Mean 18 courses (was Re: Public Domain Status?)

[fadden@uts.amdahl.com (Andy McFadden)]

In article <CAF4FA.Gw8@well.sf.ca.us> joko@well.sf.ca.us (Joe Kohn) writes:
>                                      [...] M18 expects its courses to be a
>certain length, and if they are not the exact length that it expects, they
>will not run. If you copy M18 course disks with the GS/OS Finder, the files
>will be sparsed, and will no longer work correctly.

If this is the case, then they can't be compressed with HardPressed, since
compression reduces the number of blocks that the file occupies.  You also
couldn't compress/uncompress them manually, because that would cause them
to be "sparsed".  Heck, you can't even unpack them with ShrinkIt... GSHK
has the same problem HP does, and I believe that P8 ShrinkIt handles
sparsing itself.  AA is in the same boat.

This is a symptom of a lazy programmer (for M18).  The old Class 0 Open call
returned the #of disk blocks occupied by the file; M18 is probably checking
that.  The author of SoundStudio (that old freeware sound utility) did
something similar; he calculated the file size as  512 * (#of blocks)  ,
which usually works since sound files can't be sparse.  Doesn't work so well
when the file has been compressed.

All this to save one GS/OS GET_FILE_INFO call.  Lame.

-- 
fadden@uts.amdahl.com (Andy McFadden)
[ Above opinions are mine, Amdahl has nothing to do with them, etc, etc. ]