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Right, SpacePort 1.3.0 is now available with with automatic rleD encoding (thanks David Arthur!) and other improvements. See link in sig.
(update) 1.3.1 Now converts the title music to AIFF for you. You still need to do the mp3 encoding yourself though.
This post has been edited by Guy : 09 March 2017 - 11:31 PM
Nice. Is there any chance of a Windows version?
Technically possible but I don't think it's likely sorry. Supporting the .rez format would require borrowing more code from David (or writing my own) and I don't think he has PICT support for Windows so it wouldn't be able to do the rleD encoding for you.
Ah. Bummer, but understandable.
@guy, on 21 February 2017 - 06:00 PM, said in ROTUE files:
Right, here's SpacePort 1.3.0b1 with automatic rleD encoding (thanks David Arthur!) and other improvements.
Not a big deal, but it would be nice if that could be acknowledged in the about box too.
What version of REALbasic are you building this with, by the way?
@guy, on 21 February 2017 - 08:49 PM, said in ROTUE files:
Supporting the .rez format would require borrowing more code from David (or writing my own) and I don't think he has PICT support for Windows so it wouldn't be able to do the rleD encoding for you.
Correct — even on the Macintosh, getting PICTs in and out of a .rez file required some trickery. I never so much as had any ideas of how to manage it on Windows.
And ResFrame is such a massive part of MissionComputer, and so different from anything that one would write using standard REALbasic methods. I have trouble seeing how you would make much use of it, short of essentially re-writing SpacePort according to MissionComputer’s principles.
Anyway, wouldn’t Windows users still need a Macintosh user’s help, just to get the old plug-ins into .rez format in the first place?
Somewhere I do have a .rez converter from Mac .bin plugs, but IIRC it was just the standard one that came with Nova or came from the Addons page. It was slightly glitchy after WinXP but usually reliable on Nova files. I could dig around in some old hard drives and see if I could find it if anyone doesn't still have access to it.
SpacePort is only used to convert EVC and EVO (Mac-only games) plugins to EVN plugins. I'm pretty sure if you tried putting a plugin for EVC or EVO on a Windows machine, Windows wouldn't know what to do with it and may even nuke it. That is to say, erase all data inside it. As David Arthur said, you would need a Mac user or access to a Mac yourself to first use SpacePort to convert an old plugin to a Nova plugin and then convert that to .rez for WinNova.
Oh, absolutely. That was why I was thinking of a Windows SpacePort. You can use .bin files to keep all the data in the resource forks on a Windows machine without doing Bad Things. But, it definitely is more practical to just have someone with a Mac port it up to a Nova file and then save it as a .rez.
@david-arthur, on 22 February 2017 - 09:16 AM, said in ROTUE files:
Gah, sorry about that - I did have it in mind to do that. Added now
I'm using 2009r3. What did you use for MC?
@pkrug539, on 22 February 2017 - 04:05 PM, said in ROTUE files:
You can use .bin files to keep all the data in the resource forks on a Windows machine without doing Bad Things.
Yes, exactly. I'm assuming the .rez converter doesn't do anything Nova-specific, so won't care whether it's an EVO plug or a Nova plug. And Plug-in Extractor can handle almost any archive you throw at it.
I did try to run an EVO plug through the .rez converter once. It just choked and didn't spit out anything usable. That's why I was wondering if a Windows SpacePort might update the .bin file enough to run it through the converter. That's also a guy whose programming knowledge pretty much ends with AppleSoft BASIC.
@guy, on 22 February 2017 - 07:16 PM, said in ROTUE files:
Thanks!
2007r3 for the 4.x series. Everything before that was in RB 3.5.2.
@pkrug539, on 22 February 2017 - 11:36 PM, said in ROTUE files:
That's why I was wondering if a Windows SpacePort might update the .bin file enough to run it through the converter.
To process a .bin file on Windows, you’d need to manually parse the binary resource fork. Not impossible, I suppose (it must be more or less what burgerbill’s original convertor does) but the format was only ever intended to be interpreted by the Macintosh Resource Manager. It would be a completely different, and much harder, task than parsing the relatively simple .rez format.
Frankly, the conversion process for EV Nova plug-ins always seemed ropey enough to me, without trying to extend it to EV/EVO.
No worries. I appreciate the explanations.
I did try to run an EVO plug through the .rez converter once. It just choked and didn't spit out anything usable.
I just tried extracting ROTUE to .rez on Windows with the help of Plug-in Extractor and the result was successful. Transferred .rez file onto a Mac, converted back into resource fork and found it was fully intact, even including non-Nova resources such as clut. The trick is that .bin files can often be encoded archive files rather than plug-in files, so multiple levels of extraction are needed.
@david-arthur, on 23 February 2017 - 09:20 AM, said in ROTUE files:
Want me to try building MC with my version? SpacePort hasn't thrown any malware warnings for me yet. As a side note, I believe Real Studio 2012r1 is the last version that includes ResourceFork class - according to the release notes it was dropped in r2.
@guy, on 23 February 2017 - 02:35 PM, said in ROTUE files:
Want me to try building MC with my version? SpacePort hasn't thrown any malware warnings for me yet.
It’s a thought — I’m tempted to call it ‘The Fork Awakens’.
MissionComputer is a substantially larger project than SpacePort, so I don’t know how much work it would take to get it accepted by a newer RB. Even getting it into a suitable form to send to you might take a bit of planning.
. . . I believe Real Studio 2012r1 is the last version that includes ResourceFork class - according to the release notes it was dropped in r2.
I’d heard about that (although apparently there are third-party plug-ins that replicate its functionality). A bit sad, really, but I suppose the format has been essentially obsolete for well over a decade now. NeXT-style packages somehow just aren’t as much fun, despite (maybe even because of?) all their flexibility.
@david-arthur, on 23 February 2017 - 04:31 PM, said in ROTUE files:
Sure, just flick me an email when you're ready. I can send you the list of warnings it shows.