ssokolow wrote on 2024-11-09, 19:07:

Naturally... if I'm actively going out to pay market price for something. According to the sources I checked, it'll boot anything from 7.5.1 to 9.1, excluding 7.5.2, so rescuing one with a disintegrating case and sticking my 7.5.3 retail CD into it would be better than not having one.

And I'm not sure what 7.5.3 on a low-end PPC machine really gets you...

ssokolow wrote on 2024-11-09, 19:07:

To be honest, I'm expecting that, if I wanted to shell out for the ideal loadout, it'd take at least three machines, same as what I do with my PC-side stuff: One 24-bit-capable 68k machine that can triple/quadruple-boot System 6, 7.0 and/or 7.1, and 7.5, one PPC machine capable of 7.5.3 or maybe 7.6.1 that's speedier than the 68k machine and supports a higher display resolution, and one blazing fast 9.2.2 machine that can do the 1280x1024 native resolution on the non-widescreen options in my KVM array.

I think you can get away with two: one IIci or IIsi and then the 9.2.2 machine you already have. IIci would give you options for digging up NuBus video cards and going at higher resolutions too. Both the IIsi and IIci have external floppy ports for floppyemus, too. And you could look for IIci PPC accelerator cards, although I have no idea whether any of those are still available outside the realm of vintage Mac YouTubers.

If you're going to add one more machine, then... that's a tricky one. Beige G3 is everybody's favourite bridge Mac... but won't boot 7.x. The early PPC machines will run 7.1.2 and 7.5, but are quirkier, e.g. need for an AAUI transceiver if they have Ethernet, the 6100/7100/8100 have that weird onboard video with the HDI connector, the 6200 is just... meh.

ssokolow wrote on 2024-11-09, 19:07:

That's why I jumped on an opportunity to grab some NOS Mac-to-VGA adapters cheap. Buy an ADB-USB Wombat or two and they can go on the same USB-VGA KVM switches as my G4 Quicksilver (the darn thing has a VGA/ADP video card I haven't sought a replacement for yet), AST Adventure! 210, and Lenovo 3000 J Series.

Maybe I should look for Mac to VGA adapters, but... I can't imagine going older with my vintage Macs than my MDDs at this point, unless somehow a Quadra 840av in good condition falls out of the sky. (Honestly, an 840av is... a silly retro Mac... in many ways, but it has some emotional significance)

VivienM wrote on 2024-11-09, 19:32:

And I'm not sure what 7.5.3 on a low-end PPC machine really gets you...

As long as it's cheap enough or free? Having a 7.5.3 machine at all.

Most of my retro-hobby life exists after that childhood Mac SE went back to my father's office and before I got my G4 Quicksilver, so my collection is extremely skewed toward the PC side. In fact, I think it was only two years ago that I got the G4 Quicksilver.

VivienM wrote on 2024-11-09, 19:32:

I think you can get away with two: one IIci or IIsi and then the 9.2.2 machine you already have. IIci would give you options for digging up NuBus video cards and going at higher resolutions too. Both the IIsi and IIci have external floppy ports for floppyemus, too. And you could look for IIci PPC accelerator cards, although I have no idea whether any of those are still available outside the realm of vintage Mac YouTubers.

True. The question is, once I've got the tools and practice to maintain one, whether supply-and-demand economics dislike me too much.

VivienM wrote on 2024-11-09, 19:32:

If you're going to add one more machine, then... that's a tricky one. Beige G3 is everybody's favourite bridge Mac... but won't boot 7.x.

I'm the lazy kind of hobbyist. If the machine I'm sitting at right now can't be its own LAN-based bridge machine, I've got more work to do.

Current "DOS partition is on pieces on the garage floor" state of things aside, I've got a 100MBit NIC with DOS drivers in my DOS/Win311/Win98SE machine's only PCI slot, it boots off an expansion-slot IDE-to-SD card adapter so I can easily image the drive, its visible floppy drive is B: because A: is a Gotek floppy emulator hidden in the normally covered second 5.25" bay, and the Windows 98SE side is running the only version of NERO Burning ROM I'm aware of that'll burn rewritable DVDs off Windows 9x using the DVD drive I installed after using beige spray paint to erase the dye-sublimated DVD logos on the faceplate. Game saves are backed up to my main PC using an old version of WinSCP and I've got a TODO list item to identify the best whole-OS network backup solution for Win9x.

My G4 Quicksilver got a replacement DVD Rewriter, it's booting off an IDE-to-SD card adapter so I can easily swap OS versions without worrying about cross-contaminating StuffIt Engine versions when generating test files, it's got onboard gigabit Ethernet, and I recently picked up a Macally Firewire/USB2/eSATA external hard drive enclosure to work around the lack of USB 2 on the mac and the lack of Firewire on my PC if the network isn't sufficient. Backups are done to my main PC using Retrospect 5.1's support for FTP.

etc. etc. etc.

My main PC runs FTP, Samba, and Netatalk services for the benefit of my retro-hobby machines.

VivienM wrote on 2024-11-09, 19:32:

The early PPC machines will run 7.1.2 and 7.5, but are quirkier, e.g. need for an AAUI transceiver if they have Ethernet, the 6100/7100/8100 have that weird onboard video with the HDI connector, the 6200 is just... meh.

