I'd like to be downloading some legacy Mac software (pre-OS 8.6) for my brother-in-law's older PowerMac. The problem is that the applications are only available through bittorrent (the author doesn't have much bandwidth), and there are no pre-OS 8.6 BitTorrent clients to download it on his PowerMac or my equally old PowerMac (OS 8.1).
Every time I've copied a Mac file onto a PC floppy, there's extra files which aren't mentioned in the Mac directory listing. If I just get the torrent file and start downloading, will the torrent file create the extra files, or will the resulting file be unreadable by Macs?
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On Monday 20 September 2004 02:18 pm, [email protected] wrote:
Every time I've copied a Mac file onto a PC floppy, there's extra files which aren't mentioned in the Mac directory listing. If I just get the torrent file and start downloading, will the torrent file create the extra files, or will the resulting file be unreadable by Macs?
Older Mac files have a "forked" structure, which looks to DOS like two files, a "header" file and a "body" file. There are formats such as Stuffit Self Expanding files (usually .sea) that allow a non-Mac system to handle Mac files, that's the best method for transferring them. It's possible to create Mac FS support on a Linux box, but compressed archives offer additional protection against transmission error.
Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
On Monday 20 September 2004 02:18 pm, [email protected] wrote:
Every time I've copied a Mac file onto a PC floppy, there's extra files which aren't mentioned in the Mac directory listing. If I just get the torrent file and start downloading, will the torrent file create the extra files, or will the resulting file be unreadable by Macs?
Older Mac files have a "forked" structure, which looks to DOS like two files, a "header" file and a "body" file. There are formats such as Stuffit Self Expanding files (usually .sea) that allow a non-Mac system to handle Mac files, that's the best method for transferring them. It's possible to create Mac FS support on a Linux box, but compressed archives offer additional protection against transmission error.
There were actually three parts to a file: the data fork (which contained "normal" data), the resource fork (which contained icons, sounds, images, executable 68000 code, etc.), and the file's information (type, creator, and version). It was possible for either fork to be empty, e.g. a text file typically just had the text in the data fork and no resource information, and executables typically had only resources.
In order to transfer the files to a non-Mac system you had to bundle the data, resource, and info up into a single byte stream. The two popular choices were BinHex (.hqx) files, which converted everything to text (similar to uu- or base64-encoding) and StuffIt, which compressed everything into a compressed binary, similar to PKZIP.
This is all from fading memory. I haven't used a Mac on a regular basis since early 2000 when the ancient version of Quicken on my IIsi lost features one by one over the course of four months due to Y2K.
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Gerald Combs -
Jonathan Hutchins -
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