Short information about "macformat"
-----------------------------------

When you use the Macintosh-Emulator "Executor" for Linux, you may want
to format floppy disks in macintosh format. (For technical reasons,
only the 1.44 MB format is supported by this little program, because
this format uses the same low-level format as the PC 1.44 MB format.
The 800 KB format is _not_ supported!)

The simple way is to get a macintosh, format a high density floppy disk
on it, insert the disk into the floppy disk drive of your Linux box and
say "cat /dev/fd0 >MAC_DISK". Whenever you need a macintosh formatted
disk now, simply say "cat MAC_DISK >/dev/fd0" - that's all.

The program "macformat" principally does the same, but just writes the
blocks that are really needed to tell the Macintosh that this disk is
a blank disk. Additionally, you can choose a name (disk label) for the
freshly formatted disk. Note: The disk has to be low-level formatted
first; this can be done with "fdformat /dev/fd0". But you only have to
low-level format it the first time (or buy pre-formatted ones). It
doesn't make a difference it you have previously used it with other
file systems, so you doesn't have to 'fdformat' a disk previously used
with MS-DOS etc.

To use "macformat", simply insert your disk to be macintosh-formatted
and type:

	macformat /dev/fd0

After a few seconds (not longer than five seconds), you have a freshly
formatted macintosh disk with the disk label "Empty" - ready for use
with "Executor" or a real Macintosh.

If you want to format your disk giving an other disk label to it, just
type:

	macformat /dev/fd0 "New Disk"

The new disk will then get the disk label "New Disk". For some reason,
the length of the disk label is limited to 10 characters, while a real
Macintosh accepts disk labels with a length up to 27 characters, but
my disk image had a disk label of exactly 10 characters. If you think
you can change it, just take the source (included) and fiddle around
with it. Please drop me a note if you can change it to 27 characters.
(I had no success by simply changing the length limit from 10 to 27,
maybe there's another byte on the disk image that has to be changed.)

The other two programs in this package, "bin2c" and "getdiskblocks",
are not needed for normal use. You will only need them if you want
to build a "macformat" binary with data blocks from an other disk
image. The "getdiskblocks" just writes two files with the disk blocks
needed, the "bin2c" converts them to C source, so that there is only
a single binary and no extra data files needed. Just look at the sources,
if you want to play with this.

If you have any problems, questions, suggestions, donations, flames,
write to

	aeglos@valinor.owl.de

or Snail Mail

	Holger Schemel
	Sennehof 28
	33659 Bielefeld
	GERMANY

Have fun!

		Holger
