Posted on by Mark Munz

Pause in Action

It’s been a while since I last posted. Most of my current attention is focused on getting the next version of TextSoap out in the next few months. As many of you already know, Deja IIx is more a labor of love, but it doesn’t pay the bills.

However, once TextSoap goes out the door, I hope to have some time to finish up the remaining pieces of Deja IIx and bring it out of beta. If you come across bugs, please let me know by either leaving comments or emailing me.

And no, I am not looking to bring Deja IIx to the iPhone. I will, however, make the source available if someone wants to actually try it. 🙂

12 Replies to “Pause in Action”

  2. Fellas (Mark and even Randy now, it seems),

    One of our old time Apple II guys (you’d know him) has been working on a MacFUSE ProDOS file system for OS X.

    He’s already got it at the read-only stage, but he told me he’s still got a ways to go to get it to a fully functional ‘just insert the disk to read-write ProDOS’ state.

    When this is completed, I suspect it should allow mounting of ProDOS formatted images (and actual disks, although not the 800KB floppy type due to hardware limitations) by the Mac OS X Finder so that DejaIIx can actually access them, even if it requires some type of alias.

    Mark, you’ve done a nice job with DejaIIx. I’ve played with it a little bit on one of our Tiger machines. It seems to run sharp and snappy.

    Since my workflow still involves using AppleWorks with direct serial output to PCL (and PostScript form work) printers, I haven’t adopted DejaIIx yet, but I’m keeping a close eye on it.

    {FWIW, AppleWorks printing under Bernie in OS X ‘Classic Mode’ with a Keyspan USB to Serial adapter works well for this type of work.}

    I know you’ve been working on various methods to get everyday ‘normal’ printing functional in DejaIIx.

    In my case, the ability (when printing) to dump directly to an (emulated) serial port (as in Deja ][) would be big addition to DejaIIx and would make me take a long, hard, look at retiring my real IIGS’s from everyday work.

    Thanks for your continuing efforts with AppleWorks. You know, I still refer to ‘The UltraMacros Primer’ on occasion.

    Hugh Hood
    Waco, Texas

  3. Randy, since iPhone/iPod touch uses Cocoa, it might be more possible than I thought. Perhaps if I get really, really bored one weekend.

  4. Access to the ProDOS file system would be interesting. As long as it is accessible to the standard Mac APIs, shouldn’t require too much extra. Theoretically, you could just create an alias to the prodos image and put it the Prodos Volumes folder.

    As for printing to a direct serial output, I’ll say that is way out of my expertise. Under classic, I relied on the OS having a serial port emulation. Unfortunately, that API is gone under OS X.

    If you know somebody that has expertise in that area, I’d be happy to collaborate with them.

    For the record, I still refer to the UltraMacros primer too — mainly because I’ve forgotten a lot of the little details. 🙂

  7. From reading this I take it that if one inlicts OS X on your computer that it willo no longer read PrroDOS discs. I have a powerbook and use original Deja II under 9.2.2 and a zip disc to transfer data from it to my GS. Would this not be possible if one gets OS X? If so another reason to not consider it an upgrade.

    Here is a cool thing that I’ll never get:

    http://benheck.com/04-14-2008/apple-iigs-original-hardware-laptop

  8. Anonymous,

    Your inference is correct. Out of the box, OS X, unlike OS 9, will not mount and recognize a disk (or disk image) containing the ProDOS file system.

    I, too, have been using ProDOS formatted Zip Disks for many years to transfer data between Macs and Apple II’s.

    As a very, very, late arrival to the OS X party, I discovered just last year the ProDOS ‘deficiency’ in OS X.

    Now, as a work-around, for example, I’ll save an 8-bit AppleWorks classic file to a ProDOS formatted disk within AppleWorks. Then, I’ll quit AppleWorks, boot into GS/OS, and then copy the file to an HFS formatted Zip Disk.

    The HFS formatted Zip Disk can be mounted and read by OS X.

    Since this is an arduous process that requires some extra steps, including quitting AppleWorks, I am excited about the pending MacFUSE ProDOS for OS X.

    MacFUSE is an open source project that allows support for additional file systems to be added to OS X.

    http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

    So far, ProDOS has not been one of these additional file systems. But, I have been informed that this will change soon, thanks to the efforts of a talented old time Apple II loyalist.

    Hugh Hood

  9. I saw another piece of code AMSerialPort, that may also be useful.

    I’m neck deep in text suds (aka TextSoap) right now, but hopefully I’ll get to take a look at it before too long.

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