NOTE: This file was written by an Executor user to help other Executor users solve common problems. ARDI has edited it slightly, but left it essentially unchanged. If you're not a DOS user, not all of this information will apply but you still may find some useful information in it. Enjoy! Version 2. Updated December 20th, 1995 Executor/DOS experimental (pre-beta) version 1.99p8 GETTING STARTED WITH EXECUTOR ----------------------------- "A bug is an undocumented feature. A bug becomes a feature by documenting it." The author of this document had no previous knowledge about Macintosh software and architecture before buying Executor. PC experience in abundance but totally blank about the Mac world. Executor was bought to fill this hole and fully lived up to its expectations. Although Executor can be used without any previous Macintosh knowledge (proof that this unique selling point for a Mac still holds true) there are some facts that would have helped the author. Some of these are described below; perhaps they will help you. The original Macintosh was introduced in 1984 with the now famous 1984 Big Brother advertisements. It was followed by an enormous range of machines. The original Motorola 68000 processor (comparable to an 8086) was followed by the 68020 (eq. 80286), 68030 (386DX) and 68040 (486SX/DX). Last year Apple shifted its machines to RISC architecture and now uses a Motorola/IBM developed PowerPC processor. Apple has implemented an emulator within its operating system so that all 680x0 applications still can be run on a PowerPC. Executor emulates a 68LC040, which is a 68040 without a floating point processor (the "LC" stands for "low cost"). (An interesting sidenote: ARDI's 68LC040 emulator for the PC is faster than Apple's 68LC040 emulator for PowerPC's. Mat Hostetter, part of ARDI's team, wrote the emulator and really should bring it to the market as a separate product.) Most of the Mac's success was not caused by its hardware but by its software. The Mac was one of the very first systems using a Graphical User Interface. It is this GUI that Executor emulates. The Macintosh operating system comes with the strange name of 'System'. It has had a number of releases comparable to MS-DOS; it is now in its 7th life and like a cat, it was its last; future versions are called MacOS. Although System 7 added a lot of new features, Executor fully emulates a Mac running System 6.0.7. In the current experimental versions (1.99x) of Executor, some emulation of System 7 functionality is included. It is ARDI's intention to make it possible some day that you will be able to use Apple's System 7.5 on top of Executor. Like Windows, System supports applications by giving them an environment to run in. Interaction between the user and System is done with a program called Finder; comparable to Program Manager within Windows. It is Finder that generates the metaphors of folders, desktop, trash can and others. It is Finder that starts applications. With Finder the user can rename, copy and delete files and folders. The original Finder enabled the user to run one application at the time, MultiFinder, introduced with System 6, made it possible to start several applications. Executor is a single-program-at-a-time type of emulator. Apple is known for its furious legal attempts to protect the look-and-feel of its products (and lost most cases). Therefore ARDI has developed its own Finder substitute, called Browser (ARDI once suggested 'Loser') which is integrated with Executor. In previous versions of Executor, the HFS_XFer program, was used to copy, delete and rename files and folders. System needs a harddisk with a number of pre-defined folders, one of which is the System Folder. In it you will find a file called 'System' which contains most of the Mac's operating System. On a real Mac also the file 'Finder' will be found in this folder. The System Folder is present on Executor's file system and there you will find Browser. Executor by default loads Browser when you start Executor; if you don't want that start Executor with the -nobrowser option. ARDI's System file is not compatible with Apple's. If you try to use a Macintosh and replace Apple's System file with ARDI's, your Macintosh will crash. If you try to run Executor using Apple's System file instead of ARDI's, Executor will crash. This implies that although Executor emulates a Mac very well the first impression is that it looks different because it lacks the important Finder interface. Instead Executor either pops up a dialogue box that you can use to tell it which program to start (-nobrowser), or it presents the Finder substitute Browser. There are a number of ways to disable Finder on a real Mac too, which saves a little memory. Browser has a band under the menu bar with icons of commonly used applications and directories and other objects. This band is known as the "hot band". You can drag objects into and out of this band. When you double click on a directory or volume, a window with icons for all the files in the directory will appear. You can drag files from one window to another to move or copy them. To delete a file, you must select it and choose delete; there is no trash can. Double clicking runs an application. The band has six buttons on it which allow you to choose which kind of objects are displayed in the hot band (applications, documents, volumes, directories, fonts, or desk accesories). Also the capability to format disks is included. Executor cannot format a totally unformatted disk, but it can imprint a blank Macintosh filesystem on a high-density disk which already contains a low-level Mac or PC format. In a separate chapter below, you will find a more detailed description of Browser. Since the Mac is meant to be used for graphical applications it uses a number of scalable fonts. These are stored in the 'System' file using a tool called FONT/DA Mover when using System 6. Under System 7 one can just copy a font in the System Folder and it will be recognised. FONT/DA Mover is Apple copyrighted software. With Browser one can simply drag a font to the font "hot band", restart Executor and it will appear within applications. (The necessity to restart of Executor will be gone in future versions.) On a Mac, files are arranged in folders, the equivalent of MS-DOS directories. Folders can be nested and contain icons for programs and/or data files. A remarkable feature of Finder is the alias. An alias is a copy of an application's icon that can be used to create groups of objects. It is Apple's first effort towards object orientation. Changing the properties of an icon also changes them of the alias, contrary to within Windows (even within Windows 95!). Since Executor comes without Finder, and doesn't recognize aliases, it might occur that you open a folder on a floppy or CD-ROM finding nothing in it. On a Mac there might have been aliases in those folders. A difference that a Windows user notices is that on a Mac the menu is always on the topline of the display where in Windows the active menu is always within the current window. A Windows desktop with a number of applications running shows a lot of menus which can lead to confusion. Windows indicates the current menu by giving it a different colour. On a Mac selecting a window automatically makes its associated menu appear on the topline. Since Executor can only run one application at a time this should not be much of a problem. RUNNING SOFTWARE WITH EXECUTOR ------------------------------ Now that you have installed Executor on your system and you have verified that it runs, you are ready to start some of the demo software that comes with Executor. These are freeware, shareware or fully working demos of commercial packages. The files are located in the EXDEMOS.HFV DOS volume and appear after installation in an Executor volume in the 'demos' and 'games' folders. Also Executor comes with some useful utilities included in the EXSYSTEM.HFV DOS volume that appear in the 'utils' folder on your System drive. After you have started some of these programs you probably want to do something useful with Executor. This means getting hold of the software that you need and properly installing it. Before you start installing software there are a couple of issues that have to be understood. First you need to have set aside a volume that can hold the files you need. Such a volume can be created with MAKEHFV as stated in the appropriate section of this manual. Remember that unless you to tell Executor otherwise, your newly created volume has to have a filename ending with ".hfv" and has to be placed in the same directory as the other ".hfv" files are (the default is \EXECUTOR. The program that creates the new volume is called "makehfv" (make hfv). It takes three arguments, the name of the DOS file that the volume will reside in, the name of the volume as it will be seen by any program running under Executor and the size in bytes that the volume will take up. The suffixes "k" and "m" can be used to specify the size in kilobytes (1024 byte chunks) or megabytes (1024 * 1024 = 1048576 byte chunks). For example, to create a 10 megabyte volume, in the DOS file newvol.hfv, with the internal name NewVolume, you would execute this command: C:\EXECUTOR> makehfv newvol.hfv NewVolume 10m When you next start Executor and cycle through your available drives by clicking the 'DRIVE' button you will have an empty volume called NewVolume ready to take your files. Also remember that Executor is a complex piece of software. ARDI has beta-tested this product thoroughly but the enormous diversity of PC hardware coupled with the complexity of emulating a totally different system on top of this hardware means that crashes are possible. When Executor or your PC dies, unpredictable things might happen. It is recommended that so-called write-behind-cacheing be disabled when you use Executor. Most systems nowadays use Microsoft's SMARTDRV which has write-behind-cacheing turned off by default only when you use MS-DOS 6.2 If you have another MS-DOS version or when you have turned it on please change the line that starts SMARTDRV to : SMARTDRV C instead of SMARTDRV C+ As always, it is best to back up your data frequently. GETTING HOLD OF SOFTWARE ------------------------ Apple's Macintosh is the second most widespread architecture in the world. Software for the Mac is as freely available as for the PC platform. There are however a few distinctions. Commercial software tends to be more expensive and sometimes updated versions arrive later than their MS-Windows counterparts. It used to be the other way around but this is the way it is. An important issue to note here is that Executor, due to constraints in PC hardware, can only read Macintosh HD (SuperDrive) floppy-disks and Macintosh formatted CD-ROMs (more on CD-ROMs later on). SuperDrive floppy disks are physically identical to PC HD diskettes (all of them have a second hole on the other side of the write-protect notch). As on the PC they have a capacity of 1.4 Mb. These disks share the same "low-level" format, but have a different "filesystem format" than they do on a PC. i.e. the physical format is the same as on a PC; it is just the logical format that differs. Macintosh commercial software is available from most shops. If you have no possibility to use a 'real' Macintosh then be sure that the disks you get are HD ones. Otherwise let the dealer convert them. Since not all software will run under Executor it is advisable to arrange with your dealer to test the software first. Especially look for explicit statements whether the software needs System 7. If an application *requires* System 7, then it is unlikely to work under the current implementation (1.99x) of Executor. At this moment most of the work of System 7 emulation has been done but the bottle-neck are Apple extensions like QuickTime and Apple Events. Good software for the Macintosh can be found with most magazines (again verify that they come with HD disks), on all commercial networks and on the Internet. When you want to use software on a Macintosh CD-ROM, your CD-ROM drive will appear automatically within Executor if your CD-ROM controlling software conforms to Microsoft's MSCDEX or Adaptec's ASPI standard. When you insert a Macintosh formatted HD floppy or CD-ROM these will be automatically recognised when you start Executor. If you insert them when Executor has already started, you must press Shift-left-Alt-2 before they will be seen. Due to size constraints on a floppy, most of the time the software on it will be in a compressed format. This is comparable to the way it is done on the PC where ZIP, ARC, ARJ and LZH are some of the used extensions to denote a compressed file. Amazingly the number of different compression systems used on Macs is as large as on the PC and all of them are different between the two platforms. Yes, there is a ZIP utility for the Mac but no available software seems to be compressed with it. Although the naming convention for Mac files is much less constraining than the one we are familiar with on the PC (name of 8 characters and an extension of 3), most of the time the name of a compressed file ends with a decimal point followed by a three character extension. Mind that the name of a Mac file when found on a system that has a more constraining naming convention (like MS-DOS) might not be able to tell you what sort of format it is in. However, when you transform it to Mac format (more on this later) its name will explain more. For instance you might find a file called ACMECALC.BIN on CompuServe which, when it ends up on your Executor volume, suddenly gets called 'Acme Super Calculator.sea'. The most used compression systems and their extensions are: .pit ; PackIt compressed file .sit ; Stuffit compressed file .cpt ; Compact Pro compressed file .dde ; DiskDoubler compressed file .sea ; One of the above but self-extracting For the first four files you will need the mentioned shareware programs to extract (decompress) them. The full Stuffit package can also handle the other formats. Compact Pro is found in the 'utils' folder on your System disk. Stuffit is excellent shareware and there is a freeware Stuffit Expander program that as its name suggests can only expand a compressed file (expanding again being another word for decompress, foo). DiskDoubler is less used than the others, mainly because it is commercial software. There is a free expander though. A .sea file basically consists of a compressed file with an integrated expander. When you start an .sea file it will expand itself automatically. Of the mentioned decompressors there are a number of different versions to be found; not all of these work with Executor. Also some self-extracting compressed files tend to kill Executor. When this happens there is a simple but effective trick. Try to get hold of a utility called 'DeSEA'. It does what its name implies; it turns a .sea file in a .sit,.pit or .cpt file that then can be decompressed using one of the mentioned tools. Excellent information on the various compression schemes, .hqx and BinHex formats can be found in a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) document on datacommunication, available via anonymous ftp on the Internet from: site : sumex-aim.stanford.edu file : /info-mac/comm/info/comp-sys-mac-comm-faq.txt When the file is decompressed, you are ready to roll. Mind that a lot of software that comes on CDs take the capacity of a CD to the maximum by using audio and video clips (called QuickTime). These cannot be used in Executor. A program with such a restriction will probably complain that you need System 7; the version of the Mac's operating system that supports video. GETTING SOFTWARE USING YOUR PC ------------------------------ The above is all well but you might be tempted to get software for Executor by downloading files from bulletin boards and/or networks like CompuServe, America Online or the Internet. This is possible though a bit more complicated since the PC is not a Mac (you might have noticed this; ARDI lives because of it). In the PC world every file on your harddisk comes as one logical collection of bytes, with a start, a middle and an end. On the Mac every file has two components (honest!), these are called the data-fork and the resource-fork. The data-fork contains the data that is unformatted, or at least not formatted in a way that the actual Macintosh OS itself understands. The resource-fork contains data that is formatted in a way that the Macintosh OS understands and hence can be used to specify parameters for various Macintosh OS routines, for instance icons. Every file has both a data-fork and a resource-fork although either, (or even both) can be empty. To enable distribution of Macintosh files on a non-Macintosh medium like most bulletin-boards, a number of people, Apple amongst them, found a way to combine the two forks in one file. Two of these systems are known as BinHex. BinHex 4 is often known as "HQX" and it combines both forks into a single ASCII file. BinHex 5 is often known as "MacBinary" and it combines both forks into a single BINARY file. Since Executor at this moment does not support serial I/O all downloading of Mac files has to be done using your favourite PC communication program and your PC modem. Downloaded files will thus appear on your PC's harddisk. If the file's description from where you downloaded it or its name on your PC's harddisk indicates that is in HQX format (for instance because its name contains the .hqx extension) there is an extra step to take. A file with the .hqx extension has been constructed using version 4.0 of BinHex. This program enables binary files to be transported on networks that otherwise would have problems with them by translating them in 7-bit ASCII text. You can try this by using your favourite DOS editor on such a file; it will contain seemingly endless lists of numbers; the human-readable equivalent of machine-code. The supplied BinHex 5.0 program converts a.hqx file automatically to its original format. There is also an excellent shareware program called DeHQX that also gives a lot of information in the process. To get a file converted so that it appears on an Executor Mac volume, start the program BinHex in the 'utils' folder on your System disk. In its file menu you will find a Download -> Application choice. It will pop-up a dialogue box where you can specify the file on your PC volume after which it will ask you where to store the result. When all goes well you will find some form of Mac file on the destination disk. If a file is not HQX'ed, BinHex effectively only copies the file and creates the two forks from the one file. To find out whether BinHex needs to take the extra step it looks for the phrase : (This file must be converted with BinHex 4.0) at the beginning of the file. CompuServe has its own Macintosh File Finder that enables you to find your favourite Mac file amongst the odd 20,000 it stores. On the Internet a lot of Mac software can be found. Look for the SimTel ftp archives. Another good archive is the HENSA archive of Lancaster University, UK. To summarise; when you have downloaded a Mac file it will appear to be a normal PC file on your PC. Run BinHex to write it to an Executor volume. BinHex will automatically de-HQX the file. If required run a de-compression program. If Executor 'touches' a file on a PC volume it immediately creates a pseudo resource fork for that file which is a separate file with a percent-sign as its first character. This can confuse BinHex and other programs, and a 'touched' file might not be shown anymore, unless you turn off the "TEXT filter" within the 'File' menu of BinHex 5.0, so that all files are displayed instead of just "TEXT" ones. In such a case simply delete the resource-fork file. This problem is actually a result of a bug in Executor and hopefully the bug will be fixed soon. A special word on text files. When you download a text file that was produced on a Mac you will experience that a number of DOS editors have problems with the fact that the Mac only uses a LF character at the end of every line, where the PC uses a CR, LF pair. Luckily the MS-DOS EDIT command can read both formats. When you open a Mac style text document, change one character and then write it back, EDIT will convert it to PC text format. There exists a shareware/freeware MS-DOS program called MAC2PC80.EXE that does this all automatically. If you do not want to store a compressed text file on an Executor volume but want to read it using a PC editor then there are shareware PC programs, like UNSTUFF.EXE (free!) that can decompress such a file on the PC. Aladdin Systems (makers of StuffIt) have now released a very nice Windows version of Stuffit Expander that handles almost every Macintosh file format. Apart from files being BinHex'ed and/or compressed, more complex programs come in the form of an 'Installer'; a program that installs the software so that it is automatically copied to the proper folders. An installer most of the time also decompresses its components and scatters them around in for instance your System Folder. The problem here is that most of the time installers are complex programs that might confuse Executor. Many installers were written by Apple and have special information about the insides of Macintoshes that the authors of Executor did not have (Executor was written using "clean room" techniques -- no Apple ROMs or System files were disassembled). In such a case you will have to install the program on a real Mac and then transfer the installed program to an Executor volume. Afterward, if it is not publicly redistributable, delete the program from the Mac. It is illegal not to. On the issue of files in your System Folder; this folder acts as the notorious WIN.INI file under Windows, i.e. it is regarded as every application's liberty to litter it. A separate folder 'Preferences' most of the time holds files that store items like your highest score in your favourite game. Since Executor's System drive is limited in size it pays to occasionally delete unwanted files from the System Folder. Be careful with the file 'Printer' though. This file is required for printing in Executor. Note: The size of Executor's System drive is not really limited in size. If you run out of space you have to create a second, larger System volume with MAKEHFV. Do not call the DOS volume EXSYSTEM.HFV but choose a different name like EXSYS1.HFV making sure that its logical volume name remains System. The proper MAKEHFV command line would be : MAKEHFV EXSYS1.HFV System 2M to create a 2 Mb. System drive. Copy all files from the first drive to the second drive using Browser. Be careful; both drives are called System - the empty one should be the destination. When everything has been copied delete EXSYSTEM.HFV and rename EXSYS1.HFV to EXSYSTEM.HFV. Transferring a file from a Mac to Executor larger than can be fitted on one floppy is not so easy. Try compressing it first. If it still doesn't fit you can use a serial cable and transfer it using two terminal programs, or try to get your hands on a program that cuts archives in parts. (StuffIt Lite 3.x can do this.) FILE CREATORS AND FILE TYPES ---------------------------- On a PC an application most of the time uses the 3-character extension of files to denote that it created them. For instance an application named ACMECALC might create files with an .ACM extension. Also the extension might indicate the type of file like .TXT denoting a text file. This way of doing things has lead to a lot of confusion since nobody is regulating the list of used extensions, and three letters doesn't lend itself to enough logical combinations. On the Mac the above is regulated. The Mac uses a system where every file has a 4-character 'creator' and a 4-character 'type'. These are distributed by Apple - a list can be obtained of valid ones. (This does not mean that everybody follows the rules of course.) The creator field is used twofold. Firstly it tells a Mac's Finder what application to load when the user double-clicks the icon of a data-file. Secondly it enables an application to only show files in dialogue boxes that it can handle. Normally you do not have to worry about the above, but sometimes a file that you think belongs to a certain application cannot be opened by it. The adventurous can then change the type and or creator using a tool like File Kit or from within Browser. From the number of available programs that can change types and creators we might conclude that the confusion on the Mac platform as to which file belongs to who is as confusing as it is on PCs. USEFUL PROGRAMS --------------- Apart from the already mentioned utilities there are a couple more that you probably might want to look for. Get a simple text processor like UpWord to edit an occasional file or use the supplied Tex-Edit program. To view the contents of most word-processor documents get Quill. To make sure that the files you download are not virus-ridden get Disinfectant. There are only an odd twenty viruses around but still you might be unlucky. Because Executor has slightly different "internals" than a Macintosh does, it is slightly less susceptible to virus infection than a real Mac but better not take chances. Easy Errors tells you what an error