Re: Many File Formats: do they bother you?

[Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com>]

KP <kjpmail@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jul 11, 5:13 pm, David Schmidt <schmi...@my-deja.com> wrote:
>> On 7/11/2012 4:23 PM, D Finnigan wrote:
>> 
>>> Another survey thread. There are a number of file formats for Apple II
>>> users: NuFile (ShrinkIt), Binscii, Blu, Executioner, .dsk, .po, .sdk,
>>> etc....
>> 
>>> Do they cause you bother when you download files? That is, does it take you
>>> some time to convert the file into a different format for use with an
>>> emulator or for transferring to real hardware?
>> 
>> .sdk, .shk, .bxy and their ilk bother me no end.  The quicker they are
>> expunged from all repositories, the better, in my opinion (an opinion
>> not shared by all, I realize).  Hint: I am working on making them
>> transparent to ADTPro - so you wouldn't need a conversion program to be
>> an intermediary.  And it's a huge pain - the NuFx "standard" was
>> interpreted "interestingly" by lots of compressors.
>> 
>>> If so, how do you manage? Do you have a program that is convenient for you?
>> 
>> CiderPress rules them all.  AppleCommander is getting there.
> 
> I agree on all of the above.  As a guy who seldom if ever used .sdk
> or .shk or .bxy on my actual Apple II's, it has been a great source of
> annoyance to try and fail repeatedly to get some of these files to
> work in disk images.  Maybe for those of you out there who used them
> back in the day, it's fairly easy, but for those of us who never used
> compressed files with actual Apple II's, it's incredibly cumbersome
> these days to learn the process--especially on an emulated machine.

That's why I only use .sdk when a program should be run on a real machine,
and .shk when the set of files is too big for a .dsk image. 

All my work is done on 8-bit Apples, and I find that ShrinkIt is extremely
easy to use when only doing a few kinds of operations. 

Of course, on a PC it's CiderPress all the way!

-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon