This week we reached a major milestone! From the encouragement on the work on HyperCard on 68KMLA forums, we got inspired to attempt tackling one major obstacle that was preventing it from working – file system write support!

As we mentioned earlier last year, when we last fall added the file system API, we did so using abstraction on top of AppleDouble file format. As Mac file system has the special dual nature of being split to data and resource forks, the AppleDouble format helps managing this in the emulated file system. Data fork, as mentioned earlier, is saved directly in its own file, while resource fork is merged with other file metadata in the AppleDouble header file. With this distinction, adding support for writing to data forks was really just trivial mapping of file manager write calls to the data file. Resource fork writing is a bit tricky, but we currently force the AppleDouble headers to keep resource fork as last element in the file, which allows us to offset also write operations from the beginning of resource data, and allows us to expand/shrink file easily, as end of resource fork is the actual end of header file. (One side note, setting EOF of files doesn’t have a standard C file operation, so we’re for now using the POSIX extension “ftruncate” which works at least on Mac OS X, but may lead to portability issues.)

Currently there’s very limited set of features for writing to file system implemented, basically just “Create” and “Write” file manager calls. For example, resource manipulation does not yet work as it will require a number of routines added to the Resource Manager to support it. However, one test application that directly benefited from this new feature was our beloved MacPaint, as it requires two scratch files to be present on startup volume/folder to function. This was nice, as it allowed us to add a few other missing features, such as PackBits (which also benefitted other apps and picture recording).

Although all tools don’t yet work perfectly, most of basic drawing functions are solid enough to not only allow drawing, but the experimental file writing also allows saving of MacPaint files, which appear to be readable by the Preview application in development host system Mac OS X 10.12!

Additionally, many other applications have seen improvements from this, as now we can save Civilization games and continue playing them! (Although Standard File package is still using hard-coded SFReply records).