[GTALUG] [GW-C] Re: Anyone on the list know what I need to read ancient Apple disks?

Lennart Sorensen lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca
Tue Jan 6 15:45:02 UTC 2015


On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 05:49:37PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> Lots of it was not in ROM, especially as the OS advanced and the ROM
> did not.  And the ROM wasn't too large: 64K in original 128k and Fat
> Macs.
> 
> (The Atari ST was a lot faster booting because more of its OS was in
> ROM.  On the other hand, the OS didn't advance very quickly or very
> much.  The original Amiga had almost all the OS in RAM because they
> knew it wasn't yet mature.)

Well the original amiga had 256KB ram dedicated to holding the "rom"
image, booted from the kickstart disk.  It certainly was treated as ROM
by the system once booted.  By the time I got an A500 they had 256KB
rom chips instead, although they hit 512KB later on.  That reminds me
I should really finish assembling my A500 bits now that I remembered
where I had the GVP-A500-HD8+.  At the moment I have managed to fit
inside an A500: VGA graphics output (1024x768x8bit colour), 68030 at 25MHz
with 32MB ram, dual ROM (1.3 and 3.1).  Closing the case got tricky.
Now I have to add the GVP SCSI controller with 8MB ram outside.  Also has
an SD card based dual floppy drive.

> I was wrong.  I was mixing up Extended Attributes (an odd thing) with
> Alternate Data Streams (a different odd thing).

Oh OK.  I was wondering how I could have missed something so big. :)

> ADS is an NTFS feature to embrace and extend MacOS resource forks.
> Apparently there is no public API for it except for backing up.  Many
> google hits point out that ADS is a great way to hide things (malware,
> contraband, porn) on NTFS.

NTFS has many awful features.

> Samba and Reiser support ADS to some degree (Samba: optional, Reiser
> is fading away).  I don't know what API they use.

samba has to support faking lots of things because of NTFS.

-- 
Len Sorensen


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