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NOTE: This Technical Q&A has been retired. Please see the Technical Q&As page for current documentation.

Determining 3DMF Endian-ness

Q: How does QuickDraw 3D determine if a 3DMF file was stored in little endian or big endian format?

A: If the 3DMF text format file is read, the "endian-ness" doesn't matter, because numbers are stored as ASCII strings which will be translated correctly for the host system. When QuickDraw 3D reads a 3DMF file that was stored in binary format, it looks at the first four bytes. If they are in the order "3" "D" "M" "F", the file was stored with big endian values. If the first four bytes are "F" "M" "D" "3", the numeric values in the file are interpreted as stored in little endian format.

[Apr 08 1996]


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