Floppy emu questions (for use with my Plus)

[CC_333]

Yes, since the modern OS X (for whatever reason) still uses HFS+ (with a few modifications, like journals), resource forks ought to be perfectly safe, so long as one doesn't use FAT32 or NTFS anywhere.

That being said, this hypothetical modern conversion tool could probably be Mac-only, and everything would work fine.

For now, though, the best tool is Disk Copy 6 on the Classic Mac OS (primarily because it already exists).

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[tanaquil]

I was thinking of some sort of batch conversion or utility that could be used under Classic, but I can also confirm that my mac files do just fine as long as I keep them under OS X or move them via properly mac-formatted vectors.

The main things that cause problems for me are things like uploading to Dropbox (for classic mac files, just don't! I am embarrassed it took me so long to figure that out!), moving things to my network server (unix-based), inadvertently copying something onto one of my hard drives that isn't Mac-formatted (I have both a pc and mac, so my external hard drives are a grand old mix), or moving via FTP to my classic machines without stuffing first. Poor classic mac files, the world is filled with dangers.

 

[Bunsen]

The safest way to move classic Mac files is to compress them on a Mac (or emulator) first (binhex, Stuffit, etc), and transfer the compressed archive.  Don't decompress it till it's on a Mac again.

 

[tanaquil]

My Floppy EMU arrived and I am loving it so far! But now I have a new question:

I know you can mount a blank disk for writing in the emulator by choosing the desired size from the blank folder. But, when I rename the disk, write something to it, and eject, the disk still appears in the list as "blank_size(whatever)". If I reload that "blank", it contains the information I wrote to it.

With a real mac, I would take a blank from a box, rename it, put a label on it, and reach for another blank floppy. In minivmac, I duplicate a blank and rename it before I mount it in the emulator. Is it possible to do anything like this with the Floppy EMU? If I want to save something I've written to a blank, do I have no choice but to move the card to my modern mac to save/rename/duplicate that disk image (and/or create the renamed "blank" in advance)?

I read through the manual and didn't find the answer. If it doesn't already exist, I don't know if the Floppy EMU interface would ever allow for adding a feature to "duplicate," "rename" or "save as." Just curious.

It is really cool though! I played my first game of Dark Castle. 

 

[bigmessowires]

The name of the FAT32 disk image file on your SD card never changes. This is the name you'll see in the Emu's menu screen when you're selecting a disk image. The disk image could contain a Mac filesystem, or Apple II, or Lisa, or some custom filesystem the Emu knows nothing about, or it could contain nothing, it doesn't matter.

The name of the Macintosh / Apple II / Lisa volume is data that's stored within the disk image's data. It may follow naming rules that are incompatible with FAT32 names. This is the name you'll see on the Mac desktop when you mount a disk. The Emu screen also tries to display this name for the currently mounted disk, if the disk image uses a filesystem it recognizes.

For the scenario you described, you're probably best off creating a bunch of empty disk images in advance, and copying them to your SD card.

 

[tanaquil]

Thank you! That was the conclusion I eventually came to, as well, but it's good to have confirmation that I wasn't missing a hidden feature.

For anyone else who is grappling with this problem: I created folders inside the "Blanks" folder labeled 400K and 800K (I'm using this on my Plus, so 1.4Mb isn't an option), and made files inside those folders called Thing 1, Thing 2 and Thing 3. I figure that gives me a handful of blanks to work with before I have to go back to my Mac and relabel them. I left the original blank disk images at the root level of the Blanks folder.