Well, I confused something (as I do more often …
): The parts of the former AppleTalk stack that are still used nowadays – AFP for example – are not referred to as AppleTalk anymore.
I now understand that information on Netatalk is referring to 'AppleTalk' as exactly that part of the protocol stack that has been removed from OS X since version 10.6. That part is DDP, which has been substituted for TCP/IP.
Netatalk itself never included DDP but relied on the system kernel to provide it. As OS X kernels don't have that anymore since Snow Leopard (just as almost every recent version of the numerous UNIX and UNIX-like systems, as it seems), Netatalk (also version 2.2.5 if used on SL and up) can only operate via TCP/IP.
See
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/neta ... 2.5.tar.gz and within that
/doc/README.AppleTalk for reference.
However, it seems that
CAP (Columbia AppleTalk Package) does provide DDP.
CAP is actually quite old and hasn't been updated since years, final version being 6.0. But as the full source code is available I wonder whether it could be compiled into something that can be installed on present versions of OS X. I had nothing to loose, so I tried it with Homebrew. But as I didn't know what I was doing I ended up with an "empty installation" error (just as I did with Netatalk one week ago).
At
http://web.archive.org/web/200602160132 ... P50.README there's a TODO list (towards the end of the page) that mentions DDP to be included. When that list got published some stuff was not fully finished. But it refers to version 5.0. I suppose things were finished in 6.0.
EDIT: The file is named "cap50.readme", but its content is the one of version 6.0. It says DDP is "essentially completed, but some minor parts missing". Might still work though. Would depend on someone testing it.
There is also an FAQ at
http://www.ralentz.com/old/mac/faqs/source/cap.html .
More information on CAP incl. FTP-server addresses for download is provided at
http://web.archive.org/web/200602070944 ... k/cap.html .
At time of writing this post none of the servers worked. But earlier this week one of them did. It was dead slow, so downloading ~17 MB must have taken an hour or so. For anyone interested: I have zipped the files and uploaded to
https://www.dropbox.com/s/c0dozjc07prcg5m/cap.zip?dl=0 .
Now I wish I'd know how to compile. Maybe it will be possible for someone else to spend time on this in the near future.
I'd be very grateful!