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From: tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Red Ryder questions.
Message-ID: <277@ism780c.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 17-Jan-86 23:28:12 EST
Article-I.D.: ism780c.277
Posted: Fri Jan 17 23:28:12 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 20-Jan-86 04:06:25 EST
References: <1170@utai.UUCP>
Reply-To: tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith)
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Santa Monica, CA
Lines: 47

In article <1170@utai.UUCP> lamy@utai.UUCP (Jean-Francois Lamy) writes:
>
>a) What does "Disable MacBinary format" do? 
>
It causes RR to not check to see if incomming files are in MacBinary
format ( see below ).

>b) Is there a simple way to transfer a file as with xbin + macput +
>MacTerminal, i.e.    what you get after the transfer is directly
>useable?

Well, yes and no.  There is a format, called MacBinary ( explained in
the latest MacTutor, by the way ), for transfering and storing Macintosh
files.  There is a 128 byte header, which has the finder info, and some
magic numbers, and then the two forks.

If a terminal program supports this format, then it will check the data
being recived when a file is transfered ( usually with xmodem or kermit ),
and if the first 128 bytes looks like a MacBinary header, and do the
same sort of thing Macterminal does with macput.

This format will be supported by Macterminal 2.0 ( if it ever exists! :-) ).

The current version of Macterminal, when it thinks it is talking to
another mac, uses a modified xmodem protocol.  It essentially does
three xmodem transfers, one for the header, one for the data fork,
and one for the resource fork.  This is not compatable with any
standard xmodem, and so will not work with other terminal emulators.
In particular, it uses a different handshake at the start to get
the transfer going. *sigh*

Macput is designed to work with Macterminal.  It knows about this
funny version of xmodem.  If you had a straight xmodem program on
Unix ( or modified macput ), you should be able to construct a
proper MacBinary file from the .info, .data, and .rsrc files
that xbin produces.  Kermit should work also.

I tried going "cat foo.info foo.data foo.rsrc > file; kermit s file"
but was never able to get it to fully work.  RR would recognize that
a MacBinary file was being transfered, but there was a disagreement
about the length of the file.

You are pretty much stuck with downloading the unxbined file, and using
binhex on the Mac, or downloading from someplace like Compuserve, which
uses straight xmodem.
-- 
Tim Smith       sdcrdcf!ism780c!tim || ima!ism780!tim || ihnp4!cithep!tim