Hi Guido, >I need your help for a problem I just can't solve myself. I need to test >lots of ABC files on major applications, and I have no problem when it >comes to Linux or Windows ones. I also run BarFly under the BasiliskII >Macintosh emulator (incredible piece of software, BTW). > >I can't convince BarFly to open ABC files that it didn't create itself. I >mean, I download ABC collections from the net, put them in /tmp, access >that directory and see the ABC files as feature-less icons. I can't open >these file with BarFly, Note Pad, anything. Moreover, copy and paste >between Linux and the BasiliskII box doesn't work. > >Is there a way to load external ABC files in BarFly?
The classic MacOS does not use file extensions to identify files, instead there are two four-character fields associated with files, called the creator and file type signatures. The old version of BarFly can only open files of type "TEXT". If you download your files using a Macintosh browser or ftp program running under BasiliskII it will set the file type automatically. Otherwise you need to use a utility program to change the file signatures. The traditional tool for this purpose is ResEdit, which you can download here: http://developer.apple.com/tools/legacy.html Start up ResEdit and cancel the file-opening dialog which it displays at first (since you don't want to edit the file's resource fork). Choose "Get Info" from the File menu and pick a file. In the resulting dialog, ignore everything but the Type and Creator fields. Set the Type to "TEXT" and the Creator to "Bfly" then save. ResEdit can only fix one file at a time, but there are several free or shareware programs which can operate on multiple files, of which the best known is FileTyper: http://dazuma.freeshell.org/filetyper/ The Carbon version of BarFly (because it has to live in a Unix environment) can open untyped files provided that they have a .abc or .txt extension, but you won't be able to run that under BasiliskII. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
