering similar to ProDOS. The problem is that FDOS works o.k. on an Apple with 64K of memory for reading, but not writing to disk. FDOS wipes out the catalog when attempting a SAVE/BSAVE on an Apple. I wonder if the Franklin LSI controller chip has something magic inside that is different? Anybody have any experiences or care to comment? The Ace-1000 really was't a bad knock-off of an Apple, provided that you got one that didn't have the ROM-less soft-boot version. We had a soft-boot that never would actually boot, so we de-kludged it and put copies of the original ROMs back in, and all was fine. Bill NEOUCOM ...!allegra!neoucom!wtm (216) 325-2511
galyen@scicom.UUCP (Robert Galyen) (06/09/86)
In article <209@neoucom.UUCP>, wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew) writes: > > The problem is that FDOS works o.k. on an Apple with 64K of > memory for reading, but not writing to disk. FDOS wipes out the > catalog when attempting a SAVE/BSAVE on an Apple. I wonder if the > Franklin LSI controller chip has something magic inside that is > different? > > Anybody have any experiences or care to comment? The > Ace-1000 really was't a bad knock-off of an Apple, provided that > you got one that didn't have the ROM-less soft-boot version. We > had a soft-boot that never would actually boot, so we de-kludged it > and put copies of the original ROMs back in, and all was fine. > There are a number of Apple/Franklin user groups that could probably help with your problem. A few that come to mind are M.A.U.G. on CompuServe, Franklin Users Group Int'l (417/869-5294 modem), and Aces High (303/329-6579 modem). Good luck ------------------------------------- An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy. ------------------------------------- What is mine is mine. Would anyone else claim this...please?