Re: Help transferring ASCII to Apple II via Mac

[dempson@atlantis.actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

In article <DF9HG7.ICD@news.zippo.com>,
Tim Dixon <tdixon@everest.acpl.lib.in.us> wrote:
> 
> I recently acquired my brother's Apple //e, with two 5 1/4" floppy
> drives and a fingerprint printer card.  I downloaded some binscii
> files from grind (HyperC, if you care about that), and the latest
> (last?) ProDOS 8 disk image from ftp.info.apple.com.  Since I have a
> Mac on my desk (and at home) and access to some IIgs's in my library's
> children's area, I copied all the stuff to my Mac (which is still
> waiting for network access).  I de-binhexed the image and copied it to
> an 800K disk with no trouble.  Then I copied the binscii files
> (binscii.exec, and so on) to the ProDOS disk, grabbed a bunch of 5.25
> disks and went downstairs.

There is a little haze in the middle of that description.  To
summarise as I understand it:

1. Files downloaded (somehow), ending up on Mac.

2. Files copied to an 800k 3.5" disk, presumably in ProDOS format, using
   PC Exchange (by the sound of your description below).

3. Disk taken to IIgs, IIgs system software used to copy files to a 5.25"
   disk.

4. Disk taken to a IIe, unable to copy files.

If this is what happened, then the most likely problem is step 2: the
"ProDOS File System Extension" for the Mac (part of the system
software for the Apple IIe card for the Mac LC), and "PC Exchange"
(System 7.5 and later) have the very bad habit of creating files on
ProDOS disks that contain a resource fork (an empty one!)

The IIgs has no trouble dealing with this (assuming you have new enough
system software and are using GS/OS to copy the file).

However, the ProDOS-8 operating system (on the IIe or IIgs) does not
support resource forks.  If you try to access the file, ProDOS returns
an "unknown storage type" error, which is probably causing the message
you saw.

Four possible solutions come to mind:

1. Use Apple File Exchange on the Mac to copy the file to a ProDOS
   disk.  Apple File Exchange was supplied with System 7.1 and earlier.
   It doesn't create unnecessary resource forks (I don't think it supports
   resource forks on ProDOS disks).  You probably have to disable the
   ProDOS file system support in System 7.5 to be able to use Apple File
   Exchange properly.

2. Use a program on the IIgs to remove (or ignore) the resource fork
   when copying the file to the 5.25" disk.  This is not particularly
   easy to do deliberately - some older copy programs don't know about
   resource forks, so they don't copy them.  There is very little current
   software that doesn't copy both the data and resource forks.

3. If the IIgs has a hard drive and has the HFS File System Translator
   installed, leave the file on a Mac 800k disk and use the IIgs to
   copy it directly to the 5.25" disk.  This is less likely to create a
   useless resource fork.

4. Use a utility program to remove the resource fork from the file (either
   on the IIgs or IIe).  I believe there is a freeware utility available
   for doing this.

> Curious, I copied the "Copy Me" file from the ProDOS disk and it
> worked fine.  So I looked at the catalog and the file types of the
> binscii files were listed as "Unknown."

This is a red herring.  Copy programs and the operating system don't
care about the file type, which is just a number associated with the
file.  They do care about the storage type, which specifies how the
file is physically stored on the disk.

You don't normally get to see the storage type.  There are four main
classifications: normal file (subdivided into three types according to
the physical file size), directory, disk and extended file (potentially
with a resource fork).  ProDOS-8 cannot access any files with a storage
type of "extended".

> I'm using Macintosh Easy Open and the ProDOS file system that are part
> of System 7.5 (the 7.5 upgrade is stuck on my hard drive waiting for
> properties to send me more disks to receive it).  I thought that MEO
> might be using the creator/type information to set the file type on
> the ProDOS disk, so for kicks I fired up ClarisWorks and saved a
> document as an AppleWorks 2.0.  Its type (on the Mac) is p[box] and
> its creator is pdos.  This leads me to believe even more strongly in
> my theory that MEO is using the type/creator information to set the
> ProDOS file type.

That's probably right.  When copying files between ProDOS and Mac
disks, some filetypes are translated, e.g. 'TEXT' to/from TXT ($04),
and a ProDOS-8 application (SYS, $FF) becomes 'PSYS'.

If there is no known translation, the file ends up on the Mac disk
with a creator of 'pdos' and a type of 'p' followed by three bytes
that contain the direct binary values of the ProDOS file type (one
byte) and auxiliary type (two bytes).

There is also an older convention in which the filetype is stored as a
two digit hexadecimal number followed by spaces, and the auxiliary
type is lost.
-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand