faddenSoft is pleased to announce the release of CiderPress v2.0. This is a significant upgrade from v1.2.5, adding many new features. For anyone not familiar with the product: CiderPress is like a "ShrinkIt for Windows" on steroids. It offers full access to ShrinkIt archives and disk images, including adding, extracting, renaming, and deleting files. File converters translate programs, documents, and graphics files into formats easily accessible under Windows and other systems. Disk images can be converted between several different formats. The new and updated features are described below. ** Writable disk images DOS 3.2/3.3, ProDOS, and Pascal disks can now be written as well as read. The new capabilities include: - Add files, singly or in batches. Several text conversion options are available. - Delete files. Entire subdirectories can be deleted at once. - Rename files. - Create ProDOS subdirectories. - Change file types and access permissions of ProDOS files. - Change the volume name on ProDOS and Pascal disks, or the VTOC disk volume number on DOS disks. The file attribute preservation system designed for NuFX archives also works for disk images. It preserves file types and resource forks on files extracted to the Windows filesystem. You can, for example, extract a collection of files from a GS/OS boot disk to Windows, add them to a new disk image, and then boot that image in an emulator. ** Copy & paste In addition to menu-driven adding and extracting, CiderPress now supports Windows clipboard copy & paste operations. Select files from a disk image or file archive, copy them to the Windows clipboard, then paste them to a disk image or file archive. Filenames and text formats are automatically converted when files are copied from one filesystem to another. If you paste the files into an application other than CiderPress, you will get a tab-delimited copy of the file listing. This provides a quick way to get the complete contents of a disk, including filename, file type, and length, into a spreadsheet or text document. ** Support for CFFA and Macintosh partitioning Compact Flash cards formatted by the Rich Dreher's Apple II CFFA card use fixed-size partitions but no partition table. Macintosh-style partitioning, found on CD-ROMs and Apple II SCSI hard drives, uses a well-defined partition map. Both are now fully supported by CiderPress, including 4-part and 8-part CFFA configurations. These are treated as "container" formats, in which multiple disk images can be found. ** Direct access to "logical" and "physical" devices Having support for CFFA and Macintosh partitioning wouldn't be very useful without access to physical disks and drives. CiderPress can now directly access the following devices: - Floppy drives. This allows access to ProDOS volumes on 720KB and 1.4MB 3.5" media. If you have a SuperDrive, floptical drive, or PC Transporter on your Apple II, you can now transfer files to and from your PC without having to employ MS-DOS tools on your Apple II. (Only PC-format disks are supported; Apple-format 800KB and 1.6MB disks are not.) - CD-ROM drives. Many CD-ROMs with Apple II material were created with with one or more ProDOS partitions. Using CiderPress, you can access the files in these volumes directly. - CF card readers. Access every ProDOS partition on your CFFA-formatted CF card directly. - Hard drives. Unplug your SCSI hard drive from your Apple II, plug it into a SCSI card in your PC, and open the drive. Copy files on or off of any ProDOS partition. (Your ability to access a given device depends upon your hardware and the version of Windows you're running. For a description of requirements and limitations, see http://www.faddensoft.com/ciderpress/hardware.htm .) ** Volume Copier tool Being able to copy files in and out of floppy disks and hard drives is useful, but sometimes you want to copy entire partitions on and off. The new Volume Copier tool does just that. Possible uses: - Copy partitions off of CFFA card, use them as hard drives in an emulator, then copy them back to the CFFA card for use in a real Apple II. - Copy entire hard drives to Windows. Back up irreplaceable data quickly and easily. Restore an entire hard drive or a single partition. Your backups are just block images, so you can open the backups with CiderPress and cut & paste individual files too. - Copy 1.4MB images to and from floppy disks. - Extract ProDOS volumes from CD-ROMs and write them to a CFFA card or hard drive. Handy if you don't have an Apple II-compatible CD-ROM drive. Copying non-ProDOS partitions, such as HFS, is supported. Open physical disks or block images of physical disks. ** Updated file viewer Several changes were made to make it easier to use: - Buttons now select between the data fork, resource fork, and comment of a particular file. - A drop-down menu provides formatting options. Switch from full-color double-hi-res to black & white. Change to a hex dump without leaving the viewer. - A "print" button sends the file being viewed directly to your printer of choice. In addition, a converter for Paintworks super-hi-res images was added, as well as a simple Pascal code analyzer. Color syntax highlighting was added to Applesoft and Integer BASIC listings. ** Archive Info feature This brings up a display showing the attributes of the NuFX archive, disk image, or Binary II library. The disk image display includes details for every volume and sub-volume, including total size, free space, and a description of any problems found on the disk (sectors incorrectly marked used or unused, damaged files, peculiar values in disk structures, etc). ** Disk Image Creator Need a disk image in a particular size? The disk image creation tool lets you create bootable DOS 3.3, ProDOS, and Pascal disk images. Handy for creating disk images for use with emulators. ProDOS volumes up to 32MB can be created. Create a 1.4MB ProDOS disk image, add files, then use the volume copier tool to write it to a blank 3.5" disk. ** New tool: EOL Scanner This tool simply counts up the number of carriage returns, linefeeds, and CR+LF combinations found in the file. This can be used as a way to tell if a file has been damaged by an ASCII-mode transfer. For example, if a disk image contains a number of carriage returns and CRLF pairs, but no linefeeds whatsoever, there's a pretty good chance that at some point the file underwent an LF-to-CRLF text conversion (e.g. UNIX to Windows). If the disk image doesn't seem to work right, this can give a clue as to why, and in some cases can suggest a remedy. ** New tool: 2MG Properties Editor The .2mg disk image format has some attributes, notably: - Whether or not the file is virtually "locked". - What the disk's low-level disk volume number is. - A comment about the file contents. This tool allows editing the above, and displays other header fields, such as the image creator identification string. ** Support for disk images in ZIP archives For better or worse, many Apple II disk images are stored in ZIP archives. CiderPress can now open such disk images so long as they're the only file in the archive. (ZIP archives with multiple entries are not opened.) If the contents of the disk image are updated, the ZIP archive will be automatically re-compressed with standard "deflate" compression. (CiderPress also supports ".gz" gzip compression, which is a better choice for disk images than ZIP.) ** Miscellaneous Recognition of "tweaked" DOS 3.2/3.3 volumes has been improved slightly. Some disks that weren't recognized before are handled now. CiderPress performs a series of tests on disk images to ensure that the files aren't damaged. The new version includes additional tests, and can identify "suspicious" files that aren't completely damaged but aren't entirely healthy either. The Disk Sector Viewer tool can read from physical devices. Besides its use on Apple II formats, it's a handy way to look at your hard drive partition map or examine CD-ROMs. If you have a disk image open, you can now open the image in the sector viewer with one click. The latest versions of zlib (v1.2.1) and NufxLib (v2.0.3) are included. CiderPress is shareware, with a $9.95 registration cost. After 30 days it must be registered. The v2.0 upgrade is FREE to registered owners. Visit http://www.faddensoft.com/ for a full feature list and screen shots. The download comes with MDC (Multi-Disk Catalog), a free utility (no registration required) for generating searchable file listings from a large set of disk images. -- Send mail to fadden@fadden.com (Andy McFadden) - http://www.fadden.com/ CD-Recordable FAQ - http://www.cdrfaq.org/ CiderPress Apple II archive utility for Windows - http://www.faddensoft.com/ Fight Internet Spam - http://spam.abuse.net/spam/ & http://spamcop.net/