The Opus ][ collection appears on two CDs that can be purchased individually or as a collection. The CDs are in Macintosh HFS format, which also works on properly equipped Apple IIGS computers running System 6.0.1 and the HFS FST. You can access the files from Windows machines if you have software that allows access to Macintosh format disks.
The software CD contains the most recent release of every commercial application published for the Apple ][ and Apple IIGS platforms by the Byte Works, Inc. Both the programs and the documentation are included.
The programs exist in three forms.
1. Disk Images
This folder contains ShrinkWrap disk images, which are compatible with Apple IIGS emulators like Bernie, as well as with ShrinkWrap and DiskCopy. These programs can create 800K disk images that you can carry to an Apple IIGS or Apple II that have an 800K floppy disk drive.
There is one important caveot about creating floppy disk images. Apple changed the type of drive used in Macintosh computers, and eventually dropped the floppy drive altogether. The external add-on drives I've tested for USB equipped Macintosh computers will not create 800K floppy images at all. The recent Macintosh drives will not format a disk properly for an 800K Apple IIGS drive. If the disk images you create don't work on an Apple IIGS, you'll need to find an older Macintosh, put a CD drive on the Apple IIGS, or format the floppy disk on the Apple IIGS, then copy the files on a file-by-file basis from the disk image to the floppy disk using the Macintosh Finder, which can mount both the disk images and the Apple IIGS floppy. Strange as it seems, the recent Macintosh computers that still have floppy disk drives are perfectly capable of copying files to an Apple IIGS disk, they just can't create a full disk image.
2. ByteWorks
This folder has all of the software. It is preinstalled, ready to run on an Apple IIGS that has a CD-ROM drive. You'll get better performance, though, if you copy the contents of the folder to the root directory of a ProDOS format hard drive. You can also access all of the files from a Macintosh or properly equipped Windows machine.
3. For Emulators
This folder has a 32M disk image designed for use with Macintosh Apple IIGS emulators like Bernie. It may work with other emulators as well, but I haven't tried it. The files are identical to those in the ByteWorks folder, but dragging this 32M image to your emulator folder is considerably easier than dealing with the ByteWorks folder.
The Documentation folder contains all of the documentation for the commercial products. It's available in four different formats.
1. Word
All of our recent documentation was created in Microsoft Word. All of the documentation has been moved to Microsoft Word 98 for the Macintosh, checked, and when necessary, reformatted. You will find some differences between the documentation in this folder and our printed documentation, especially for older programs. That's because changes in fonts, Microsoft Word itself, and printers occasionally forced me to reformat the documentation. For the really old stuff, Microsoft Word would not read the original files, so I had to recover the ASCII and completely redo the formatting. For the truly ancient stuff, including most of the 8 bit software, I didn't have any files at all, or the ones I had could not be read on any equipment I still own. Small-C is a good example. For these programs, we used OCR software to convert the documents to ASCII, then redid the formatting. Watch for typographical errors in those older documents, especially in source code.
2. PDF
All of the documents were converted to PDF format using Acrobat Distiller. Use this format if you want to print a physical copy of the documentation. Most copy shops can print PDF files on 3 hole notebook paper.
3. RTF
All of the documentation was saved from Microsoft Word in RTF format. This is a text interchange format that most text editors can load. It preserves most of the formatting. Use this format if you are trying to read the documentation online, you don't have Microsoft Word, and you do have an editor that recognizes RTF.
4. ASCII
If all else fails, there are the raw ASCII files. You loose all formatting and all figures, but at least the words are still there. ASCII documentation can be read with practically anything, even the ORCA programming language editors.
The source CD has the source code for all of the programs on the software CD that were developed at the Byte Works, Inc. It also has the unpublished programs, including some that were never completed. The uncompleted programs do not appear on the software CD.
Some of the software, like QCCalc, appears in individual folders. All of the ORCA related software is collected in the ORCA folder. The ORCA languages shared many common components, like the shell, linker and editor, so it didn't make sense to break these up by product. Bonus contains the source code for all of the unpublished programs, while Beta has the source code for commercial programs like the C compiler that were updated after the last commercial release. These beta versions are the ones I actually use, although they have not been run through the complete test cycle I used for commercial releases.
The test suites for ORCA/C and ORCA/M are included with the languages. The tests for ORCA/Pascal were based on a commercially available ISO Pascal test suite, so I could not put them on the CD.
