[comp.sys.atari.st] only_ste.lzh

ralph@laas.fr (Ralph P. Sobek) (05/29/91)

In article <1991May28.202555.16251@lsuc.on.ca> jimomura@lsuc.on.ca (Jim Omura) writes:
|  This brings to mind that 1 of the things
|  I looked at from the Net recently was this "only_ste.lzh" sound
|  demo package.  Now this is a strange package with what seems to
|  be a whole disk compressed into an ".MSA" file which in turn was
|  LHARC'd.  I unpacked this kit just this morning.  When I unpacked
|  the disk I used the MSA.PRG auto-formatting command.  It seems to
|  me that this method of packaging might allow for transporting of
|  boot sector or other viruses.  Has anybody else unpacked this demo
|  kit recently?

I just unpacked this demo for friends last nite!  I don't have an STe
or MegaSTe, but I got 4 Mb and they were needed.  

First off, I received only_ste.lzh through the News at work.
Unfortunately, only_ste.lzh is incompatible with MS-DOS compatible
floppy disks, since they're limited to 720 Kb.  As a reminder,
only_ste.lzh is 802661 bytes long.  What to do?  I used "split" on my
SPARC to chop the file in half.  Each half was put on a separate
floppy and taken home.

At home, I became worried about concatenating two binary file parts
together.  I then decided to run full blown GNU emacs (not mg, jove,
nor micro-emacs) with a 1 Mb RAM disk.  I then inserted into my emacs
buffer both halfs of the file and saved it to the RAM disk.  Of course
there was no more room to unpack the file.  It tested out okay.  Well,
I copied it to a floppy and extracted back to the RAM disk.  I then
ran MSA to create the demo floppy.   Ouffhh!!! ;-|

The first thing I did then was to run VKILLER on it.  It stated that
the floppy was executable, but no known virus was found!!  8-)

Did anyone have a much easier time of it?  I only hope that few items
of this sort travel through USENET or are uploaded to atari.archive.
Normally, large *.lzh or *.zoo can be split up differently since the
individual member files are less than 720 Kb.
--
Ralph P. Sobek			  Disclaimer: The above ruminations are my own.
ralph@laas.fr				   Addresses are ordered by importance.
ralph@laas.uucp, or ...!uunet!laas!ralph		
If all else fails, try:				      sobek@eclair.Berkeley.EDU
===============================================================================
Proud owner of a Mega 4 ST.  Wishing it was a Mega STe!  :-|

spa@fct.unl.pt (Salvador Pinto Abreu) (05/29/91)

on 29 May 91 10:00:03 GMT,
ralph@laas.fr (Ralph P. Sobek) said:

>						   I used "split" on my
> SPARC to chop the file in half.  Each half was put on a separate
> floppy and taken home.

> At home, I became worried about concatenating two binary file parts
> together.  I then decided to run full blown GNU emacs (not mg, jove,
> nor micro-emacs) with a 1 Mb RAM disk.  I then inserted into my emacs
> buffer both halfs of the file and saved it to the RAM disk.  Of course
> there was no more room to unpack the file.  It tested out okay.  Well,
> I copied it to a floppy and extracted back to the RAM disk.  I then
> ran MSA to create the demo floppy.   Ouffhh!!! ;-|

The exact procedure I followed was to run lharc on Unix (a DECstation
5000 unpacks LZH archives a *little* faster than an ST :-), split the
file in two, and then wrote the floppies. On the ST the easiest way I
found to do this was to `cat' the two parts (using GNU cat from
cs.uni-sb.de), a lot faster than creating a RAMdisk and using GNU
Emacs, I'd say...

> Did anyone have a much easier time of it?  I only hope that few items
> of this sort travel through USENET or are uploaded to atari.archive.
> Normally, large *.lzh or *.zoo can be split up differently since the
> individual member files are less than 720 Kb.

The thing might be to have a simple stand-alone SPLIT/JOIN program on
the ST. If I knew more about GEM I'd do it myself (maybe I'll give it
a try someday). By "simple" I mean one that does NOTHING but the
equivalent of Unix's split and cat, ie. no headers or CRC's.

Anyway, regarding the only_ste demo, I must confess it's absolutely
fabulous.
--
-- Salvador Pinto Abreu		spa@fct.unl.pt
				Universidade Nova de Lisboa, PORTUGAL