*nod* ~$100 HDI45-to-VGA adapters. Bleh. At least AAUI to 10Base-T transcievers are much cheaper than that.

ssokolow wrote on 2024-11-09, 19:07:

(Honestly, an 840av is... a silly retro Mac... in many ways, but it has some emotional significance)

If a recapped SE/30 were to magically become available at a price I could afford, I'd jump on it in a heart beat. Given the original Mac SE I used as a kid, the SE/30 is the epitome of how I like to do "rose-colored glasses" builds of nostalgic things. (eg. MS-DOS 6.22, with ANSIPLUS+4DOS giving me a bash/zsh-like DOS prompt experience at less conventional memory consumed than the stock COMMAND.COM because of how good they are at loading themselves high and using EMS or XMS.)

I might have found someone who would be interested in playing with this old Mac, so I would like to try getting it fixed up for them and probably upgraded a little bit. I'm just going to dump my Mac-noob questions here:

*A lot of great older games are meant for 68K Macs. Can this run those as well?

*What would be the best OS version to run the oldest and newest games that this machine can handle? It has 7.6.1, which from my brief research seems like the best balance without getting "too new" for the system and going to 8.x.

*What would be the largest IDE hard drive (or SD card in an IDE adapter) I can use in this machine with that OS version?

*Are there any particular types of RAM I need to look for? I would like to get it to 16MB or 32MB, rather than just 8.

*The CD-ROM has been a little flaky. If it is actually dead, are there any limitations to what IDE CD-ROM drives can be used?

*Are there any tweaks or other things I can do to improve performance or compatibility for games?

*Finally, I have yet to try to work with any of these CD images, but I found several good games listed for download here, so I am downloading some for it. They mention Toast and SIT files... both of which are foreign to me. Can I use either of these formats on my modern PC to burn CDs that I can pop into this Mac and install games? The person I have in mind loves messing with 80s\90s physical media, so I think dealing with CDs and floppies wouldn't be that big of a deal and it'd obviously save on disk space if the system\OS are limited to smaller drives.

Thanks for all the info guys.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-24, 03:03:

I might have found someone who would be interested in playing with this old Mac, so I would like to try getting it fixed up for them and probably upgraded a little bit. I'm just going to dump my Mac-noob questions here:

*A lot of great older games are meant for 68K Macs. Can this run those as well?

Yes. Apple built 68K emulation into PowerPC Mac OS and, aside from things which specifically assume hardware quirks or OS internals from the "Black & White macintosh with a 9-inch screen running at 512x342, running System 6" era of macintoshes (i.e. the mac equivalent of IBM PC games which assume an original Intel 8088 CPU's clock speed), it should just work if you double-click them.

As with Windows 3.1 or early Windows 95 games, you may need to manually change the display resolution and/or color depth to get them to start. For retrofitting automatic resolution changing into such situations, the macintosh equivalent to QRes is SwitchRes 2.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-24, 03:03:

*Finally, I have yet to try to work with any of these CD images, but I found several good games listed for download here, so I am downloading some for it. They mention Toast and SIT files... both of which are foreign to me. Can I use either of these formats on my modern PC to burn CDs that I can pop into this Mac and install games? The person I have in mind loves messing with 80s\90s physical media, so I think dealing with CDs and floppies wouldn't be that big of a deal and it'd obviously save on disk space if the system\OS are limited to smaller drives.

.toast files are .iso files with a different extension to acknowledge that raw data track dumps of Mac CDs will only have ISO9600 filesystem interwoven with their HFS filesystem if they also contain the PC version of the thing. (They're named after Roxio Toast... the "everyone uses this" burning tool akin to Adaptec Easy CD Creator or NERO Burning ROM.)

You can burn them to disc using any CD burning program which doesn't do a header check to prevent you from feeding something like a .png or .mp3 to the Burn Disc Image dialog.

However, this guide from the same site recommends just using disc image mounting software on the mac if you've got the hard drive space and provides some links.

(BUT be careful to go into the Get Info and check "Locked" (mark as read-only) before mounting the disc image. Unlike ISO9660, which is inherently read-only, HFS is literally the same filesystem as is used on hard drives, and you don't want the OS to alter the disk image by doing things like updating last accessed times... plus, "This disc isn't read-only!" is how mac copy protection works when it does get done.)

As for .sit, it's the classic macintosh equivalent to .zip and you have to be careful to only ever un-SIT files on a vintage macintosh and on a macintosh-format drive because classic mac executables and other classic mac file formats have structural elements (resource forks, HFS type codes) which will be discarded (thus corrupting the file) if you unpack them outside a classic mac. (Think of it as deleting the whatever_files folder that comes with an "HTML (Complete)" Ctrl+S from your browser, except glued to the back side of the .html file instead of as a separate folder.)

Make sure you move/copy files onto the hard drive, not the desktop, before un-SITing them. The desktop on classic mac OS isn't actually one folder, but rather one folder per hard drive which get merged by the OS, so clicking and dragging from a PC-format drive to the desktop doesn't actually copy the files but, instead, just moves them to that particular drive's hidden desktop folder.

