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Moving files from OSX to Mac Plus 6.0.8 via FTP

ctarstar

Member
Hi all - I've revived a multi-year project to get my Mac Plus online via ethernet (Asante EN/SC) and have finally succeeded in getting it to speak IP natively! I expected it to be relatively easy to move files from the internet onto the machine, by hopping through my OSX laptop, but finding it to be much more difficult than I expected.

Specifically, I'm trying to get files that I download (RamDisk+ for example) onto the machine, but I seem to be running into this 'resource fork' problem I've read about (but don't fully understand).

An example is this RamDisk file, I have a .sit file that I'm able to expand on my OSX machine, it shows the files in the finder, but when I try to FTP GET them from my Plus, they show as zero byte files (as they do when doing ls from a terminal in OSX as well...)

I only have NCSA telnet 2.6. I have a Basilisk instance on my OSX machine, and I had the brilliant idea of FTPing from the Basilisk instance to the FTP server on the Plus, which I thought would overcome the OSX mangling problem, but the telnet version I have does not seem to support Passive FTP, and as the networking is virtual in Basilisk, it breaks active FTP as the actual IP connection for the session setup is from the physical ethernet on my OSX machine, but the IP that the Basilisk (7.5.3 btw) thinks it has gets passed to the Plus for the data connection and it tries to make a connection to this IP instead...

I believe one of the solutions to this is to simply keep the .sit files as .sit files when I move them to the Plus, but I don't have Stuffit Expander on the Plus, and it seems to be similarly packed as a .sit or a .sea which 6.0.8 doesn't know what to do with.

Any ideas of how to overcome this? I seem to have read some posts that suggest the latest version of Stuffit Expander will retain the files (or overcome this 'resource fork' problem) but I've tried the latest version, and continue to have the same problem. The example file I'm using is from http://home.earthlink.net/~gamba2/download/ramdisk324a.sit.bin for example.

Any help greatly appreciated! Thanks, Chris

 

basalgangster

Well-known member
The original solution to this was BinHex. It hex-encodes a file so it is ASCII and can be transmitted over practically any protocol. I think you could use an old version of Stuffit in your emulator to encode your .sit file as binhex. You get a file with the .hqx extension as a result that can be decoded in stuffit. There was originally a program called BinHex that just did the .hqx encoding.

The first Mac users encountered this problem when downloading programs from CompuServe. They had to download BinHex from CompuServe, but they couldn't decode it without having BinHex. The solution, as I remember, was a MacPascal program which was downloaded as text, but when executed, created a working binary version of BinHex.

 
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