ejbell@milton.acs.washington.edu (Eric Bell) (06/02/90)
Please don't flame me if: 1) I'm asking a stupid question 2) I'm in the wrong newsgroup I'm a competent and experienced programmer (I know my shit) but I don't know anything about optical disks or much about mac programming. I am investigating the feasibility of a project that would read an existing database that is available on optical disk (High Sierra format) for computers running ms-dos. I want it to run on a mac. Because the database is so large, (otherwise they wouldn't have put it on optical disk, would they?) I can't just copy the files onto a hard drive using something like apple file exchange. I presume I need a program/routine that makes a dos-formatted optical disk appear to be an "on-line" mac disk, or something that directly reads and interprets the dos file-system and handles all of the file-system functions. Is this commonly done and/or are there libraries/programs that handle this? If so, what are they? A final question. Just out of curiosity, did the ms-dos file-system have to be tweaked to deal with the large files you can create on an optical, or was it able to handle it in its original design? Thanks in advance, flames | /dev/null Eric Bell
russotto@eng.umd.edu (Matthew T. Russotto) (06/02/90)
In article <3874@milton.acs.washington.edu> ejbell@milton.u.washington.edu (Eric Bell) writes: >Please don't flame me if: > 1) I'm asking a stupid question You aren't > 2) I'm in the wrong newsgroup Well, comp.sys.mac is supposed to be obselete, but I don't think any of the specific groups would fit this question, so I've redirected followups to comp.sys.mac.misc (the new general group) > >I'm a competent and experienced programmer (I know my shit) but I don't know >anything about optical disks or much about mac programming. > >I am investigating the feasibility of a project that would read an existing >database that is available on optical disk (High Sierra format) for computers >running ms-dos. I want it to run on a mac. > >I presume I need a program/routine that makes a dos-formatted optical disk >appear to be an "on-line" mac disk, or something that directly reads and >interprets the dos file-system and handles all of the file-system functions. > >Is this commonly done and/or are there libraries/programs that handle this? >If so, what are they? You are in luck-- Apple has such a thing available in their CD-ROM software at apple.com-- it's called Foreign File Access (and it's associated files, Audio CD Access, ISO 9660 Access, and High Sierra Access). It's also available on the developer CD, and comes with Apple CD-ROMs. It makes the High Sierra disk look exactly like a mac disk except that you can't tell how many files are on the disk. >A final question. Just out of curiosity, did the ms-dos file-system have to >be tweaked to deal with the large files you can create on an optical, or was >it able to handle it in its original design? High Sierra isn't MS-DOS at all. It is entirely different, and MS-DOS computers also need additional software to read it. -- Matthew T. Russotto russotto@eng.umd.edu russotto@wam.umd.edu ][, ][+, ///, ///+, //e, //c, IIGS, //c+ --- Any questions?