About | Capabilities | Screen Shots | Issues | Future | Requirements | SourceForge | Download | Developer Documentation | Historical | Contact

Welcome to the AppleCommander web site! Click on a link to jump to the appropriate section, or continue on and read it all! AppleCommander is hosted at SourceForge.

About

AppleCommander is a little project whose main purpose is to provide a tool to move data between Apple ][ disk images and a native filesystem ('C:\' for Windows, or '/wherever' for Linux and Mac OS X). As with all good projects, this one is a little out of hand, and it is becoming a general utility to manipulate Apple ][ emulator images. If you're thinking this could be useful, read on!

Some secondary (or tertiary, depending on what you are counting) considerations are to give me a bit of experience using Eclipse.org's SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) - which is an alternative windowing system to Sun's AWT or Swing.

If you wish to participate or have ideas, please let me know!

Please click here to visit the AppleCommander project page.

Capabilities

As stated above, AppleCommander is intended to become a general utility for disk images. But, where is it now? What are the current capabilites?

AppleCommander is currently able to read and display information about disk images, export files of various types, create disk images, import files into disk images, and has a rudimentary compiler. As of 1.3.3, AppleCommander has added an internal file viewer and incorporates John Matthews command-line version.

• Compressed images (*.gz);
• 140K DOS-ordered images (*.do, *.dsk);
• 140K ProDOS-ordered images (*.po);
• 140K Nibble (DOS ordered) images (*.nib);
• 800K ProDOS-ordered images (*.2mg, *.2img);
• 32MB ApplePC Hard Disk images (*.hdv).

• DOS 3.3 (140K formats only);
• UniDOS, OzDOS (800K formats only);
• ProDOS;
• Apple Pascal (140K formats only);
• SSI's RDOS (140K formats only);
• CP/M (probably only 140K formats).

• Raw disk data (dumps blocks or sectors without regard to file length or operating system storage);
• Binary file (dumps file without any converstion);
• Hex dump;
• ASCII file filter;
• Formatted assembly output;
• Pascal ".text" files;
• Applesoft BASIC file filter (file is de-tokenized and written out as a text file);
• Integer BASIC file filter (ditto);
• Graphic image file filter (supports black and white or color Hires images as well as black and white or color Double Hires images as well as standard Super Hires, and 3200 color Super Hires);
• AppleWorks word processor (AWP) file filter (converts to text, poor HTML, or Rich-Text Format (RTF));
• AppleWorks database (ADB) file filter (converts to CSV);
• AppleWorks spread sheet (ASP) file filter (converts to CSV).

• Applesoft BASIC

• BASIC programs (Applesoft and Integer BASIC); Applesoft BASIC is colored
• Graphics images (same as supported by the graphics export function)
• Appleworks (database, spreadsheet, word processor)
• Text files (plain text, assembly source files, Pascal text files)
• Hex dump of all the above
• "Raw" format of all of the above; this includes all data as read from disk including length and starting address as well as full sectors/blocks

Issues

• If a disk is mostly in a known format, but has bad data and what-not, AppleCommander may crash. Technically, the worst culprit is a retrieving a non-existant block or track/sector.
• Various interface improvements.
• Requirement of a Java JVM as well as SWT for the interface.
• The Win32 (compiled) version of AppleCommander doesn't interpret graphic image colors correctly - however the Java JAR version does.
• There is a known issue with Mac OS X: Somehow the windows do not come into the foreground. The windows can be closed but not interacted with. Any help appreciated! (This is most likely due to a misuse of the Eclipse SWT library on my part.)

Please visit the tracker page for an up-to-date list of issues, submit a new issue, or submit a feature request.

Future

There is a general list of TODO items which is managed as part of the CVS archive. Click here to see the current TODO list.

Requirements

AppleCommander is written in Java and uses a non-standard Java library, SWT. Fortunately, none of these will cost anything but download time:

• Java - If you need to install Java, go to the Sun Java site for J2SE and download the latest version (1.4.2 as of June 2004) and install it. I develop with 1.4.2_04, and have tested with 1.3.1, so these should work along with any future releases.
• SWT - As far as SWT is concerned, I have created a Windows archive (1MB) of these files which you can unzip into the same directory as the AppleCommander JAR file. For those running Linux, OS X, or for that matter, Windows, you can go directly to the Eclipse site for the latest 2.1.x release of SWT. Here is a handy link!

Because of the SWT difficulties, I hope to continue compiling the application. These will be tagged with a win32 in the filename.

Download

Note: Please read the requirements and download Java and the SWT code, if required first!

Once you have installed Java and copied SWT into the future AppleCommander directory, download a copy of AppleCommander from the download section of the SourceForge site.

This software is distributed under the GPL.

To start AppleCommander, just double-click on the AppleCommander JAR file! (If you've downloaded the win32 version, double-click on the EXE file.)

Developer Documentation

There is currently minimal documentation available for others interested in the development, structure, or code of AppleCommander. The source is, of course, available on SourceForge via CVS. However, extra documentation is fairly sparse at this time.

For your web-browsing pleasure, the AppleCommander Java Documentation has been uploaded, and I will try to keep it up-to-date. (If not, the code is documented, and you can generate it yourself.)

Additionally, EclipseUML has been used to generate the UML diagrams which have been drawn by hand. These UML diagrams don't cover all of AppleCommander, but they do give the general structure used by the "storage" package - that is, the domain in which AppleCommander specializes.

Historical

Version	Date	Description
1.3.3	18-Jun-2004	Primarily restructuring, but added a two new file viewers (Apple Pascal .text files and Assembly source code). The summary is available here.
1.3.2	05-Jun-2004	Added nibble image support, CP/M support, as well as SHR 3200-color graphics. The summary is available here.
1.3.1	12-Dec-2003	Incorporated John Matthews' command-line version of AppleCommander ("ac"); added file viewing capabilities. The posting is here.
1.3.0	04-Dec-2003	Very early release of an Applesoft BASIC compiler; John Matthews' bug fixes have been incorporated; Chris Sebrell's fixes have been incorporated.
1.2.3	13-Apr-2003	Work towards Windows executable (now available!); posting is here.
1.2.2	15-Mar-2003	Bug fixes (primarily ProDOS updates); posting is here.
1.2.1	1-Mar-2003	Bug fixes; added ASP and ADB exports; posting is here.
1.2.0	11-Feb-2003	The fourth posting for version 1.2.0 announcing import abilities is here.
1.1.1	30-Nov-2002	The third posting for version 1.1.1 announcing the GPL release of AppleCommander is here.
1.1	12-Nov-2002	The second posting for version 1.1 is located here.
1.0	28-Oct-2002	The first news group posting is here announcing version 1.0.

Contact Me

Feel free to drop some email - I don't expect traffic to be very large. However, because of the ever-present threat of SPAM, I won't create an email link either (sorry, you gotta type it!):

RobGreene at users dot sourceforge dot net

Last updated 6/5/2004