CiderPress II released

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eric

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You may be familiar with CiderPress - a Windows utility that can work with ProDOS, HFS, and other Apple/Mac file systems and disks.

CiderPress II is the continuation of that - with cross platform support (no GUI for Mac yet, but hopefully soon) - lots of new features and cool things. This 3 min video gives a great overview:

I found it interesting that CiderPress is a project that's been (in some form) worked on since 1989 - history is interesting:

CiderPress History​

The true origin of CiderPress is a program called "NuView", the NuFX Archive Viewer. Written in May 1989, it printed a list of files from a ShrinkIt archive. This was also of note because it's the first useful program (i.e. not a class project) I ever wrote in the C programming language.

This project gradually evolved into a program called "NuLib", which continued to grow until 1992. In 1998 I started working on a NuFX archive manipulation library, called NufxLib. That was a back-burner project until it was finally released with the NuLib2 archiver in May 2000.

In December 2002 I decided to start working on Windows software. The original CiderPress was introduced in March 2003 as a shareware application. It was originally intended as "ShrinkIt for Windows", a simple GUI wrapper around the NufxLib library, but during the early stages of development support for read-only access to disk images was added.

In October 2004, CiderPress v2.0 was released. It added the ability to create and modify disk images, and allowed direct access to physical media.
Four years after its initial release, in March 2007, the program was re-released as free open-source software. In January 2015, the code base was updated for modern systems, but at its heart it was still a Windows 98/2K 32-bit application.

Work on CiderPress II began in May 2022, mostly out of frustration with the awkwardness of the user interface of the original. Another goal was to have a full set of features available from the command line, including file converters. The original CiderPress had a few sample commands that ran under Linux, but nothing actually useful.
The first public announcement was made a year later, in May 2023, at a point where the CLI was in good shape but the GUI was barely functional. Several months later, near the end of 2023, an alpha-quality build was released for general testing.

Depending on how you figure things, this might be the 5th time I've written the same project. It just gets a bit larger and broader in scope each time.
 

eric

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FYI I've got CiderPress 2 working on macOS - not "pretty" but pretty functional!

Double click an (unsigned, not notarized) "CiderPress2.app" and wait a few seconds, use it as normal.

Download and discussion on their github: https://github.com/fadden/CiderPress2/discussions/34

Here's me adding a file to a BlueSCSI HD image:
 

eric

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I've been working with the developer of CiderPress II (a dotnet based GUI and CLI for working with Apple disk images (HFS, etc) - and he's now including a macOS GUI in the latest release! We also got it running on Linux too if thats your jam

Download:
Discussions:
 

Byte Knight

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I've been working with the developer of CiderPress II (a dotnet based GUI and CLI for working with Apple disk images (HFS, etc) - and he's now including a macOS GUI in the latest release! We also got it running on Linux too if thats your jam
Nice job - I've been waiting for a MacOS version for years!
 

JDW

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Just downloaded "CP2Mac106.zip" (1.2GB wow!) from that Github page, and tested it on my Intel iMac running Monterey.

1737598029603.png


Sadly, the README says this:

This is a Windows GUI application wrapped into a Wine emulation bundle for
macOS. The emulation isn't perfect, but it's pretty good.


That means it won't work on Apple Silicon Macs, which, mind you, came out back in Nov. 2020.

Here is what I see on my Intel iMac...

1737598238495.png


For a test, I dragged a random disk image on my hard drive named "FireOrgan_ScreenSaver_1981.do" onto that open window, which then shows this...

1737598434830.png


Double-clicking the file named HIRES opened this window, which is pretty neat...

1737598500240.png


I was rather intrigued to see that one of the "Conversion" options is MacPaint!

1737598559949.png


Zoom & B&W features are also very handy and nice to have.

Doesn't seem to like 800K disks though, because when I drag-n-drop A2_Robots (8-bit Guy) onto the open window, it hangs...

1737598955698.png


But thankfully it will open other 800K disks like ProDOS 4.0.2.po...

1737599063062.png


All said, it's wonderful being able to use this on the Mac, where it belongs! The only one downside is that WINE is not Apple Silicon compatible, which means a native Mac app would be needed to overcome that. But for now, it's a very nice app to have. Thanks for your efforts on this, @eric !
 

JDW

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... it runs on my M1 MacBook Pro. Do you have Rosetta 2 on your Apple Silicon Mac?
Yes, I have Rosetta 2 on my M1 Max 16" MBP, but WINE isn't compatible, or at least it wasn't in the past. I've not tested CiderPress II on my Apple Silicon Mac yet. I've only tested on my Intel iMac so far.

So you can get WINE to work on your M1 MBP?
 

Fizzbinn

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Yes, I have Rosetta 2 on my M1 Max 16" MBP, but WINE isn't compatible, or at least it wasn't in the past. I've not tested CiderPress II on my Apple Silicon Mac yet. I've only tested on my Intel iMac so far.

So you can get WINE to work on your M1 MBP?

I'll admit I don't have much experience with using WINE, but in this case you don't need to "get WINE to work", you just run the app in the zip download which I'm guessing includes the WINE libraries (or whatever the right term is) that make it work. These appear to be x86 intel but Rosetta runs them fine on Apple Silicon Macs.

Perhaps there was/is an issue with the larger WINE concept of running random x86 windows apps on Apple Silicon Macs where I guess you first install some WINE Windows OS abstraction and then launch x86 windows apps within it but that does not appear to be how CiderPress II is using "WINE" (or if that is how its doing it, it nicely hides that aspect and is bundled within the "App").
 
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