(It's a holdover from the very beginning when macs had no hard drive but might have a second floppy drive. It provided a convenient compromise to have both your application disk and your documents disk have files on the desktop and just have the desktop update as you swapped floppies.)

ssokolow wrote on 2024-12-24, 06:09:

Yes. Apple built 68K emulation into PowerPC Mac OS and, aside from things which specifically assume hardware quirks or OS intern […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-24, 03:03:

I might have found someone who would be interested in playing with this old Mac, so I would like to try getting it fixed up for them and probably upgraded a little bit. I'm just going to dump my Mac-noob questions here:

*A lot of great older games are meant for 68K Macs. Can this run those as well?

Yes. Apple built 68K emulation into PowerPC Mac OS and, aside from things which specifically assume hardware quirks or OS internals from the "Black & White macintosh with a 9-inch screen running at 512x342, running System 6" era of macintoshes (i.e. the mac equivalent of IBM PC games which assume an original Intel 8088 CPU's clock speed), it should just work if you double-click them.

As with Windows 3.1 or early Windows 95 games, you may need to manually change the display resolution and/or color depth to get them to start. For retrofitting automatic resolution changing into such situations, the macintosh equivalent to QRes is SwitchRes 2.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-24, 03:03:

*Finally, I have yet to try to work with any of these CD images, but I found several good games listed for download here, so I am downloading some for it. They mention Toast and SIT files... both of which are foreign to me. Can I use either of these formats on my modern PC to burn CDs that I can pop into this Mac and install games? The person I have in mind loves messing with 80s\90s physical media, so I think dealing with CDs and floppies wouldn't be that big of a deal and it'd obviously save on disk space if the system\OS are limited to smaller drives.

.toast files are .iso files with a different extension to acknowledge that raw data track dumps of Mac CDs will only have ISO9600 filesystem interwoven with their HFS filesystem if they also contain the PC version of the thing. (They're named after Roxio Toast... the "everyone uses this" burning tool akin to Adaptec Easy CD Creator or NERO Burning ROM.)

You can burn them to disc using any CD burning program which doesn't do a header check to prevent you from feeding something like a .png or .mp3 to the Burn Disc Image dialog.

However, this guide from the same site recommends just using disc image mounting software on the mac if you've got the hard drive space and provides some links.

(BUT be careful to go into the Get Info and check "Locked" (mark as read-only) before mounting the disc image. Unlike ISO9660, which is inherently read-only, HFS is literally the same filesystem as is used on hard drives, and you don't want the OS to alter the disk image by doing things like updating last accessed times... plus, "This disc isn't read-only!" is how mac copy protection works when it does get done.)

As for .sit, it's the classic macintosh equivalent to .zip and you have to be careful to only ever un-SIT files on a vintage macintosh and on a macintosh-format drive because classic mac executables and other classic mac file formats have structural elements (resource forks, HFS type codes) which will be discarded (thus corrupting the file) if you unpack them outside a classic mac. (Think of it as deleting the whatever_files folder that comes with an "HTML (Complete)" Ctrl+S from your browser, except glued to the back side of the .html file instead of as a separate folder.)

Make sure you move/copy files onto the hard drive, not the desktop, before un-SITing them. The desktop on classic mac OS isn't actually one folder, but rather one folder per hard drive which get merged by the OS, so clicking and dragging from a PC-format drive to the desktop doesn't actually copy the files but, instead, just moves them to that particular drive's hidden desktop folder.

(It's a holdover from the very beginning when macs had no hard drive but might have a second floppy drive. It provided a convenient compromise to have both your application disk and your documents disk have files on the desktop and just have the desktop update as you swapped floppies.)

Wow, thank you so much for taking the time to post all that! That helps a ton!

Once I get the hardware stuff figured out (bigger hard drive, reliable CDROM, moar ram), I think I'll have everything I need to get some games onto this machine.

Are there normally any performance or compatibility issues involved in using mounted disc images on such a slow processor? Some images of Lucas Arts games (Sam and Max, The Fate of Atlantis, etc.) are a couple hundred MB, and The Dig is over 500MB.

Also... I am obviously a Mac noob, but I just learned that these require ADB peripherals, so I am stuck with the single button mouse (at a quick glance I thought it was a PS/2 port).

It would have been a stupid idea to give people a single button mouse in the 1970s, but possibly excusable... I mean, 3 button mice had "only" been around since the late 1960s... To continue to saddle people with a single button mouse in the 80s, 90s and even 2000s is so ridiculous that it has forever soured my opinion of Apple. Any company ethos that would justify this is incompatible with how my mind works.

How many fingers do we have? Usually five. How many mouse buttons can we use? Way more than that, as it turns out. Surely two would be a reasonable starting point for anyone trying to keep things simple and intuitive.

Actually, Apple had to go and make "no button" mice more than once, because that is even more absurd, unintuitive and uncomfortable to use.

.... whew... sorry about that. It's just annoying to find out that this nearly complete 30 year old computer that I could probably barely get $150 for on a good day (and then lose half of that to fees and such) will require a fairly uncommon peripheral just to be able to play old point and click games with two mouse buttons. Meanwhile, I have a few dozen awesome vintage mice from the 90s that would look great and work perfectly for games like these.

