--- On Tue, 5/24/11, Austin Leeds <[email protected]> wrote:
> Bingo, finally found the issue! It > was my version of StuffIt for > windows messing stuff up. I'm going to try StuffIt 7, which > preserved > Mac-specific info in applications during stuffing and > expanding operations. If you un-stuff most Mac files on any non-Mac system, you'll break the file so it won't work on a Mac. The reason is because Apple chose to use a two-fork file system where every file has a Resource Fork and a Data Fork. To make it even weirder, a file *may* have one or the other fork with nothing at all in it, or for a particular file type the contents of one fork or the other may be non-critical if it's lost. One example, Stuffit archives. The only thing their Resource Fork is used for is the Stuffit icon and the Type and Creator codes. Later versions of Stuffit programs can recognize Stuffit archives by the .sit file name extension and will create a Resource Fork for them when you doubleclick the archive. In older Stuffit versions the archives could be opened/extracted using the menu commands. Many image, video and audio files can be opened on a Mac without a Resource Fork, but in general - formats that originated on a Mac have data in their Resource Forks that is critical. Quicktime videos are an odd case. They can be "flattened" where the Resource Fork is combined with the Data Fork. Then the video may be played on any other system with a Quicktime player app. The oddity is if you find and copy the Resource fork, give it the extension .qtr and place it in the same folder (on a PC) as the .mov Data Fork, Quicktime for Windows will play the video. I know of no other dual fork Mac file that trick will work on. Any MOV file that plays on a non-Mac system and has only the .mov file has been flattened. A special use of Apple Double is (or was) on server versions of Windows with Services For Macintosh installed. Macs could store dual fork files on the Windows Server without having them break. SFM also included a Forkize command to "reattach" the forks of a file. Search Windows help for Macintosh for information on how to utilize that if you have access to a Windows server with SFM installed. (The info is there in XP's help, I haven't looked for it in Vista or 7.) If you want even more information on Apple's fondness for creating file systems incompatible with the rest of the computing world, look up AppleDouble and AppleSingle. Aside from Stuffit archives and the few other formats/types that can survive losing their Resource Forks, you have to keep pre-OS X Mac files 'wrapped up' in Stuffit, MacBinary or BinHex when they're on a non-Mac system. Apple *was* doing away with the dual fork system in OS X but it's been revived in 10.6 where the Data Forks of many system files have been compressed into the files' Resource Forks. Neat trick, gives the illusion that 10.6 is "smaller" than previous releases even though it's not. It's also way late to the on-the-fly decompression game. Microsoft had that at least as far back as Windows NT4 - and almost nobody used it because it was totally pointless. If your system was that low on space it was far better to get more storage space. Windows still has it and still hardly anyone uses it. Apple forces it to be used, it's on by default and there's no way to turn it off - or at least nobody has bothered to dig in and figure out how to disable the "Wheee! Look what I can do!" pointless bit of frippery. :P -- ----- You received this message because you are a member of the Vintage Macs group. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/
