Using an HSF partition on a PC hard drive as a shared drive

[bobrpggamer]

I know WinUAE has the option to dedicate a drive to be accessed by the OS, so if I create an HSF with HSF+ from Paragon Software can I use that drive to be accessed and store apps and games on?

[adespoton]

Is your question "Will SheepShaver use a HFS+ partition on a PC Hard Drive?"

Or is it "Can SheepShaver read/write the same HFS+ disk image as Paragon?"

In any case, the answer to the first is "no" and the second is "yes", but the order of operations is important -- create the disk image in Paragon, make sure it is unmounted, attach it to SheepShaver and boot SheepShaver. You'll be prompted to format and erase it -- do so. Shut down SheepShaver, mount the image with Paragon, and you can write files to it. Unmount the image, boot up SheepShaver again, and you'll have the files.

However, using the shared folder is simpler to copy the files over. You don't have to worry about unmounting the image.

[bobrpggamer]

Is your question "Will SheepShaver use a HFS+ partition on a PC Hard Drive?"

Or is it "Can SheepShaver read/write the same HFS+ disk image as Paragon?"

In any case, the answer to the first is "no" and the second is "yes", but the order of operations is important -- create the disk image in Paragon, make sure it is unmounted, attach it to SheepShaver and boot SheepShaver. You'll be prompted to format and erase it -- do so. Shut down SheepShaver, mount the image with Paragon, and you can write files to it. Unmount the image, boot up SheepShaver again, and you'll have the files.

However, using the shared folder is simpler to copy the files over. You don't have to worry about unmounting the image.

Well I was hoping that you could have something similar to a shared drive that is formatted in HSF, but I guess maybe that could be a new feature.

WinUAE can use a windows shared folder or drive formatted in even windows file formats so I was thinking the same thing with Sheepshaver but with an HSF formatted partition.

No disrespect to sheepshaver devs, but I have been spoiled with WinUAE, in which I believe to be the best emulator I have ever used, but then I was always an Amiga guys sisnce the late 80s anyway.

[adespoton]

Ah; I see what you're trying to do.

It would actually be fairly trivial to implement; native HFS handling routines already exist in SheepShaver and are used in the macOS version. The source code would just have to be tweaked so that SS is expecting resource forks in the shared folder instead of apple double files.

Interestingly, this could (sort of) work with standard Windows as well, as NTFS has support for ADS, which was specifically designed to be resource fork compatible. The problem is, alternate data streams are local to the NTFS partition in use, and if you copy those files anywhere else via Windows, you'll lose the resource forks.