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From: hairston@henry.ece.cmu.edu (David Hairston)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: WDEF editor ?
Message-ID: <12831@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 29 Apr 91 01:41:09 GMT
References: <1991Apr28.060530.22536@newshost.anu.edu.au> <RANG.91Apr28165150@nexus.cs.wisc.edu> <1991Apr28.232759.13768@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu>
Organization: Gaia II
Lines: 35

[jww502@anu.oz.au ("John W White") writes:]
[]       Since there are so many (well OK, a few) alternative WDEF
[] inits around, I was wondering if there was an editor or something so
[] that I (and possibly others :-)) can create my own.  If there isn't
[] then how do you work out the resource ?  Hmmmmmmmmm ? :-)

[rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang) writes:]
[]  A WDEF resource is just a chunk of 68000 code.  See Inside Mac for
[] details.  There are probably disassemblers around for it; the source
[] for the standard WDEF is available on apple.com.  To create one, you
[] can just use your favorite compiler--MPW, THINK Pascal, and THINK C
[] all make this easy.  (OK, "easy" is relative.  Fairly easy?)

[jtsweet@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu (Jonathan Thoma Sweet) writes:]
[] Yes but there must be some sort of a program that would be able to
[] generate the code.  I've looked in the Res. of a QuickChange document

WDEF's, CDEF's, LDEF's, etc. are _code_ resources, which are distinctly
different than data resources where you can simply plug and chug with
the numbers.  the program you need to generate code resources is a
compiler (unless you're an excellent hacker, then a hex editor is all
you need ... :)

consider the similar situation of writing applications (basically code
resources).  you don't normally expect to do this with a utility of
some sort (and if you can do this with a utility then your range of
possibilities would, most likely, be severely limited).

writing an xDEF is fairly simple (there's example code at apple.com
in pub/dts/mac/defprocs), however, except for a few simple cases,
writing one _correctly_ is non-trivial.  give it a try.  when/if you
master it, you'll understand your mac so much better ...

  -dave-  
hairston@henry.ece.cmu.edu