Apple Greetings

In my experience it seems that for the PR #6 command to work on the Apple, the greeting program that one INITializes the disk with must be entitled "HELLO". After RENAMEing the greeting program and attempting to boot the disk, a FILE NOT FOUND error resulted.

Jeff Walsh

Actually, you can assign any filename up to 30 characters in length to the greeting program (or to any other program). Ordinarily, this is done during the INITialization process. When INIT is executed, the disk is formatted and the name of the greeting program (in addition to being stored in the catalog) is placed on the disk in sector 9 of track 1. So when the disk is booted, the named greeting program is automatically run.

If you later decide to RENAME your greeting program (as you did) or have another program you wish to boot, you must also replace the filename for the booting program stored in track 1 or a FILE NOT FOUND error occurs. The following short program lets you replace the filename in track 1 with any filename you choose:

50 FOR I = 1 TO 36 : READ J : POKE 3071 + I, J : NEXT
100 INPUT "NEW GREETING PROGRAM NAME - >"; A$
120 FOR I = LEN (A$) + 1 TO 30
130 A$ = A$ + " " : NEXT I
140 POKE 3072 + 22,1 : CALL 3072
150 FOR I = 1 TO 30
160 POKE 8192 + 116 + I, ASC { MID$ (A $, I 1)) + 128
170 NEXT
180 POKE 3072 + 22, 2 : CALL 3072
190 DATA 169, 12, 160, 10, 32, 217
200 DATA 3, 96, 0, 0, 1, 96
210 DATA 1, 0, 1, 9, 32, 12
220 DATA 0, 32, 0, 0, 2, 3
230 DATA 254, 96, 1, 0, 0, 0
240 DATA 0, 0, 0, 1, 239, 216

After you INPUT your new filename, the program writes it to track 1, sector 9. The short ML routine in this program enables you to replace the filename on the disk.