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From: russotto@eng.umd.edu (Matthew T. Russotto)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Reading msdos optical disks with a mac
Message-ID: <1990Jun2.024654.212@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 2 Jun 90 02:46:54 GMT
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In article <3874@milton.acs.washington.edu> ejbell@milton.u.washington.edu (Eric Bell) writes:
>Please don't flame me if:
>	1) I'm asking a stupid question
You aren't
>	2) I'm in the wrong newsgroup
Well, comp.sys.mac is supposed to be obselete, but I don't think
any of the specific groups would fit this question, so I've redirected
followups to comp.sys.mac.misc (the new general group)
>
>I'm a competent and experienced programmer (I know my shit) but I don't know
>anything about optical disks or much about mac programming.
>
>I am investigating the feasibility of a project that would read an existing 
>database that is available on optical disk (High Sierra format) for computers
>running ms-dos.  I want it to run on a mac.
>
>I presume I need a program/routine that makes a dos-formatted optical disk
>appear to be an "on-line" mac disk, or something that directly reads and
>interprets the dos file-system and handles all of the file-system functions.
>
>Is this commonly done and/or are there libraries/programs that handle this?
>If so, what are they?
You are in luck-- Apple has such a thing available in their CD-ROM
software at apple.com-- it's called Foreign File Access (and it's
associated files, Audio CD Access, ISO 9660 Access, and High Sierra
Access). It's also available on the developer CD, and comes with Apple
CD-ROMs.  It makes the High Sierra disk look exactly like a mac disk except
that you can't tell how many files are on the disk.

>A final question.  Just out of curiosity, did the ms-dos file-system have to
>be tweaked to deal with the large files you can create on an optical, or was
>it able to handle it in its original design?

High Sierra isn't MS-DOS at all.  It is entirely different, and MS-DOS
computers also need additional software to read it.

--
Matthew T. Russotto	russotto@eng.umd.edu	russotto@wam.umd.edu
][, ][+, ///, ///+, //e, //c, IIGS, //c+ --- Any questions?