Home Page Forums MAME MAME 8bit Apples - Apple I, II, /// and the 16 bit GS

I thought I'd try to fiddle with the Apple /// and see how it does its silentype. Man, the Apple /// is really an alien experience to someone who has only known DOS 3.3 and Applesoft.

There's a disk image of Apple3_Diskware_SilentypeIIIDriver_681-0009-a.dsk which has a basic demo program.

Doing a directory of floppy 2 you have to type "CAT .D2" or once you know the disk name is SITYPE, you can type "CAT /SITYPE".

Then to set the prefix, use the business basic prompt to

PRINT PREFIX$
PREFIX$ = "/SITYPE/"
LOAD DEMO
LIST

(CTRL+numpad 7 will pause/unpause listing) (good old CTRL+S and Q doesn't work)

RUN

at which point it freezes.





Business basic is sure different, with all of these commands like INVOKE and PERFORM which will load assembly language modules and execute routines in the modules.

I'm guessing the actual silentype driver is in BIG.DRIVER and SMALL.DRIVER.



Somewhere there exists a Silentype Manual for the Silentype ///. (I could only find a picture of it on worthpoint)



edit:

I was trying to experiment with the graphic commands from the basic command line with

INVOKE "bgraf.inv"
PERFORM grafixmode(%0,%1)

and it would give ?SOS call error

INVOKE "bgraf.inv"
PERFORM gload."anyfilename"

would cause it to freeze up.

Trying the silentype demo program with only the OPEN #1,".silentype" gives a file not found error, so maybe the driver isn't there?

LOAD DEMO
DEL 80-5000
DEL 50-60





edit: ok, I was able to get some graphics operations working with Apple3BusBasic1.23.dsk
so how do you do a mixed text/graphics mode? It seems you have to switch back and forth with PERFORM grafixon and TEXT.

Ok, I can do writing text to the screen and drawing lines in Business Basic.

The y coordinate is zero in the lower left.

emu.keypost doesn't work correctly, I get @ instead of ".

Working with the Apple3BusBasic1.23.dsk and running the sample program VOLUMES there does appear to be a .SILENTYPE driver that wasn't there with the 1.1 disk.





Interestingly, it also lists .D1 through .D3 but not a .D4 volume.

For comparison, here's the v1.1 business basic VOLUMES output.

SOS has a feature very much like vendor Unixes where you have to relink the kernel to add or remove device drivers. So you have to boot a disk where SOS.DRIVERS includes the .SILENTYPE driver or use the System Utilities to add it to the disk of your choice.

That explains it. I'm doing some reading of this article in the Sept 1982 BYTE where it says that you have to use the System Configuration Program to do this reconfiguration. I'm learning all kinds of interesting stuff.

https://archive.org/stream/byte-mag...ters_and_the_Disabled#page/n109/mode/2up

edit:

I fiddled with the SCP program and it seems pretty straightforward, you can change things like the number of drives in a system, and load driver files to generate a new system.

The only problem that I'm having now is that the floppy drives don't seem to write properly. The SCP can't format a freshly made image (getting an I/O error) and when I saved some basic files to a disk it seemed to clobber it and afterwards I couldn't even get a directory listing.

#Soon

Sooner than I thought, actually. I'll commit this tomorrow after I get some more testing on it.

Very cool!

Now you know: worthwhile

Hey RB, are there any plans to get a Transwarp GS working with the apple2gs?