[goldie]

Originally posted by Stoepsel
Hi,

I can only speak for WinMX because I don't know much about how other clients treat incomplete downloads...

WinMX keeps information about incomplete files in a simple text files called "imcomplete downloads.txt" (duh!). It says that you shouldn't tamper with that file but I think it should be rather easy to fake an incomplete file that you want to continue.

It seems to me (but I could be wrong) that WinMX doesn't store anything in its incompletely downloaded files apart from the raw data. And since you can only download from one person at the moment (version <= 2.6, multi-sourced downloads in the long awaited version 3.0 coming sometime in 2005 afaik), the incomplete files are always exactly as large as the data already transferred. In Morpheus you often get partial files almost the size of the complete file when you are downloading from more than one user. That's because Morpheus retrieves different parts of the files and allocates its partial files so that the parts that have not been retrieved are left empty.

Okay - I've gotten the multi source problem down and understand the difficulties involved with resuming one. But, what if the file you download is not part of the multi-source variety and the end-data can be stripped off the file? One file + one user - only (for now anyway).

Also, going back to the multisource, partial file problem.......

If you take that multisource partial dat file to another multisource compatible application with the end-data removed, would it be possible to resume the file in that other application?

Guess it would also depend how the other application stores the file's data also, right?

[SIZE=small]<sigh> this is getting to be a rather slippery surface indeed.[/size]

Additionally, Morpheus adds some extra info at the end of partial files. That's something that WinMX couldn't handle.

So to finally give an answer to the original question:

I personally don't think that WinMX would be able to work with Morpheus files mainly because of the 'full-size' partial files. If it weren't for that, it would be rather simple to 'import' partial Morpheus files into WinMX after stripping off the excess data and using the "Resume from" option.

Remember, I (you, whoever) have the dats of some very hard-to-get files, most of the files can only be found on 1 or 2 people's hard drives (one of them is typically not sharing or is behind a firewall). Wouldn't it be cool if you can make that partial file portable from one application to another compatible application.

It'd be a good way to spread that rare file around a network, wouldn't it?

Of course all this could be complete bollocks in which case I apologize for the waste of bandwidth
Stoepsel [/b]

Thanks for "your thoughts out loud"!