tarage <tarage@NOSPAM.bellsouth.net> wrote:
Hey...I was cruising through ground the other day ready to d/l some new
progs and was frustrated in my attempts, because quite a few files
aren't in SHK or BXY format. Judging by the extensions, I had no idea
what format they were in (.1, .2, .whatever). Does anyone know what
format these guys are in?
It's very likely these are archived posts from the (now mostly) defunct
'comp.binaries.apple2' group. Like any other *.binaries group that still
operate today, binary files were encoded into 7-bit ASCII text so they
could be distributed through a newsgroup. The Apple II had its own
encoding format (similar in concept to UUencode or Base-64/MIME,
though more efficient I recall) called Binscii.
When archived as-is, these _should_ have an extension such as
*.bsc or *.bsq so you can identify them browsing the FTP site. Still,
these days you can easily check by clicking on the files with your
web browser and seeing if the first few lines look something like this:
-----------------------------
FiLeStArTfIlEsTaRt
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789()
MMCS.SONGS.SHK BQkqAAAACA(4kKQg3yIAOaxJCAztAADAAoA3
-----------------------------
If so, then it's Binscii encoded. Make sure to download them as ASCII
gather all the segments in the same directory and then use a utility to
decode them back into a standard *.SHK or *.BXY, etc file. I used to
use GScii+ NDA myself (look for it on the Ground or Caltech site).
Mitchell Spector
a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca