🚀 go-pugleaf

Recently some articles were posted by Atari folks (I forgot who - perhaps
it was Allan Pratt) as well as Landon Dyer, in which it was asserted that
FOLDRXXX.PRG will work properly with ALL versions of TOS - past, present,
and future.

Last week on CompuServe's Atari Developer's Forum, Dave Small said that some
of Data Pacific's hard drives were acting "40-folder-ish" once connected
to a Mega, while they were fine when running on an older machine. The
version of FOLDRXXX.PRG they are using was the "official" one posted
to CIS, GEnie, etc. (I'm not even sure there exists more than one version).

This brings me back to GEMBOOT. The most recent version I have (v1.10) came
with a utility program to find and display the address of the GEM memory
block nodelist (GEMFRL) as well as display all the allocated memory blocks.
The docs state that in the "old" roms GEMFRL was located at $56FA and if
this location is no longer valid, the GEMBOOT environment must be changed
to reflect the actual location of GEMFRL.

Running this program under the new (04/22/87) roms gives a location of
$7E9C, and GEMBOOT does indeed enlarge the number of type 4 (directory
cache) memory blocks when so configured.

Next I looked at FOLDRXXX.PRG. The discussion on CIS said that it contained
a look-up table of ROM version dates. Within the program the following
information (re-formatted, of course) appears:
      $4E75   11/20/1985
      $56FA   02/06/1986
      $56FA   04/24/1986
      $56FA   06/01/1986
      $7E0A   00/00/0000
(actually the last "date" might not be an entry at all, as the table is
padded at the end with nulls).

This table brings forth two very alarming impressions!
1. The system date of the current roms, 04/11/1987, is NOWHERE IN THIS TABLE.
2. The address of $7E0A, which I take it is a projection of where GEMFRL might
   be in the future, is WRONG. The TOS header lists GEMFRL at $7E9C.

Just for fun, I zapped the last "entry" to read:
      $7E9C  04/22/1987
rebooted my system, and re-ran GEMFRL.TOS. The number of type 4 blocks allocated
had increased by 50%!

Granted a lot of the above information may be shaky, reverse-engineered, or
based upon other people's mistaken "facts". Still, it raises questions about
the point-blank assertion that FOLDRXXX.PRG was designed to work with ANY
POSSIBLE version of TOS. Would an Atari spokesperson care to post a COMPLETE,
AUTHORITATIVE answer?

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-- 
l\  /l'   _  Mike Schuster          {sun!hoptoad,cmcl2!phri}!dasys1!schuster
l \/ lll/(_  Big Electric Cat       schuster@dasys1.UUCP
l    lll\(_  New York, NY USA       DELPHI,GEnie:MSCHUSTER  CIS:70346,1745