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I have just bought a USB memory stick and am trying to figure out the simplest way to save a file from VRPC on to it. At the moment the only way I can see is to quit VRPC, open the HardDisc4 folder in a Mac window and drag the file in to the memory stick window. Is there a better way?

Thanks,

Tricia

-Mount your USB stick
- Start VA for mac
- Go to Preferences - HostFS and create a new mount point. (/Volumes/xxx ) xxx=name of your USB stick under MacOSX
- Give the new mount a name (eg USB-stick)
-Apply changes


If you want to use the USB stick under VA mount it on your mac BEFORE you start VA - after entering the RISCOS desktop you will see a new HD , this is your USB stick

IF you unplugged the stick before starting VA nothing will go wrong but the 'extra' HD is missing under VA for mac.
Easy -- RISCOS will see the USB stick only if you have mount it before starting VA, if you do not mount the stick nothing strange will happen
Warning: if you rename the USb stick under MacOSX : change the mount point again in VA-- preferences--HostFS

Thanks Kees, that's exactly what I needed.

Tricia

OK

I'm glad to see it works
Your biggest problem was to read my English

Actually I wrote too soon - the 'extra' HD doesn't show up on VA. I've gone over it several times trying to figure out where I went wrong...

Ok this is a quick and dirty one

Start VA for Mac
Press F12 and type :
*mount total-mac /Volumes/
press 2x ENTER

Now you have a new HD called total-mac
There you will find all mounted devices from your mac

You can detect a new inserted USB stick as follows:

-Plugin the USB stick (you don't have to switch to macOSX )
-Click on the total-mac disc icon
-In the window from the root of this disc press F5 (RO6 users) or click 'MENU" and choose refresh.

The mount point /Volumes/ shows all your devices so take care about what you are doing. (it is easy to f*ck (sorry) up your whole internal HD if you don't know what you are doing)
It will mount everything connected on your Mac , including CD/DVD images / network drives /External USB or firewire drives or downloaded and mounted .dmg files.

Thanks for that, Kees

Tricia

Right. Instead of doing what I was supposed to be doing this afternoon I have knocked up an application called !MacPop. This is designed to make it much easier to handle external memory devices from inside VirtualRPC.

You can download a copy from the Mac Downloads page of the main VirtualAcorn website:

http://www.virtualacorn.co.uk/dloadpage/varpcmac.htm

This should do what you want without the worry of messing up the main Macintosh HardDisc. Can everyone please give this a try and let me have some feedback (either positive or negative). This is beta quality so at the moment I can't guarantee that it will work under all circumstances, but I've only spent 3 hours on it

It looks as though I'm the first to give feedback.

That was three hours well spent! It loaded my Kingston memory stick quickly and I're read from it and written to it.

I'll try it with an SD card and a Zip drive next and let you know how they work.

Any chance it will work with an external floppy disk drive?

Yes, it should work with anything that's "storage". I've taken Kees' rather cunning idea (of mounting all /volumes/) and worked from there. I'm interested to find out what it does work with. Certainly memory cards should be fine, and a floppy *should* work - if you could try that would be great. One other silly idea is to find out what happens with a blank CD-R (I haven't had time to try it yet).

Amusingly I had spent ages trying to get the Windows VRPC !DrivePop app ported to the Mac VRPC, with limited success and had given up. So you can all thank Kees for coming up with a solution that's solved the major problem.

I've got a number of ideas to improve MacPop. Let's face it at the moment the "interface" (if you can call it that) is very poor and I would like to make it much more flexible.

It works with Zip drive and SD card (only one out of two, but I suspect that's a card problem).

I forgot to ask - I put it in Filing as suggested. Is there any reason not to put it in Apps, which is where I would usually put something like this?

Thanks for that. With regard to the card that doesn't work (and I'm interested in things that don't work)...

Can the Mac itself read the card OK?
If so - what does MacPop say (if anything) about the card?
Again, if it reads on the Mac, what's the name of the card?

MacPop will work from anywhere, I suggest putting it in 'Filing' as that's where other 'filing' related bits are stored - it's also where the PC equivalent (!DrivePop) lives on the PC versions of VRPC.

I was also coming up with something similair app (but I don't have the time now to make it idiot proof )
But I can confirm that every device mounted with the /Volumes/ command will work with VA for Mac
as long as your mounted volumes have read/write access you can read/write from within VA

I have tried CD/DVD's - network drives / USB firewire drives /NAS drives samba or AFP shares / iPod etc.
you can mount a cardreader connected to an Apple Airport extreme router or different mac's on your network
We have a mobile me familypack , you can if you want connect to another mac everywhere in the world with the 'back to my mac' function

One nice feature is that you can make an sparcebundle dmg file with 128bit AES password protection.
All my private RISCOS documents are copied to that sparceimage. - no one on the mac can open that .dmg file without the correct password
If you have an mobile me account you can even mount your iDisk and read/write to your public folder on that disk ( extra 20GB storage on the Apple servers )

as you can see endless possibilities. (yes a lot more as the humble windows user )

<edit>
Do NOT use a space in the name of your device , it simply won't work
normally under UNIX you type a space in a filename as a '\' (eg. a drive called 'Time Machine' is under UNIX 'Time\ Machine' ), but even that won't do the trick if you want to mount such a name under VA.
</edit>

I think Kees has explained why that card doesn't work. It has the imaginative name of "No name"!

I've ordered an external floppy disk drive from eBay, so I'll let you know if it works when it arrives.

Confirmed it - I changed the name of the card to scanner and Macpop can now read it.