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From: hsu@eneevax.UUCP (Dave Hsu)
Newsgroups: net.micro.apple
Subject: Re: Including DOS in marketable products
Message-ID: <8@eneevax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 17-Jul-86 18:11:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: eneevax.8
Posted: Thu Jul 17 18:11:44 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Jul-86 05:29:48 EDT
References: <1367@burl.UUCP>
Reply-To: hsu@eneevax.UUCP (Dave Hsu)
Organization: Imperial Widget Research Center, Kingdom of Maryland
Lines: 55

In article <1367@burl.UUCP> geoff@burl.UUCP (geoff) writes:
>Does anyone have any experience in including DOS in a product?  I have
>seen stand-alone disks that boot the Apple, load themselves, and go.
>I assume they have a copy of DOS on the disk to load the program and
>to do any kind of disk read/write the program might need.  Is this
>licensed through Apple?  How much does it cost?  I have a program
>that runs under DOS 3.3 right now, but I may move it to ProDos later.
>...
>-- 
>		geoff sherwood

I seem to remember way back when that Apple sold some sort of
distribution licenses for 3.3 much in the same way that they sold
run-time modules for the p-system.

When you mention load and go software, I presume you mean commercial
canned stuff.  Thanks to the wonderful world of copy protection, most
of these sport either fully-custom boot sections of their own (i.e.
Flight Simulator) or customized versions of Apple's own software (like
Castle Wolfenstein, or Ultima II).  Most software publishers have tried
to move away from this latter method, because it creates legal hassles
for them if they aren't careful.  The classic case of this involves a
3-in-one arcade game that a major manufacturer produced about 4 years
ago; they had bought the program from a young programmer who also
pirated disks as a hobby.  The protection scheme involved tweaking
the directory track, and overwriting the original DOS with a customized
version.  Then, the disk was slapped into the bulk copier.  Trouble is,
the original had arrived on their doorstep with a deleted, unlocked 3.3 
binary of Choplifter on it, and they had neglected to scramble the original
disk tables.  So, with the aid of any undelete program, your 3-in-one
game had just become a 4-in-one game.  Needless to say, the company
involved was NOT Broderbund, and the disk was pulled.

I doubt that you'd be willing to devote the resources to writing a dos,
and licensing the Real Thing could be more trouble than it's worth.
Because...

The last alternative is to use a PD dos.  If your program does not
require access to ordinary files (i.e. load memory once and run)
there are a number of tiny (3-sector) loader programs that don't
require a dos, but run very very quickly.  If you do need a dos,
packages like DavidDOS (and I think, the Beagle one too) require
only an attribution somewhere in your opening sequence.  I gave up
hacking my ][+ when ProDOS started to gain in popularity, so I'm afraid
I have no useful advice to you if you need access to existing files.

-dave
-- 
David Hsu  (301) 454-1433 || -8798	"It was Dave, not me..honest!" -eneevax
Communication & Signal Processing Lab / Engineering Computer Facility
The University of Maryland   -~-   College Park, MD 20742
ARPA:hsu@eneevax.umd.edu  UUCP:[seismo,allegra,rlgvax]!umcp-cs!eneevax!hsu

"Who cometh to the bridge of death must answer me these questions three,
 'ere the other side he see....aiggggh!"