milo@ndmath.UUCP (Greg Corson) (05/21/89)
After reading some of the conversation on the "Developer Helper" CD I had
a thought. Since the Mac has all this nifty resource handling stuff...it
should be possible, even EASY to have a "split" system file.
By split, I mean with some system resources in one file and other resources
in a different one. This would allow you to , for example, have all the
"writable" system file resources on a hard disk (like the layout resources,
drivers...etc) and have the "read only" resources on a CD (like Fonts,
patches and the Mac "Packages").
It seems like this would be very easy to do and could be done without impacting
users who wanted to have "normal" unsplit system files.
A resource in the main system file could give the location of other files
to get the other resources from. The system would just do a ResOpen on this
auxilary file somewhere early on in the boot process.
I'm doing something similar to this for a Game I'm writing...the digitized
sounds are in a seperate resource file. This is because the game code
changes frequently, but the sounds much less frequently. This way, when
someone wants to download a new copy of the game they don't have to download
all the (60-100K) of sound files. Of course, you can still put sound
resources in the application...thanks to the resource manager it doesn't
matter where they are...it will find them.
It would seem like this kind of scheme could save a substantial amount of
space for people with CD's. A really "loaded" system file quickly pushes
several megabytes, particularly with lots of fonts. It would be nice to
be able to have a system which would only require the writable resources
to be on the hard disk...while fonts, packages, patches, templates...etc
could be left on the CD.
Just a thought....
Greg Corson
19141 Summers Drive
South Bend, IN 46637
(219) 277-5306
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