EDIT: Just thought of another question. It seems that the Mac world is kind of averse to knowing specifications of these computers on a hardware level, so I can't seem to find this information. What does a Mac like this use for music synthesis in games? I assume it is some kind of FM synth? Is it an OPL3 or equivalent? The CPU seems too slow to always be running a GM soft synth, and there is no mention of general midi anywhere as far as I can tell.

For that matter, I can't find anything about what these use for sound at all. What are the bit depth and sample rate limitations of the sound chip, and what is it even called? It's like they didn't want people to compare these capabilities to a PC sound card. Granted, I understand that there were some legal issues between Apple Computer and Apple Corp regarding music, so that must have had some impact on the advertising... but still, it's like no one talks about the sound capabilities of these machines 30 years later either.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-24, 08:11:

Are there normally any performance or compatibility issues involved in using mounted disc images on such a slow processor? Some images of Lucas Arts games (Sam and Max, The Fate of Atlantis, etc.) are a couple hundred MB, and The Dig is over 500MB.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no macintosh disk-image mounting software for BIN/CUE images with CD Audio tracks (i.e. the kind where you'd need to perform Digital Audio Extraction rather than just sending a "Play" command to the microcontroller in the disc drive and let it do the work) but, in the grand scheme of things, they're much less common for macs than PCs for whatever reason.

(Probably something to do with macs beating PCs to having onboard PCM sound capability by a decade, CD audio being spec'd to allow up to a 2-second seek latency, Apple providing a precursor to DirectMusic as part of the closest thing they had to DirectX prior to GameSprockets (QuickTime) not long after CD-ROMs started to burst onto the scene, it being more difficult to get a comfortable compose-compile-test workflow out of CD audio than out of QuickTime Music on a bedroom coder's budget in the 90s, etc.)

Data-track-only disc images impose no performance penalty because you're just pointing the usual filesystem driver at a different range of bytes and mounting from .iso/.toast is generally faster because hard drives have better throughput and seek time, even without an SSD, than optical drives do.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-24, 08:11:

Also... I am obviously a Mac noob, but I just learned that these require ADB peripherals, so I am stuck with the single button mouse (at a quick glance I thought it was a PS/2 port).

From what I remember, Finder didn't even have the Ctrl+Click context menu that could be mapped to a right click by a driver or utility until Mac OS 8. Prior to that, multi-button mice tended to be the domain of user-definable mappings in drivers like Logitech MouseWare and applications that came up with their own ideas for what to use additional buttons for.

Heck, as a kid, the Mac SE I used had a two-button trackball at one point and I never found anything where the second button did something different. (I don't think it had the driver for it installed.)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-24, 08:11:

It would have been a stupid idea to give people a single button mouse in the 1970s, but possibly excusable... I mean, 3 button mice had "only" been around since the late 1960s... To continue to saddle people with a single button mouse in the 80s, 90s and even 2000s is so ridiculous that it has forever soured my opinion of Apple. Any company ethos that would justify this is incompatible with how my mind works.

How many fingers do we have? Usually five. How many mouse buttons can we use? Way more than that, as it turns out. Surely two would be a reasonable starting point for anyone trying to keep things simple and intuitive.

In 1984, they were pulling out every trick in the book to make the antithesis of a green-screen terminal as far as friendliness goes. All the silliness that came after was just the results of Apple's visual design team being allowed to veto the engineers. (Yes, that's why iPhone cables don't have proper strain relief on their connectors. I'm assuming it's something Steve Jobs re-instituted when he came back, given that he himself had money wasted on that nonsense.)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-24, 08:11:

EDIT: Just thought of another question. It seems that the Mac world is kind of averse to knowing specifications of these computers on a hardware level, so I can't seem to find this information. What does a Mac like this use for music synthesis in games? I assume it is some kind of FM synth? Is it an OPL3 or equivalent? The CPU seems too slow to always be running a GM soft synth, and there is no mention of general midi anywhere as far as I can tell.

For that matter, I can't find anything about what these use for sound at all. What are the bit depth and sample rate limitations of the sound chip, and what is it even called? It's like they didn't want people to compare these capabilities to a PC sound card. Granted, I understand that there were some legal issues between Apple Computer and Apple Corp regarding music, so that must have had some impact on the advertising... but still, it's like no one talks about the sound capabilities of these machines 30 years later either.

Apple always leaned on a "rely on the abstraction in the OS" strategy more than PCs did. That's why, among other things, it was possible to retrofit multitasking with MultiFinder when earlier system software versions were 100% single-tasking, and why it was possible for fans to colorize MacRISK without access to the source code using ResEdit.

This VCFed post lays out the capabilities of the "compact mac" form factor machines that were so iconic and are still relevant because so many developer wound up staying backwards compatible with them for so long:

Macintosh 128K, 512K, 512KE, Plus, SE, Classic, Classic II (Performa 200), Color Classic (Performa 250), Color Classic II (Performa 275): Monaural four-voice sound with 8-bit digital/analog conversion using 22-kHz sampling rate. Later models have a stereo output jack, although the sound capability is still only mono.

