Re: MS-DOS FST?

[Jim Murphy <murph@apple.com>]

In article <1993May1.145408.25982@ornl.uucp> Jonathan L Cooper,
jlcooper@sacam.OREN.ORTN.EDU writes:
>So, did anyone but me think that Jim Murphy seems to have implied rather
>indirectly that the MS-DOS FST will not be read-only?

     Nope, I didn't try to imply that. You're reading too much into what
I said. If the FST can both read and write, I'd come out and say it,
plain and simple. :-)

>He suggested that the FST will handle 800K MS-DOS format disks.  If this
>is true, the only way to format such a disk would be on an Apple IIgs. 
PC
>exchange on the mac only wants to format 720K, and doesn't seem to
support
>800K disks.  IBM hardware doesn't support it.

     Well, the reason I mentioned 800K disks was for theory only. The FST
can handle any media that's formatted MS-DOS, however, some combinations
(such as an 800K Apple disk) would be pretty useless. For example, I took
a disk image of an MS-DOS disk (which was created on the Macintosh) and
extracted it to a 1,440K RAM disk on my GS. The FST could read from it
quite well, it's just not a very useful thing to do.

>He also talks about resource fork support.  If the FST will be read-only,
>the only reason to bother implementing the code will be pulling mac
>TrueType fonts off of MS-DOS disks.  :)

    The FST supports the PC Exchange format of storing resource files so
that as much information as possible can be preserved when reading files.
Presently the only use would be when reading files that PC Exchange had
written, so again, the usefulness of this feature at present can be seen
as somewhat limited.

Jim Murphy        Apple II System Software Engineer        murph@apple.com

"It's a perfect day for kiss and swell,	                          The Cure
  for rip-zipping button-popping kiss and well..."       Doing the Unstuck