Re: Disassembling an FST...(what about FAT?)

[CUTjefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney)]

On Mon, 21 Sep 1998 22:42:38 +1200, dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David
Empson) wrote:

>Supertimer <supertimer@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> What about FAT?  If the MS-DOS FST was read/write and GS/OS
>> was installed on an MS-DOS volume, could GS/OS boot from it?
>
>Not if the disk was also able to boot a PC.  The boot code for the IIgs
>and PC would need to be in exactly the same place.

Umm... Why would you want to be able to boot a hard drive which
contains GS/OS and Apple II software, from a PC?  I could see wanting
the ability to plug the drive into a PC and be able to read/write
files to/from it, but I don't see why you'd ever want to try and
create a hard drive partition that can be booted both by a IIgs and a
PC.

>For starters, FAT has no concept of forks.  The Mac has to use an ugly
>hack (a hidden subdirectory containing the resource forks) to get around
>this.  Most of the file attribute options are missing, and there is no
>way to store a file type without some kind of auxiliary file (as with
>the Mac using FAT).

Easiest way around this problem is to use an Apple invented file type
called the AppleSingle format.  It just puts both the data and
resource fork into one file with a wrapper, I believe.  The only thing
with this method is that is would require an add-on driver to GS/OS to
allow you to access the data or resource fork from such files.
Basically, it would have to work something like AutoArk or HardPressed
to support on the fly unwrapping.  From my understanding of the
AppleSingle format, this would be trivial to do.

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