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From: toddpw@tybalt.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Macintosh-->ProDOS
Message-ID: <1990Feb20.212421.22124@spectre.ccsf.caltech.edu>
Date: 20 Feb 90 21:24:21 GMT
References: <1011@spock.UUCP> <14002@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Sender: news@spectre.ccsf.caltech.edu
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Organization: California Institute of Technology
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MARCELO@phoenix.princeton.edu (MARCELO) writes:

>IBM on an Amiga and on an Apple ][ .. There is no need to use AFE .. In 
>fact if you do use AFE it takes this data which is for an Apple ][ and 
>treats it like it was a Mac file (trouble begins here) .. Now we take this 
>file and convert it to Apple ][ format using AFE (why?? it was in A ][ 
>form to begin with) .. You now have a file filled with garbage That is 
>useless to any and all machines .. 

Untrue. The format conversion performed by AFE is across file system formats,
which all have their own way of storing text files, and that is what AFE puts
on your ProDOS disk -- a text file which when you read it will look just like
the text file did on the mac.

If you take a mac word processing document and convert it, you get garbage, but
it is by no means useless... the garbage (like that in an AppleWorks file, by
the way) is usually just a big header of format information and then special
markers are placed between each line of text. You can get a mac WP document
onto your Apple and "Clean up" the file, which means you have to delete the
garbage and replace it with the Apple WP's formatting.

AFE is too damn slow anyway, and this is because it seeks track 0 before it
writes every block on to a ProDOS disk. (No conspiracy here, eh?)

I found a better way: A screenfull of BASIC and poked assembly reads in a mac
disk and stores the raw image as a huge text file on the RAMdisk. If no files
have been modified or deleted, then the HFS algorithms will have put every text
file on the disk in contiguous and ascending block order... I then run the
raw dump file through Binscii, and after it picks through the directories and
the desktop file it decodes all my binscii downloads to the other RAMdisk.
(helps to have a 1 meg //gs and a 1 meg RamFactor.)

Mucho faster, and batch so I can walk away and let it finish. On the mac, all I
have to do is erase a disk, and copy the files I want onto it with finder, and
take the disk home.

Still, it's no substitute for an HFS FST.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ tybalt.caltech.edu