Macintosh SE/30: Apple Sound Chip (ASC) including four-voice, wavetable synthesis and stereo sampling generator. The built-in speaker is only mono, but if you connect external speakers you can get stereo sound.

-- vwestlife

That's not entirely accurate. The design of the Mac allowed one sample output per scanline (DMA retrieved a sound sample during the horizontal retrace), so the actual capability of the early Macs was a single voice. The four voices was done in software, so the system took a speed hit if you actually used more than one voice. Some software didn't use the system toolbox and did their own mixing; this is why you can play up to six simultaneous digital notes in Jam Session and Studio Session (they are doing the mixing themselves).

-- Trixter

Anyway, when they switched from using just the original ASC (Apple Sound Chip) to using the ASC and a pair of Sony chips for 8-bit 22kHz stereo, I didn't think video refresh was involved any more. That's why the SE/30 and all other Macs from then on were able to drive multiple displays at different resolutions and refresh rates. This same basic audio setup was used on the Mac II line and all of the rest of the Macs all the way until the Quadra 840AV and 660AV came out in like 1994.

-- Arcady

(vwestlife cites this bigmessowires post for details on the relationship between video refresh and audio playback.)

...but yeah, developers generally just used QuickTime Music Architecture for synthesis once it came out (think of it as what DirectX's DirectMusic was taking inspiration from), focused on "Is the hardware fast enough?" rather than "Is the hardware capable?", trusted that a Windows XP-esque soft synth fallback would always be present, and left it to the OS know whether there was hardware assist for doing wavetable synth.

Likewise, you'd be surprised how many games designed for colour are playable, if unpleasant, on black-and-white macs with QuickDraw's built-in support for dithering as long as the game doesn't explicitly check for it and refuse to run. (Which, funny enough, is the same reason some games require you to change the resolution or colour depth down. They were designed when higher resolutions or greater colour depths being sufficiently performant in a consumer machine was unthinkable, so the developers manually added a check to reduce tech support calls. The more courteous ones just display an "I've never heard of a 933MHz PowerPC G4, but I've gotta warn you that it'll be slower if you don't switch to [some lower color depth] mode first" dialog every time you start them.)

ssokolow wrote on 2024-12-24, 14:35:

To the best of my knowledge, there is no macintosh disk-image mounting software for BIN/CUE images with CD Audio tracks (i.e. th […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-24, 08:11:

Are there normally any performance or compatibility issues involved in using mounted disc images on such a slow processor? Some images of Lucas Arts games (Sam and Max, The Fate of Atlantis, etc.) are a couple hundred MB, and The Dig is over 500MB.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no macintosh disk-image mounting software for BIN/CUE images with CD Audio tracks (i.e. the kind where you'd need to perform Digital Audio Extraction rather than just sending a "Play" command to the microcontroller in the disc drive and let it do the work) but, in the grand scheme of things, they're much less common for macs than PCs for whatever reason.

(Probably something to do with macs beating PCs to having onboard PCM sound capability by a decade, CD audio being spec'd to allow up to a 2-second seek latency, Apple providing a precursor to DirectMusic as part of the closest thing they had to DirectX prior to GameSprockets (QuickTime) not long after CD-ROMs started to burst onto the scene, it being more difficult to get a comfortable compose-compile-test workflow out of CD audio than out of QuickTime Music on a bedroom coder's budget in the 90s, etc.)

Data-track-only disc images impose no performance penalty because you're just pointing the usual filesystem driver at a different range of bytes and mounting from .iso/.toast is generally faster because hard drives have better throughput and seek time, even without an SSD, than optical drives do.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-24, 08:11:

Also... I am obviously a Mac noob, but I just learned that these require ADB peripherals, so I am stuck with the single button mouse (at a quick glance I thought it was a PS/2 port).

From what I remember, Finder didn't even have the Ctrl+Click context menu that could be mapped to a right click by a driver or utility until Mac OS 8. Prior to that, multi-button mice tended to be the domain of user-definable mappings in drivers like Logitech MouseWare and applications that came up with their own ideas for what to use additional buttons for.

Heck, as a kid, the Mac SE I used had a two-button trackball at one point and I never found anything where the second button did something different. (I don't think it had the driver for it installed.)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-24, 08:11:

It would have been a stupid idea to give people a single button mouse in the 1970s, but possibly excusable... I mean, 3 button mice had "only" been around since the late 1960s... To continue to saddle people with a single button mouse in the 80s, 90s and even 2000s is so ridiculous that it has forever soured my opinion of Apple. Any company ethos that would justify this is incompatible with how my mind works.

How many fingers do we have? Usually five. How many mouse buttons can we use? Way more than that, as it turns out. Surely two would be a reasonable starting point for anyone trying to keep things simple and intuitive.

In 1984, they were pulling out every trick in the book to make the antithesis of a green-screen terminal as far as friendliness goes. All the silliness that came after was just the results of Apple's visual design team being allowed to veto the engineers. (Yes, that's why iPhone cables don't have proper strain relief on their connectors. I'm assuming it's something Steve Jobs re-instituted when he came back, given that he himself had money wasted on that nonsense.)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-24, 08:11:

EDIT: Just thought of another question. It seems that the Mac world is kind of averse to knowing specifications of these computers on a hardware level, so I can't seem to find this information. What does a Mac like this use for music synthesis in games? I assume it is some kind of FM synth? Is it an OPL3 or equivalent? The CPU seems too slow to always be running a GM soft synth, and there is no mention of general midi anywhere as far as I can tell.

