delton@pro-carolina.cts.COM (System Administrator) (02/29/88)
A "Large" version of ProDOS isn't really used with the PCT.. it's just AE's way of installing their driver code for their ram disk. The PCT card doesn't contain any ROM to hold ProDOS device drivers for either their ram disk or for any drives attached to the PCT card. They tack on a driver file on the front end of the PRODOS file so booting the system will install their driver into the area that would normally be ROM code. Once their driver is installed, they move the unmodified PRODOS code down to $2000 and jump to it so you can use their PCINSTALL utility to add the driver code to either the P8 PRODOS file or to the PRODOS loader file on a P16 disk and it won't make any difference since the PRODOS code itself isn't modified. The down side to this method is that the ram disk goes south after every reboot (making it almost useless for most purposes) and you can't use a drive attached to the PCT as a boot device since there's no ROM. There are also a few shortcomings in the 'smartport' driver code for the Apple Disk 3.5 that can cause some problems when the drive is used with Finder but that's no big deal for me since I never use the Finder.