i have a friend who lives quite a way off from me. i borrowed a game of his a few months back but i can't get it back to him until later this year but he wants it now to play. so what i said i'd do was to copy the files off the cd and compress them using stuffit into a zip archive then send them to him via yousentit.com for the time being until i can get his cd back to him. i'd have used my pc but it's currently out of action, so i was forced to do it on my mac. however when i copied the files onto the hdd ready to be compressed, i noticed the file names are in their dos format not the windows long filename format. naturally i wouldn't have expected anything else, but i'm wondering, will the long file names still be readable when my friend unzipps the contents of the archive? like, if he opens the archive up will he see the dos names as well or will the files still retain their long filenames? even if they do have dos names will the installer still work right? thanks.

OS 9 can't support filenames longer than 31 chars. If you have OS 10.2 or later, you can use windows(joliet format).

Well that doesn't answer my question, but thanks anyway.

No, i don't believe so..at least, i've never been able to preserve windows LFNs on a Mac created archive.. in OS9..(not sure about OSX) If you made a disk image of the CD files (with something that a PC can mount, like a toast / iso image) and compressed *that* as a zip.. However, i cant remember if even Toast 5.2x supports Joliet format (the long file name format in windows).. If there's not too many files, you could include a text file listing the long file name versions of the Dos 8.3 names..he could then re-name back the relevant files in order to do the install (the installers for most windows games often really do want the full long names for installation)...