For that matter, I can't find anything about what these use for sound at all. What are the bit depth and sample rate limitations of the sound chip, and what is it even called? It's like they didn't want people to compare these capabilities to a PC sound card. Granted, I understand that there were some legal issues between Apple Computer and Apple Corp regarding music, so that must have had some impact on the advertising... but still, it's like no one talks about the sound capabilities of these machines 30 years later either.

Apple always leaned on a "rely on the abstraction in the OS" strategy more than PCs did. That's why, among other things, it was possible to retrofit multitasking with MultiFinder when earlier system software versions were 100% single-tasking, and why it was possible for fans to colorize MacRISK without access to the source code using ResEdit.

This VCFed post lays out the capabilities of the "compact mac" form factor machines that were so iconic and are still relevant because so many developer wound up staying backwards compatible with them for so long:

Macintosh 128K, 512K, 512KE, Plus, SE, Classic, Classic II (Performa 200), Color Classic (Performa 250), Color Classic II (Performa 275): Monaural four-voice sound with 8-bit digital/analog conversion using 22-kHz sampling rate. Later models have a stereo output jack, although the sound capability is still only mono.

Macintosh SE/30: Apple Sound Chip (ASC) including four-voice, wavetable synthesis and stereo sampling generator. The built-in speaker is only mono, but if you connect external speakers you can get stereo sound.

-- vwestlife

That's not entirely accurate. The design of the Mac allowed one sample output per scanline (DMA retrieved a sound sample during the horizontal retrace), so the actual capability of the early Macs was a single voice. The four voices was done in software, so the system took a speed hit if you actually used more than one voice. Some software didn't use the system toolbox and did their own mixing; this is why you can play up to six simultaneous digital notes in Jam Session and Studio Session (they are doing the mixing themselves).

-- Trixter

Anyway, when they switched from using just the original ASC (Apple Sound Chip) to using the ASC and a pair of Sony chips for 8-bit 22kHz stereo, I didn't think video refresh was involved any more. That's why the SE/30 and all other Macs from then on were able to drive multiple displays at different resolutions and refresh rates. This same basic audio setup was used on the Mac II line and all of the rest of the Macs all the way until the Quadra 840AV and 660AV came out in like 1994.

-- Arcady

(vwestlife cites this bigmessowires post for details on the relationship between video refresh and audio playback.)

...but yeah, developers generally just used QuickTime Music Architecture for synthesis once it came out (think of it as what DirectX's DirectMusic was taking inspiration from), focused on "Is the hardware fast enough?" rather than "Is the hardware capable?", trusted that a Windows XP-esque soft synth fallback would always be present, and left it to the OS know whether there was hardware assist for doing wavetable synth.

Likewise, you'd be surprised how many games designed for colour are playable, if unpleasant, on black-and-white macs with QuickDraw's built-in support for dithering as long as the game doesn't explicitly check for it and refuse to run. (Which, funny enough, is the same reason some games require you to change the resolution or colour depth down. They were designed when higher resolutions or greater colour depths being sufficiently performant in a consumer machine was unthinkable, so the developers manually added a check to reduce tech support calls. The more courteous ones just display an "I've never heard of a 933MHz PowerPC G4, but I've gotta warn you that it'll be slower if you don't switch to [some lower color depth] mode first" dialog every time you start them.)

Awesome info, thank you! I will hopefully have time to tear into the Performa in the next few days to get it working more smoothly. Then I'll be able to test some games.

I remembered something today though and felt kind of silly. A year or two ago I managed to snag a complete boxed Roland SC-7 for Mac. At the time I just grabbed it because it is otherwise identical to a PC one... but it should have the Mac serial cable as well, so I could theoretically use that cable to run any of my serial-compatible Roland synths on this Performa, correct? The big question is, do Mac games allow you to select a different music\MIDI device, or would a synth only be usable in applications for music playback and creation?

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-24, 21:26:

The big question is, do Mac games allow you to select a different music\MIDI device, or would a synth only be usable in applications for music playback and creation?

That'd depend on whether the game supports it. Just as every DOS game supported either PC speaker or AdLib or both as a baseline audio playback solution, and the AdLib only does FM synthesis, the Macintosh started out only supporting PCM sampled audio and then QuickTime 2 introduced a customizable software wavetable synthesizer and a default soundbank as the baseline for developers to rely on.

Think of mac games less as DOS games with MIDI and more as Amiga games with MOD. Unless they want you to be able to experiment with how the music sounds, each game will just rely on being able to carry along music that will sound the same as when it was composed for every customer.

Okay, I have done a bit of work on the machine and learned a couple of things.

I have built and installed a new 4.5v battery pack for it, so it keeps time and doesn't complain about that anymore. Yay!

