A Correction to the KEGS Guide

[Jorpho]

http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/kegs

I encountered someone else having trouble extracting the GS/OS disk images, and rather than look here I decided to try to do things the hard way. It turns out it is quite possible to extract them under Windows after all, if you want to.

The .sea.bin file is, to be precise, a MacBinary-encoded DiskDoubler archive. You can get rid of the MacBinary encoding using this program, specifically by invoking
"macbinconv.exe -mb [whatever].sea.bin -dfrf [whatever].dd [whatever].rsc"
This will put the DiskDoubler archive (without its .sea stub) into [whatever].dd .

It turns out the DiskDoubler archive can in turn be extracted with The UnArchiver, available for Windows as a command-line utility. In this case you need to run
"unar -k skip [whatever].dd"
The result should be the decompressed disk image.

I was thinking The Unarchiver (and its Windows port) might be news here, but after a bit of searching it turns out people have posted about it before. I reckon it could be handy in dealing with Stuffit 5 archives and environments where Expander 5 will not run: just use The Unarchiver in Windows to unpack all the files with MacBinary encoding, and then un-MacBinary them using Expander 3 (or whatever) on the Macintosh side.

[ClockWise]

Thank you for the correction. I'll change the guide accordingly!

[ClockWise]

I've added your correction to the guide. Thanks for sharing it!

I'll pass along that Unarchiver tip on the Macintosh Garden board. There's a ton of old games there where the standard advice for Windows users is to extract the game in Basilisk II and then play it in Mini vMac. Sort of time consuming, that.

[Jorpho]

I thought I should note that this actually got a lot easier in unar 1.1, which apparently handles MacBinary more transparently. All you need now is
unar -k skip [whatever].sea.bin
which will create [whatever].sea , the uncompressed disk image.

[Silent Flamer]

Why can't you just use StuffIt under Windows?

[ClockWise]

Silent Flamer, here's an explanation from The Mac Geek:

If you unpack a Mac archive on a
Windows system, and any of the files in that archive had a resource fork, the
Windows version of Stuffit Expander simply discards the resource part of the file
and preserves the data part. For many files, such as JPEG images or most word
processing documents, there is no harm in this. For other types of files, much
of the important information was in the resource fork, and the file will be
useless on the PC (and useless when transferred to the Mac without its resource
fork). This is especially true of Mac applications, including .sea files.

http://www.macgeek.org/downloads/readme_pc_mac.txt

[Jorpho]

More importantly, it's not a Stuffit .sea – it's a DiskDoubler .sea, and I don't think Stuffit under Windows supports that. (I'm not sure http://www.stuffit.com/win-expander.html even supports classic Stuffit anymore.)

[ClockWise]

Someone actually wrote to me a few weeks ago saying that the very latest Stuffit for Windows doesn't handle the old files. He had been following our old Mini vMac setup guide and was stumped by that. I recommended he stick with version 9, which the guide references.

[Silent Flamer]

This is especially true of Mac applications, including .sea files.

Right. Forgot .sea files are in a way applications.

Though, I honestly think that the Basilisk II method is easier.

By the way, StuffIt Expander can get the files out of a .sea archive just like a .sit archive, right?
If doing so doesn't need the resource fork, wouldn't decoding the archive completely in Windows leave a faulty .sea file that still can be used just fine as a .sit archive?a

[Silent Flamer]

http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/kegs

I encountered someone else having trouble extracting the GS/OS disk images, and rather than look here I decided to try to do things the hard way. It turns out it is quite possible to extract them under Windows after all, if you want to.

The .sea.bin file is, to be precise, a MacBinary-encoded DiskDoubler archive. You can get rid of the MacBinary encoding using this progr am, specifically by invoking
"macbinconv.exe -mb [whatever].sea.bin -dfrf [whatever].dd [whatever].rsc"
This will put the DiskDoubler archive (without its .sea stub) into [whatever].dd .

It turns out the DiskDoubler archive can in turn be extracted with The UnArchiver, available for Windows as a command-line utility. In this case you need to run
"unar -k skip [whatever].dd"
The result should be the decompressed disk image.

I was thinking The Unarc hiver (and its Windows port) might be news here, but after a bit of searching it turns out people have posted about it before. I reckon it could be handy in dealing with Stuffit 5 archives and environments where Expander 5 will not run: just use The Unarchiver in Windows to unpack all the files with MacBinary encoding, and then un-MacBinary them using Expander 3 (or whatever) on the Macintosh side.

Also, since we know the archive itself, when completely decoded and unpacked leaves a disk image, why not use StuffIt in Windows, even if it tosses the resource fork, to get the disk image (which does not need a resource fork)?

Of course, this isn't as plausible on files that do need a resource fork (that is, the files after the archive has been decoded and unpacked).
h

[Jorpho]

A .sea file is in fact nothing more than an archive with a self-extractor application in the resource fork; cutting off the resource fork in this case leaves you with nothing but an ordinary archive, as suggested by my OP, so nothing is lost. (I recall I once found a Macintosh utility named DeSEA which did exactly the same thing.)

Regardless: This is a DiskDoubler archive; it is not .sit and has nothing to do with .sit. Self-extracting archives on a Macintosh all often had .sea in their names by convention, regardless of whether they were created with Stuffit, Compact Pro, or DiskDoubler, much like all self-extracting archives on a PC are .exe regardless of whether they were made with PKZip, ARJ, LHA, or whatever. One of the awesome things about The Unarchiver is that it supports a whole bunch of these formats, including DiskDoubler.