David wrote: ↑June 30th, 2018, 5:32 pmSo, is the problem that you don't know how to find where the levels are inside the disk image?
No, that shouldn't be a problem.
I'll explain the issue by analogy.
For
Harem Adventures, I picked the (non-NokiaUI) 176x208 version, and MicroEmulator. It's unlikely that anyone else will make a level editor for
Harem Adventures. This means my choice made that particular version of
Harem Adventures the moddable version.
Before I get started with a Macintosh level editor, I want to make sure I pick the 'best' file/disk image and emulator. There are MacBinary (.bin), BinHex (.hqx) and StuffIt (.sit) files, and also unencoded/expanded Hierarchical File System (.hfs) disk images. I want to avoid the proprietary StuffIt, but this still leaves various options. I can't simply pick what works best in an emulator, for instance a disk image, because my level editor should be able to modify the game. The other way around, I can't simply pick what I can edit easiest, because an emulator still needs to run it. On top of that I'd like to use the same emulator on all platforms (at least Windows and GNU/Linux), preferably have the game as a single file to simplify sharing possible future mods, and use the color version of the game. Plus, I don't mind picking a cracked version of the game, that includes cheats or whatever, but at the same time I want the original game, so it shouldn't be a version where crackers removed tiles or levels to crack copy-protection.
I created a multi-page
PDF [Edit: Newer PDF here.] that explains how to run this port (on Linux) because it's so complicated. A boot disk, a ROM file, HFS files, a customly compiled BasiliskII. It's like climbing a mountain. Not to mention the possible copyright problems here; could an editor ever work out-of-the-box without including a ROM file.
I theory I could do all this work by myself. That is, figure out what "LC" in "Persia(LC)" means, figure out how to run .bin files, look into the exact differences between all these files, etc. But on my TODO list is already the creation of another level editor. So, now I'm looking around and asking on this forum what's the best choice for this. How would I even run/unpack/whatever .hqx files, for example. Which version of the game should I use, and which emulator?
The reason that I 'suddenly' decided to create a level editor of the Apple II version is that I'd noticed that adamgreen's GitHub fork contains a suitable, single, 3.5" disk image. With the Macintosh, I don't know what to use.