I have upgraded the RAM to 40MB by adding a 32MB stick from my collection of assorted 72pin memory. Since this system doesn't need matched pairs and likely doesn't benefit from more than 40MBs at all, it was a nice opportunity to just find a large capacity SIMM that didn't have a match. I don't get too many opportunities to use those, since most systems that could benefit from a 32MB 72pin SIMM will expect them installed in pairs.

Also, the CD-ROM is totally fine! I didn't realize that the operating system completely locks the optical drive if you have used the disc and have not chosen to "Put away..." that program yet. This is a weirdly "permanent" thing apparently since it kept the program from the CD on the desktop (needing to be "Put away") even after gutting the machine and putting it back together. Coming from a PC, it just feels so weird and wrong for it to be locking open applications that are on a CD even after a restart, but now that I understand how it works I can see why it might be desirable in some situations. The way I discovered that the drive was still functional was by pressing the eject button while it was still booting up. It hadn't yet loaded the OS yet, so it allowed the tray to open.

Once it got into the OS and it wasn't open anymore I remembered the whole icons-on-the-desktop weirdness and realized what I needed to do.

So, at this point it's all working decently. With only a 1GB hard drive, I will still plan to upgrade that of course. Not sure if I should keep a spinning disk (since I have them) or buy an SD to IDE adapter and just throw in a 4GB SD card or something. Is there a maximum to the disk size this thing will use?

Also, I managed to snag a brand new (supposedly) 2 button ergonomic ADB mouse for $13 yesterday, so once that arrives the point and click adventure games that can make use of two buttons will be a lot more tolerable.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-25, 22:24:

Also, the CD-ROM is totally fine! I didn't realize that the operating system completely locks the optical drive if you have used the disc and have not chosen to "Put away..." that program yet. This is a weirdly "permanent" thing apparently since it kept the program from the CD on the desktop (needing to be "Put away") even after gutting the machine and putting it back together.

The desktop on pre-OSX Mac OS is actually a virtual location created by combining a hidden Desktop Folder on every drive but, since CDs are read-only, clicking-and-dragging a file from the CD to the desktop will make a copy instead of moving it from its original location on that drive to the desktop.

"Put Away" is just an interesting artifact of following the desktop metaphor in that, if the user drags files onto the desktop to use as scratch space instead of leaving folder windows open, the system will remember where each file on the desktop used to be and "Put Away" will move them back (or, for CDs, delete the copy made).

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-25, 22:24:

Coming from a PC, it just feels so weird and wrong for it to be locking open applications that are on a CD even after a restart, but now that I understand how it works I can see why it might be desirable in some situations. The way I discovered that the drive was still functional was by pressing the eject button while it was still booting up. It hadn't yet loaded the OS yet, so it allowed the tray to open.

Once it got into the OS and wouldn't open anymore I remembered the whole icons-on-the-desktop weirdness and realized what I needed to do.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, It sounds like you're running into Apple's software-based "plan B" for the reason Apple's floppy and CD drives have traditionally lacked a physical eject button (aside from the emergency pinhole) and required you to do the Mac OS equivalent of right-clicking the drive in My Computer and choosing Eject or "Safely Remove"-ing a USB flash drive. (For writable disks, to prevent data from being corrupted. For any disk, to prevent things from crashing if you eject a disk while it's being read from.)

Basically, there are three options:

1. Click and drag the floppy/CD icon to the trash can to eject it. (Yeah, "delete floppy doesn't actually delete the data on it" isn't an intuitive association so Mac OS X changes the trash can to an eject symbol when you start dragging a removable drive's icon. However, it is something Apple has consistently done since the very first mac in 1984.)
2. Click the icon to select it, and then choose Eject from the Special menu.
3. Click the icon to select it and then press ⌘E

I've never had trouble ejecting discs on a mac and that's how I do it.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-25, 22:24:

So, at this point it's all working decently. With only a 1GB hard drive, I will still plan to upgrade that of course. Not sure if I should keep a spinning disk (since I have them) or buy an SD to IDE adapter and just throw in a 4GB SD card or something. Is there a maximum to the disk size this thing will use?

See this guide but the gist is that the limits you'll probably want to keep in mind are:

• OS versions below System 7.5 have a limit of 2GB per partition. (Like with MS-DOS, you need to split bigger drives into multiple partitions.)
• If, for some reason, you're running a version of System 7.5 prior to 7.5.3, you're limited to 4GB. (And you really have no reason to be other than if you don't know how to patch the boot screen back to the 7.5.0 one. It had free downloadable updaters, physical update CDs, sparked a refresh of the bootable System 7.5 install CDs available at retail, and Apple even eventually offered a set of floppy images on their FTP site for users of out-of-support systems who lost theirs.)
• System 7.5.3 through the last version of Mac OS 9 never broke the 120GB limit on boot partition size.
• Macs didn't start supporting 48-bit LBA for IDE until part-way through the G4 era, so that model of hardware is limited to addressing 128GB per IDE drive.
• If you're running a Mac OS too old to have HFS+, keep in mind how large partitions mean large chunk sizes and small files wasting space.

