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| Author | Next project ideas? (Read 43577 times) | ||||||||||
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Jatoba
256 MB  Posts: 270 System 9 Newcomer! 
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Reply #30 on: May 26, 2024, 09:08
Quote from: lauland Time as adults with families we don't have to spare! Especially after working a 40 hour job. Sometimes the very last thing you want to do is stare at yet another screen for an hour (minimum). This is a huge factor, for me and probably for almost everyone. There can be more reasons on top of this, too. For example in my case I'm also someone who will get strongly side-tracked by completely different activities. So there are "periods" of different activity. Also, keep throwing those seeds! Edit: About project ideas, if you find it interesting, you could also consider bringing an unzipping (and zipping?) utility that will know how to directly handle those Mac OS X type of ZIP files, so that we can directly unzip them on Mac OS 9.2.2 and earlier. This is honestly something I hoped to do myself, despite my somewhat low qualification for this task. My starting point would be to take the MacZip source code and just try to compile that. If that works, then I'd finally try to branch out the code into bringing in the new functionality to join back the two fork files (resource and data) into one file, the original file. And if THAT goal is one day reached, the next step would be to take the codebase and expand it further to also handle 7-Zip, and its associated LZMA and LZMA2 compression algorithms. Is that idea interesting enough? One thing I can say is that such a tool would be incredibly helpful in practice, since so much Mac-OS-friendly content is "locked out" via OS-X-Zip and, to a lesser extent, 7-Zip formats. The current solution is to use a VM like Virtual PC to handle 7-Zip. While there are ways to handle the Mac-OS-X zip via VM, as well, none of them preserve the date & timestamps, so they still require Mac OS X, which can't directly be booted via any VM (which is why I tried to recompile Bochs to support SSE2 so that I could boot x86 Hackintosh Tiger directly on it, and use its Zip Decompressor, "BOM Archive Helper", but I failed). Edit 2: Similarly, while the latest version of Disk Copy can mount very few .DMGs, the vast majority of them cannot be processed under the actual Mac OS. Again, this is often a practical problem, because a huge amount of software and other files are locked up behind such .DMGs, even though they are compatible with, if not even intended for, Mac OS 9.2.2 and earlier. So a proper .DMG mounter would be a killer app to have. Last, but not least... Also related to disk mounting, there is not a single .BIN/.CUE mounter for the Mac OS. So multi-track games cannot run with fidelity to play all the extra tracks, unless you physically burn a CD each and every time. I said "last" above, but there's actually one more thing: likewise, we have no disk imaging software to take CDs and get a .BIN/.CUE out of them, but only a cropped .toast or .iso file, under Mac OS. In other words, we cannot accurately rip many CDs under Mac OS. (I think Mac OS X has lesser-known tricks to do this under later Toast versions, though.) |
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Last Edit: May 26, 2024, 09:29 by Jatoba
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023
Reply #31 on: May 26, 2024, 09:28
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Quote Time as adults with families we don't have to spare! Especially after working a 40 hour job. Sometimes the very last thing you want to do is stare at yet another screen for an hour (minimum). Even more so since if you're using actual old hardware the screens sometimes leave something to be desired (at least on laptops)! Indeed. And to add: having three little kids at home doesn't help either. They'll destroy your train of thought effectively and keep you busy as the notorious phone calls at work tend to do :-) Quote And especially with larger projects, like JabberNaut, just building the thing takes an appreciable amount of time. There's little of the instant gratification of hitting Reload in the browser to see changes you made, etc. Very well spotted. That is indeed the case. Quote "I want a certain environment/place, haven't been able to find it, and so want to see how I could sow the seeds, and help build it myself, since it doesn't already exist.". I'd like to reiterate that we're humbled and thankful for your offer to teach and help; and I hope S7T can evolve into the place you're looking for. I think we have the potential to grow into it, so please let's keep ploughing and throwing the seeds :-) As for my next project idea: I started to set up Think C 5 on my IIci yesterday for some retro coding. I simply like the IDE. My next project will be my old project - I will attempt to tackle my old sources again. Are you ready for some "dumb" questions? 
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cballero
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1024 MB Posts: 1179 System 7, today and forever
Reply #32 on: May 26, 2024, 23:52
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Sooo, Jatoba, when you mentioned a new compression/decompression tool and followed it right up with mounting DMG disks, I did a double-take!  On a related and similar vein, I stumbled upon a brand-spanking new and crazy-cool .hqx-encoding utility aimed at simply BinHexing files developed by none other than David Cook over at 68kMLA! (in Steve's keynote way "Oh wait! There's one more thing") his tool can be used to both encode and transfer files from one Mac to another using a serial cable!  I got excited with it because it does something I do, but specifically for archiving purposes: I like to encode images and files as MacBinary because there's simply no need to use StuffIt anymore being that drives are much larger now so space is no longer a real-world issue. And while encoding a .img image is fine, I prefer making them self-extracting so Disk Copy is not needed either (again, the size difference is negligible) but having a neat way of imaging folders and encoding them would make it easier to archive, email and transfer Binary Mac files!  ("Oh wait, there's one last thing") David's next plan for the Plus version of his tool is to add a new, cool and very effective new 68k-friendly compression format, either very similar to or based on FC8, developed by another programmer, among other things as well. Here's the link to that discussion!
Last Edit: May 27, 2024, 00:01 by cballero
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