CiderPress Features

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Access to ShrinkIt Archives

Full access to ShrinkIt archives (.shk, .sdk, .bxy, .sea, .bse) is provided, including:

It's like having "ShrinkIt for Windows".  Viewing and extracting files from Binary II files (.bny, .bqy), AppleLink Compression Utility archives (.acu), and AppleSingle files is also supported.  ShrinkIt archive access is provided by NufxLib, the library used by the NuLib2 archive utility since early 2000.  Archives created with NufxLib are nearly identical to those created with GS/ShrinkIt.

Disk Image Support

CiderPress has the ability to identify nearly all Apple II disk image formats automatically.  Supported file formats include:

The image file format, filesystem, and sector ordering are determined automatically for most disks.  The settings can be overridden if necessary.  Images larger than floppies, such as ProDOS and HFS hard drive partition images, are fully supported.

The recognized filesystem formats are:

DOS, ProDOS, HFS, and UCSD Pascal filesystems are fully supported.  You can view, add, extract, rename, and delete files, as well as create bootable blank disk images.  Change disk volume names and DOS volume numbers.  Create subdirectories and change file types on ProDOS disks.  Files on CP/M and RDOS disks can be extracted and viewed.  CiderPress also recognizes the following "meta-formats":

Direct Access to Physical Devices

With CiderPress you can directly access physical devices on your PC.  For example:

With the included volume copier, you can also copy partitions or multi-partition volumes to and from physical media.  This allows you to extract partitions from CFFA cards, CD-ROMs, and hard drives, and use them with an emulator.  Back up your hard drive to a block image file in seconds, and restore the whole drive, a single partition, or individual files quickly and easily.

All of the above requires appropriate hardware, and some versions of Windows work better with certain hardware than others.  See the Hardware Compatibility page for details about what you need and what you can expect.

Built-in File Viewer/Converter

The file viewer can convert several formats for easier viewing on modern systems:

In addition, any fork of any file can be viewed in its "raw" state or as a hex dump.

Text and graphics can be cut & pasted from the file viewer to other applications, or sent directly to your printer.  The file converters can be applied when extracting files as well, allowing you to convert disks full of source code or images easily.  It takes the same amount of effort to convert one AppleWorks document or one hundred.

Unsupported formats with recognizable extensions, such as ".GIF" and ".JPG", are displayed in an external viewer when double-clicked.

Disk Image Creation and Conversion

The disk image creation tool allows you to create blank, bootable disk image for DOS 3.2/3.3, ProDOS, HFS, and Pascal disks.  ProDOS volumes can have arbitrary sizes up to 32MB, and HFS can go up to 2GB.  Resize volumes by copying & pasting between them, or use the one-step disk-to-file-archive and file-to-disk-archive features.

The disk image converter easily converts disk images to any other suitable format.  Use it to add or remove 2MG headers, or convert .PO to .NIB and back again.  Convert your 800K ShrinkIt disk images to and from DiskCopy 4.2.  You can optionally add gzip compression for reduced storage size.

If you have a large collection of images that you want to convert to a different format, use the bulk image converter to migrate them all in a few easy steps.

Additional Tools

CiderPress includes some other handy tools:

Included as a separate application, Multi-Disk Catalog (MDC) allows you to generate file listings from hundreds of disk images with only a few mouse clicks.  Just select the images and the automatic format recognition does the rest.