Re: Help: Need PFS:Write file format

["Dave Althoff, Jr." <dalloff@gcfn.org>]

Lazarus I. Long <me@lazilong.com> wrote:
: Anybody got info on the file format of Apple II PFS:Write files?
: 
: A google search produced tools to translate, but no info directly.
: thanks.

The translation tools are your best bet.  The original version of 
PFS:Write used a nasty proprietary file format somehow based on Pascal, 
but not readable from Pascal.  

Some programmer at Software Publishing Corp. was absolutely brilliant, 
terribly talented at coming up with ways of exploiting the 5.25" disk.  I 
used to use PFS:File, and searches on that thing were blindingly fast in 
the Pascal version.  Then I got the ProDOS version and installed it on my 
][e with its hard drive, and gave up on it because even with the HDD, it 
was achingly slow because it complied with the ProDOS file format.

This is all well and good.  But I've never seen any documentation of any 
of the PFS:* file formats, so if a PFS: disk fails, trying to recover any 
data from it is a major challenge!

--Dave Althoff, Jr.
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