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Oregon Trail on an 800K disk, is it possible?

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voidstar78

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I have the Oregon Trail disk 1/disk 2 in .DO images - and those run on my Apple ][, but I do have to flip disk. They are 140KB disk images.

Is there any format we can put these disk on, to avoid having to actually flip disk? (or in the emulated disk drive, to avoid having to select the other disk?) I looked at 800KB disks to try to make an image with AppleCommander, but I'm just not familiar with the Apple ][ eco-system to know of any combination that works. Even if the program stil asks to "flip disk" it would be nice to be able to just press spacebar and not actually have to change anything to proceed.
 
It's probably possible to put the hard disk installable version on an 800K image - I could probably do that if I haven't already.
 
Glad to see archive.org back up. I tried the 3.5" 800K version mentioned. I'm using the BigMessOWires FloppyEmu and it says it couldn't load those .WOZ files "in the current emu mode" (apparently it supports 5.25 disks only). So maybe we could try a HD image? Would I need to boot into ProDOS to make that work?
 
voidstar78 said:
Glad to see archive.org back up. I tried the 3.5" 800K version mentioned. I'm using the BigMessOWires FloppyEmu and it says it couldn't load those .WOZ files "in the current emu mode" (apparently it supports 5.25 disks only). So maybe we could try a HD image? Would I need to boot into ProDOS to make that work?
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I don't use any FDD emulator since I prefer real drives and diskettes, but most likely you have to change the flopyemu firmware (it has several depending on its usage).
 
voidstar78 said:
Glad to see archive.org back up. I tried the 3.5" 800K version mentioned. I'm using the BigMessOWires FloppyEmu and it says it couldn't load those .WOZ files "in the current emu mode" (apparently it supports 5.25 disks only). So maybe we could try a HD image? Would I need to boot into ProDOS to make that work?
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Been a long time since I've used an Apple II so reading up on it shows DOS 3.2.1 and earlier are 116K sided disks and DOS 3.3 and ProDOS are 140k sided. Being GCR format they are not the regular FM/MFM capacities but close to Double Density in those terms.
 
richarjo said:
Been a long time since I've used an Apple II so reading up on it shows DOS 3.2.1 and earlier are 116K sided disks and DOS 3.3 and ProDOS are 140k sided. Being GCR format they are not the regular FM/MFM capacities but close to Double Density in those terms.
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This is completely irrelevant to the floppyemu and to the original topic at all! As if an AI bot generated some noise in the topic.
 
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As it so happens, I have in fact created a "raw" disk image of a 3.5" version of Oregon Trail based on the hard disk installable version. The timestamp on the file is January 13, 2018.
 

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george said:
This is completely irrelevant to the floppyemu and to the original topic at all! As if an AI bot generated some noise in the topic.
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I'm really sorry. The OP asked is needed to boot into ProDOS to make an HD disk image work. That was the best information I could find, that being DOS 3.3 and ProDOS are 140k while earlier versions are 116k sided.
 
richarjo said:
I'm really sorry. The OP asked is needed to boot into ProDOS to make an HD disk image work. That was the best information I could find, that being DOS 3.3 and ProDOS are 140k while earlier versions are 116k sided.
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The reason for moving the game to a ProDOS disk is because it supports 800K 3.5" drives. This is touched upon on Wikipedia:

ProDOS 8 natively supports Disk II-compatible floppy drives, a RAM drive of approximately 59 KB on computers having 128 KB or more RAM, and block devices whose controllers support the Pascal firmware protocol, a standardized method of accepting block reads and writes originally introduced for use with the UCSD p-System. This latter category includes 3.5" floppy drives and hard drives. Custom block device drivers can be hooked into the OS as well.​

(The "8" above refers to the 8-bit version of ProDOS as opposed to the 16-bit version; it's not a version number.)
 
cjs said:
The reason for moving the game to a ProDOS disk is because it supports 800K 3.5" drives. This is touched upon on Wikipedia:

ProDOS 8 natively supports Disk II-compatible floppy drives, a RAM drive of approximately 59 KB on computers having 128 KB or more RAM, and block devices whose controllers support the Pascal firmware protocol, a standardized method of accepting block reads and writes originally introduced for use with the UCSD p-System. This latter category includes 3.5" floppy drives and hard drives. Custom block device drivers can be hooked into the OS as well.​

(The "8" above refers to the 8-bit version of ProDOS as opposed to the 16-bit version; it's not a version number.)
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Thank You for the clarification. :) That is more diverse information than I found. The thread I referred to stated ProDOS and Pascal formats are 140k : https://comp.sys.apple2.narkive.com/TUJpcfaK/apple-ii-disk-drive-question
 
ProDOS is disk format agnostic and supports disks up to 32 MB.

That's part of the trick here. This uses some sort of a DOS 3.3 emulator that runs on top of ProDOS-8 and uses a disk file as one or two virtual disk images.
 
Will give the image a shot tonight. We have physical drives, but the issue is Oregon trail requires users to "flip the disk" part way through - for a public use system, we're trying to avoid that just for the sake of a bit less wear and tear on the equipment.
 
so, I found a mode to put the FloppyEmu in 3.5 disk mode, but looks like it needs a "Yellowstone" disk controller. Or a "Liron" disk controller if trying to use a Smartport. The FloppyEmu does support a dual 5.25 mode - so I did that try, and put the different "sides" of Oregon Trail into different drives. Was hoping the S/W might look at the "other drive" as a fallback - but no such luck. Obviouslly I could move up to the Mac version, but still hoping to stick with the Apple ][.

I wasn't sure what to do with the 3.5 800KB "raw' disk image earlier - the FloppyEmu did let me switch to a 3.5 "unidisk" mode, and "booting" with that image just brought me to (what appears to be) a BASIC prompt. I'm not too earlier with ProDOS, but the included SD appears to have both ProDOS 2.x and a 4.x version. (i.e. not sure if ProDOS has some command to mount the 800KB image?)
 
Never heard of a ProDOS 4.x. My disk image has 2.4.1.

If you can pull files off it, MECC.SYSTEM is the "DOS 3.3 Emulator" and MECC.PROD is the two sides of Oregon Trail sandwiched together. By executing MECC.SYSTEM, it should show a "]" on the screen for a second, and then blank and show the Oregon Trail boot splash.

ETA: whether you can boot a Unidisk directly, without using PR#, on an Apple //e depends on the version of the firmware. The original version, says "Apple ][" when you boot, won't do it, but the newer one, says "Apple //e" when you boot, should.
 
usotsuki said:
As it so happens, I have in fact created a "raw" disk image of a 3.5" version of Oregon Trail based on the hard disk installable version. The timestamp on the file is January 13, 2018.
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I can confirm the image self-boots as a .2mg image in AppleWin IIe emulation
 
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usotsuki said:
That's what it literally is.
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Stuffit unpacks the archive as oregon.800 without further suffix. I read in Applewin help that it accepts 800k unidisk images as file.2mg mounted as a hard drive. I tried it and it worked.
Applewin wouldn't accept an 800k file.po image.
 
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