You guys really love wacky file types

Why can't anyone make a guide that's a simple text or rtf file? Why cpt or .sit inside of bins and more sits? Do you really need to compress a simple file that's merely words? I guess 50k is too much space.

@greedybones, on Nov 15 2007, 06:01 AM, said in You guys really love wacky file types:

Why can't anyone make a guide that's a simple text or rtf file? Why cpt or .sit inside of bins and more sits? Do you really need to compress a simple file that's merely words? I guess 50k is too much space.

Standard procedure; the Ambrosia administrators are adamant to refuse to upload any kind of file onto the site without it being compressed first (this is both a space-saving and a security measure). And, for the last decade or so, it has generally been taken for granted that any Mac-user worth their salt has a copy of Stuffit, through legitimate channels or otherwise. And since many of the people on this site are so long-winded, they often prefer pdf files instead of just ordinary text, or rich text, formatted documents (however, I don't even know what a cpt file is). I know it can be annoying, but on the other hand you're more likely to get your questions more favorably answered here on the forums anyway.

You're talking about the EVO addons? Not that it'd make a difference I guess, uploads to the Nova addons have improved greatly in recent times but the early stuff is no better than what you find on the EVO addons.

The reason for this is the instructions you get when submitting a file tell you to use all those crazy formats just to be on the safe side, because way back in those times there was a lot that could go wrong. Guides, for instance, would have been written with SimpleText which creates 'styled text' files (rtf wasn't really around back then) where the formatting data is stored in the resource fork and needs to be appropriately archived. So yeah, the archiving was all pretty wild and varied.

These days only two archive types are accepted on the Nova addons (despite the submission dialog still showing the same old crap): Zip, with plug-ins macbinary encoded (preferred); or sitx (discouraged). Of course if you had some sort of guide as a single rtf or pdf file then that would happily be accepted as it is, though it would be unusual. Plain text is prohibited due to compatibility issues with line breaks and text encodings.

(edit) I think cpt is Compact Pro - some sort of ancient, short-lived compression program.

This post has been edited by Guy : 15 November 2007 - 04:49 AM

I guess that makes sense as far as the compressed as far as amrbosia goes. My problem was with the two EVO ship guides that are posted in the addons. One is a .cpt that I need one of several expensive applications to view, and the other is just a .sit inside of a bin and doesn't appear to have any content despite being 300k.
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/cgi-bin/vftp/dl-...uide101.cpt.hqx
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/cgi-bin/vftp/dl-...20Guide.sit.bin

There's another thing at play here, too: Back in the declining years of HyperCard, but before the rises of PDF and OS X, there were Mac programs like "DocMaker" that created "stand-alone" documents that were actually little application programs themselves. These things were sometimes a real joy to use in their day, but you won't be able to read/run them if you manage to extract them from their archives on a recent Mac that can't run Classic.

If you really want to get at their content, though, try opening them with an OS X ResEdit replacement like Rezilla. Looking at one I have at hand (EVO Strategy Guide v0.1a), it seems that a lot of the written content is in "styl" and "TEXT" resources.

Oh, and Stuffit Expander (10.0), which is free, will open cpt files. Just drag and drop the cpt onto the app.

EDIT: OK, I just broke into the Ship Guide using the advice I just gave. Yeah, there's good info in there, but you have to dig because there are no nice title lines preserved to tell you which TEXT refers to which ship. The comments after the stats usually clear up confusion.

For another source of EVO ship info with frustrating technical problems, try Shayon's EVO Site. The original seems to have been closed down, but the Wayback Machine still has it... with faulty roll-over graphics, apparently.

This post has been edited by Dr. Trowel : 15 November 2007 - 11:38 AM

Allright, I'm still a bit confused on what exactly to do. I have stuffit 11 for windows. I've expanded both the cpt and version and the sit version, but after I expand it, I get another .cpt or another .sit. After that, I can expand to something that's 0kb. I've tried dragging it on to the stuffit Icon, but that just opens up stuffit and lets me expand or make another archive.

After expansion, what are the file types? What do I view the files with?

For reference, .cpt is Compact Pro, which for a long time was a strong rival of StuffIt .sit files as the Mac compression standard. It fell out of favour a very long time ago, though. As far as I can see, the files you're downloading are probably DocMaker files - not readable on Windows. They are applications with resource forks that generally get stripped by Windows as soon as they're decompressed.

Remember that a lot of things on the EV/EVO addons page are very, very old indeed.

Yeah, if you're on windows then you're completely out of luck I'm afraid. Unless someone else is feeling helpful enough to try and extract and convert the information into some reasonable format then there's simply no way you can use it.

@guy, on Nov 15 2007, 02:14 PM, said in You guys really love wacky file types:

Unless someone else is feeling helpful enough to try and extract and convert the information into some reasonable format then there's simply no way you can use it.

That's what I was thinking. But I'm not feeling very useful at the mo, sorry.