Opening a Mac .bin image file on a PC

It's got me stumped

[MatthewHSE]

A very helpful visitor to my website is working with me to try to figure out some rendering problems our site has on Macs. They took a screenshot of what they see and e-mailed it to me. However, the file is "screenshot.bin" instead of a more standard file type for images. I can't get any of my image editors to open the file.

I'm really shooting in the dark here. I'm not sure what type of file this is or how to go about opening it. Actually I don't even know what questions I need to ask. So could some kind-hearted Mac user help me understand what I'm dealing with here? ;)

Thanks in advance,

Matthew

[moltar]

From what I remember of my breif mac experience, stuffit expander was able to handle those files. I think it's an archive format for mac (like ZIP on win32)

[rocknbil]

^ ^ That would be correct, but the problem may not stop there. You may even be able to unpack it with winzip. Getting it "unstuffed" is only half the problem, the file format itself may be Mac-specific, especially if it's a snapshot.

Take it from one with a long history of cross-platforming and failed attempts: tell your MacCustomer to MacSave it as a MacJpg. file and re-MacSend it. :-)

. . . some kind-hearted Mac user help me . . .

I soooo have to leave this one alone. :-)

[jezra]

Macintosh harddrives are formatted with HFS+. In HFS+, files have 2 types of information, the data fork, which is the actual data of the file, and the resource fork, which is meta data about the file. The resource fork information can NOT travel over TCP/IP networks. To work around this problem, the data fork and the resource fork can be bundled into a macbinary file(.bin) and the macbinary can be transferred over TCP/IP. Upon reaching another macintosh computer, the .bin file is converted to its original data and resource. If the file is opened on a non-HFS+ computer, the resource fork will be lost.

If the screenshot is from OS 9 or earlier, the screenshot should be a PICT file, but the file won't have an extension. If the screenshot is from OS X, the screenshot should be a PDF.

For what it is worth, there is no compression in macbinary.