7. Make your boot disk

You’re almost ready to use virtual drives, courtesy of David Schmidt’s VSDRIVE, which is included with ADTPro. You can also use ADTPro itself to transfer disk images to actual disks, and vice versa.

To access the virtual drives, you need to boot from the A2CLOUD disk. To get that, you need ADTPro to transfer it to an Apple II floppy. If you’ve already got ADTPro on an Apple II disk, boot it (choose Serial if prompted), and skip the video and the paragraph which follows it. Or, if you’ve got some other means of turning disk image files into floppies, you can download the 140K A2CLOUD boot disk or the 800K A2CLOUD boot disk, and skip the rest of this post.

If you don’t have ADTPro on an Apple II disk already, you need to get it running on your Apple II via a process called bootstrapping. Here’s a video to show you how to do that, or you can read the instructions below it.

 

First, turn on your Apple II and press ctrl-RESET before DOS or ProDOS can load. Next, if you have a screen, keyboard, and mouse attached to your Pi, type startx. Otherwise, log in with Remote Desktop Connection (as described in A2CLOUD: go headless) from another computer. Once you see the desktop, double-click ADTPro Server, and when the ADTPro server window appears, choose Bootstrapping->ProDOS->SpeediBoot and follow the instructions which pop up. When you get to the “LOADING MLI” phase on your Apple II, nothing may appear to happen for several minutes; just be patient and it will eventually kick in. (You can alternatively choose VSDRIVE+SpeediBoot to immediately gain access to the virtual drives, but as soon as you reboot, you’ll need to bootstrap again. It’s much more convenient to have a boot floppy.)

Once you’ve ADTPro running, put in a blank floppy disk and type F to format it (unless you know it’s already formatted). You can use any volume name. When it’s done, type R to receive, and then enter (in all caps) A2CLOUD.DSK for a 5.25″ drive or A2CLOUD.PO for a 3.5″ drive. The A2CLOUD disk will be copied from your Pi to your Apple II. (You can use ADTPro to transfer any other disk images to or from your Pi at any time.)

If you bootstrapped, once you’ve got your A2CLOUD disk, you can leave the ADTPro server window open, or reboot your Pi. If you close the window, or quit the Raspbian desktop without rebooting, ADTPro server will no longer be running; you can type adtpro-start at a prompt to get it going again, or reboot, or disconnect and then reconnect the USB-to-serial adapter on the lower USB port.

One thought on “7. Make your boot disk

  1. eric F

    Encountered a minor hiccup here with adtpro.sh. If you’re using the Pi headless with tightvncserver, Java won’t connect to the vnc display and the ADTPro window won’t come up. My solution was to turn off access control on the Pi with “xhost +”.

    Reply

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