I place everything in this folder in the public domain
Sheldon Simms 3/2013

This is my RS-232 disk driver hack for Prodos. The main benefit of this
software is that it requires no disk drives at all on your Apple II in
order to work. You can boot your Apple II over a serial connection.

In fact, since it uses a patched version of Prodos in which the disk II
driver has been overwritten, any disk II drives won't work when
using this software.

Please be aware that when I write "Apple II" in this document, I actually
mean an Apple II with 65c02 cpu. If you have a 65c02 in an Apple II or II+,
then it will probably work, otherwise you will have to have an enhanced IIe
or IIc.

I wrote this program as a lark, and because I wanted to let my children
write (and save) BASIC programs on my Apple IIe without having any disk
drives attached.

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Using the disk server

In order to use this software you must have a PC running Windows with an
RS-232 serial port, and an Apple II with a 65c02 processor and a super
serial card (or compatible).

The files ser.exe and bootload.bin must be in the same directory on the PC.
After unpacking the distribution archive, open a Windows command prompt and
switch to the 'serpd' directory, then run the PC server by typing at the
windows command prompt:

.\ser.exe Patched-Prodos-4.0.2.po

Of course you can replace the Patched-Prodos disk image with any other prodos-
order disk image, provided you first replace Prodos on your other image with
the patched version of Prodos found on the Patched-Prodos image.

On any Apple II with more than one serial port, both the bootloader and driver
will automatically use the serial port in the highest slot. The only way to
change this is to edit the source code.

After starting the driver on the PC, as shown above, you must prepare the
Apple II for booting:

 1) Fully reset, or power-cycle your Apple II.
 2) Enable input from the serial card by entering the command
    IN#<slot number> at the basic prompt, where <slot number> is the
    slot of your serial card. I have my serial card in slot 1, so I type
    IN#1 and then hit return.
 3) Set the serial card baud rate to 19200, by typing <ctrl-A> then, at
    the serial card prompt, 15B and hit return.

At this point, everything is ready, and you hit enter on the PC to begin
the transfer of the bootloader to the Apple II. After the bootloader has
transferred, it will execute and the Apple II will boot off of the disk
image being served from the PC.

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Source code

The bootload source code is arranged for the xa65 cross assembler. The
main thing is to assemble absolute at $800, and call the resulting file
'bootload.bin'

If you are interested in modifying the driver that gets patched into Prodos,
the source code for that is in the 'src' directory on the disk image.
There is also source code for a program that will patch the driver into
Prodos. If you want to use that, assemble the driver and the patcher, load
the driver at $2000 and the patcher at $c00, then go into the monitor and
run the patcher at $c00. Before doing this, you will have to change the path
to Prodos in the patcher source.

The Prodos patcher program patches the serial driver into Prodos on top of the
disk II driver, but it doesn't patch the device search code that installs
the serial driver in the first place. Therefore, you can't use the patcher
to make a virgin copy of Prodos work with the disk image server.

To install the serial driver in Prodos, I just patched in the necessary
code by hand using block warden, based on Prodos source code and some
snippets I assembled in Merlin. My "source file" for that is included as
'devsearch.txt'