number generated by an application actually means. (Who ever said a Mac was userfriendly?) Get File Kit to have a look at file attributes like creation date and length. Shareware and/or freeware programming languages are not that freely available as on the PC. There are a number of freeware 'C' compilers, ChipMunk Basic 3.21 is a simple Basic interpreter. HyperCard from Claris runs fairly well, but some stacks will not work under HyperCard under Executor. Supercard created stacks also usually work, although some aspects of Supercard's use of color can confuse the experimental versions of Executor that support color. If you want to learn how to program a Mac be prepared for a shock. To fully understand how the Mac works you need to master a large and very expensive series of books from Apple, called Inside Macintosh. Apple has released a CD version of these books though. Just like the Windows environment just knowing a programming language is not enough to write a nice looking application. On a Mac one needs to master the equivalent of the Windows API, called the Toolbox. LIMITATIONS ON WHAT WILL RUN UNDER EXECUTOR ------------------------------------------- On a real Mac there is a large number of ways to interact with the machine. Apart from starting normal programs, there are - Desk Accessories; these are handy programs that can be found in the Apple Menu. - Extensions; these extend the Mac's Operating System, for instance for video. - Control Panels; enable a Mac user to control various settings of his/her system. - Inits; small programs that a Mac loads for special devices and/or functionality. Apart from some Desk Accessories, Executor at this moment cannot run any of the above. TRANSFERRING DATA BETWEEN MAC APPLICATIONS AND DOS COUNTERPARTS --------------------------------------------------------------- You can manipulate data within applications on both platforms if they can read the applicable format, i.e. a Word for Windows 5.x document can be edited using Word 5 with Executor. If you let an application produce print output then Executor puts it in a file EXECOUTx.PS within the directory where you started Executor. The 'x' is a number from 0-9. This output is a proper PostScript file that can be printed on a printer that supports PostScript. Otherwise you can use the freeware package GhostScript to view or print them under MS-DOS. Browser ------- Recent 1.99x experimental pre-beta versions come with ARDI's Finder substitute, called Browser. When you normally start Executor (i.e. without the -nobrowser) option, Executor will automatically load Browser and will return to Browser when you exit an application. Browser presents the following: - a normal Macintosh style menu - 6 pictograms - 2 buttons - a 'hot-band' containing icons From the menu you can for instance create folders, print files or eject a disk. CLicking on the pictograms selects the appropriate 'hot-band'. There are 'hot-bands' for drives, applications, fonts, DAs, folders and text files. The button 'Sort', sorts the current 'hot-band' and 'Help' gives a short explanation of the various 'hot-bands'. A word about disk drives here. Executor will try to figure out what drives are available when it loads. In a standard setup, the drives 'hot-band' will show the System: drive, your .HFV volumes and your c:/ drive. If you have a CD-ROM player available it will show up as a d:/ if MSCDEX is running. On a Macintosh the sense hardware detects that a removable drive is inserted and its icon will show up automatically. This is different from the PC architecture. This means that Executor does not detect automatically when you insert a Mac CD-ROM or diskette. To have Executor detect such a medium select 'Check for disk' from the 'File' menu within Browser, or press Alt-Shift-2. If the medium is recognized it will show up on the drives 'hot-band'. Also you have to manually eject a drive from the 'File' menu. Be careful not to phyiscally eject a floppy when Executor is not finished with it; buffers might not be flushed. Always use 'Eject' or Alt-Shift-2. It is possible to drag DAs to the DA 'hot-band' and have Executor put them in the Apple menu. Not all DAs work however. Be careful to have a copy of your EXSYSTEM.HFV file. Some DAs crash Executor and weird things might happen. Browser can format Macintosh 1.44 Mb. diskettes. For this to work properly first check that 'Direct Disk Access' is selected. (Press Alt-Shift-5 to select the Preferences Panel.) Bibliography ------------ Suggested further reading if you want to know more. Title Author Content --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Insanely Great Steven Levy History of the Mac Technical Introduction Apple THE Source to the Macintosh Family comp.sys.mac.comm FAQ D.L. Oppenheimer Everything on datacommunication, compression and file formats. Executor's FAQ ARDI When all else fails All company names and products mentioned are copyrighted and trademarks of their respective owners. Feel free to contact me : Ernst J. Oud Compuserve : 100265,3601 Internet : ernstoud@euronet.nl