E-Maculation

First of all -- I'd like to thank everyone who worked on the various tutorials on emaculation.com -- very good stuff. In just a morning, I had a running System 7.5 emulator going -- amazing!

Second -- I've got some old files I created on a Mac from a very long time ago, that I'm unable to load. They've gone through many different systems all throughout the years. I'm trying to open them in my System 7.5 emulator, but experiencing some problems.

I've tried searching the forum, and while I've found others who had problems with resource forks, none seem to be exactly like my problem.

The problem:

It looks like a lot of the files are "split up" -- I've been reading about how copying onto/off non-Macosx systems over the years can "split" the resource forks from the files, as they were created back in the System 7 days, but I haven't seen much about how to repair this.

I believe I still have the resource forks -- a lot of my data seems to have the interesting folder organization, like the following example. Any idea about how to "combine" all of this into one file, launchable in System 7? Thanks for any help!

That's called "Apple Double" format, and is used, among other places, by SheepShaver and Basilisk II on Windows in the shared folders. Stick that in a shared folder, launch SS or BII, and from within the emulator copy the files back to an internal image and they'll get merged back into single files again.

Or, if you run macOS, you can do it yourself from the command line via cat "file.rsrc" > "file/..namedfork/rsrc"

adespoton wrote: Mon Oct 04, 2021 3:44 pmThat's called "Apple Double" format, and is used, among other places, by SheepShaver and Basilisk II on Windows in the shared folders.

Don't Sheepshaver and Basilisk use folders named ".finf" and ".rsrc" for storing resource fork data? I've never been entirely clear on whether the data stored therein is necessarily AppleDouble or something custom.

I think individual .rsrc files are created by PC Exchange, but it's been a while.

Unfortunately that doesn't really help to get to the bottom of just what to do here.

Hmm... you might be right. Those are definitely Apple Double files though. macOS (and OS X) can merge them like I said... I think HFVExplorer can merge them as well on Windows.

Well, if they're AppleDouble, then if I'm not mistaken, HFVExplorer would require "SaintEdit 1.1.rsrc" to be renamed to "%SaintEdit 1.1", and would also expect a second zero-byte file named "SaintEdit 1.1" to represent the data fork. (A zero-byte file can easily be created from the Windows Explorer right-click menu via New->Text Document.)

Jorpho wrote: Tue Oct 05, 2021 9:15 pm Well, if they're AppleDouble, then if I'm not mistaken, HFVExplorer would require "SaintEdit 1.1.rsrc" to be renamed to "%SaintEdit 1.1", and would also expect a second zero-byte file named "SaintEdit 1.1" to represent the data fork. (A zero-byte file can easily be created from the Windows Explorer right-click menu via New->Text Document.)

Sounds right to me.

adespoton wrote: Mon Oct 04, 2021 3:44 pm That's called "Apple Double" format, and is used, among other places, by SheepShaver and Basilisk II on Windows in the shared folders. Stick that in a shared folder, launch SS or BII, and from within the emulator copy the files back to an internal image and they'll get merged back into single files again.

Or, if you run macOS, you can do it yourself from the command line via cat "file.rsrc" > "file/..namedfork/rsrc"

Very interesting! Unfortunately:

1) when launching Basilisk II, and copying the ".rsrc" file from shared to the internal image, nothing happens. The file is copied over as a ".rsrc" file, and is unable to be opened.

2) I am using MacOSX, and when I tried to perform the "cat" command like you mentioned, the following happened:
3) Just to be thorough, I also created a zero byte file just called "SaintEdit 1.1" in the same folder, and then ran the command again:
After doing that, there does seem to be _something_ at the location "SaintEdit 1.1/..namedfork/rsrc", but still this file won't launch inside Basilisk II.

I feel like I'm really close here -- what am I missing?

Hmm... as discussed further down the thread, Basilisk II in Windows uses a slightly different convention for its apple double files. The merged one you created is almost there, but I realized you're still missing the metadata -- you'll need a tool like FileBuddy or Greg's Browser or ResEdit to set the file type and creator. If it's an application, setting the file type to APPL should be enough to get it running. Opening the file in ResEdit might give you clues as to what the creator ID is supposed to be.

If Executor and HFV Explorer aren't options, then there is a utility included with netatalk that can be used to convert AppleDouble back to MacBinary, previously discussed in https://emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=53615 . MacBinary files can then be safely decoded in System 7.5 with Stuffit Expander (or various other utilities).

Otherwise, an increasingly roundabout way is to put the files together in a zip file and then use Miniunzp:
-Create a folder named __MACOSX (starting with two underscores).
-Copy SaintEdit 1.1.rsrc into the folder and rename it to "._SaintEdit 1.1"
-Create a Zip file containing the __MACOSX folder within the zip along with a zero-byte file named "SaintEdit 1.1".
-Decompress the Zip file in System 7.5 with Miniunzp, as in viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8322 .

I don't doubt there's an easier way of doing this, but I don't know exactly what that would be offhand.