Man, you've been a ton of help with this. Trying to catch up to 30 years of not using Macs is not an easy task. They are so different from PCs. Also, sorry, there was a typo in my previous post that probably added to the confusion about the CD-eject thing. I was just saying I couldn't eject the tray using the eject button on the front of the drive until I tried it before the OS had fully loaded. When the OS loaded and the button stopped making it eject, I realized that it was a software thing, not a broken drive.

I will probably keep using OS 7.6.1 on this, so I should be able to use any IDE drive that I could reasonably find for it.

I have seen lots of recommendations to use ethernet to transfer files to it over FTP, rather than having to keep making CDs, but I have to say... the ethernet cards are not cheap! Looks like a minimum of $50 (shipped) for either a PDS or Comm Slot 1 card. Also, I saw some random benchmarks on a site where they mentioned getting around 100-150KBytes per second over ethernet on a Mac which is... not great. If we're dealing with 200MB game disc images, that's like half an hour to transfer one image over the network. 6x CD reading should be five to six times as fast, so it may be much faster to just make CDs anyway.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-26, 00:57:

Man, you've been a ton of help with this. Trying to catch up to 30 years of not using Macs is not an easy task.

Funny thing is, aside from a brief contact with a Macintosh SE as a toddler which whet my appetite, I had essentially zero macintosh experience until almost exactly two years ago when a family member decided to get me the OS9-capable Power Mac G4 Quicksilver on my wishlist as a Birthday present... I'm just good at self-directed learning and tend to leap head-first into learning my new toys. (Next goal when I can make time, learning the Macintosh Toolbox APIs and writing some hobby software.)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-26, 00:57:

They are so different from PCs. Also, sorry, there was a typo in my previous post that probably added to the confusion about the CD-eject thing. I was just saying I couldn't eject the tray using the eject button on the front of the drive until I tried it before the OS had fully loaded. When the OS loaded and the button stopped making it eject, I realized that it was a software thing, not a broken drive.

No worries. I got that. If anything, I should be apologizing for not being clear enough that I was elaborating on the reasoning behind what you discovered and how it's intended to be interacted with.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-26, 00:57:

I saw some random benchmarks on a site where they mentioned getting around 100-150KBytes per second over ethernet on a Mac which is... not great.

My understanding is that it depends heavily on what CPU you're dealing with. The benchmarks you saw wouldn't happen to be these, would they? ...because those are constrained by one of the machines being a Macintosh IIcx with a Motorola 68030 CPU running at 16 MHz and any other architectural performance bottlenecks that come with a 680x0-based machine from 1989.

ssokolow wrote on 2024-12-26, 01:53:

Funny thing is, aside from a brief contact with a Macintosh SE as a toddler which whet my appetite, I had essentially zero macin […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-26, 00:57:

Man, you've been a ton of help with this. Trying to catch up to 30 years of not using Macs is not an easy task.

Funny thing is, aside from a brief contact with a Macintosh SE as a toddler which whet my appetite, I had essentially zero macintosh experience until almost exactly two years ago when a family member decided to get me the OS9-capable Power Mac G4 Quicksilver on my wishlist as a Birthday present... I'm just good at self-directed learning and tend to leap head-first into learning my new toys. (Next goal when I can make time, learning the Macintosh Toolbox APIs and writing some hobby software.)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-26, 00:57:

They are so different from PCs. Also, sorry, there was a typo in my previous post that probably added to the confusion about the CD-eject thing. I was just saying I couldn't eject the tray using the eject button on the front of the drive until I tried it before the OS had fully loaded. When the OS loaded and the button stopped making it eject, I realized that it was a software thing, not a broken drive.

No worries. I got that. If anything, I should be apologizing for not being clear enough that I was elaborating on the reasoning behind what you discovered and how it's intended to be interacted with.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-26, 00:57:

I saw some random benchmarks on a site where they mentioned getting around 100-150KBytes per second over ethernet on a Mac which is... not great.

My understanding is that it depends heavily on what CPU you're dealing with. The benchmarks you saw wouldn't happen to be these, would they? ...because those are constrained by one of the machines being a Macintosh IIcx with a Motorola 68030 CPU running at 16 MHz and any other architectural performance bottlenecks that come with a 680x0-based machine from 1989.

I found posts about those low ethernet transfer speeds in this thread about a homebrew project ethernet card (which I understand is for a different generation of Mac), and at least one post mentioned that even built in ethernet on later Macs had similar speeds... but I see now that other benchmarks in that thread show the expected numbers for various ethernet cards, and it was likely a testing issue (slow server for example). So, I guess disregard that. If I could get my hands on a cheap network card for this thing, I'd do that... but it's not looking like any exist as the moment.

I want to burn some files to CD for this thing, but now I keep reading that simply burning a data CD on a modern PC will result in a CD that can't be read under Mac OS 7.6.1. I had read the opposite a day or two ago.

Oy...

Not sure what to believe here... haha.

EDIT: Also, reading more posts about operating system versions and I am wondering if 8.1 would actually be better? It seems like the older versions of the OS are "lighter" on memory and take longer to start, but the newer ones are more computationally efficient, especially for running 68K applications. Again, I have no idea about any of this... it's just what I'm reading. I think if I cram 64MB of RAM and a CF or SD card in this thing (to improve loading times), it may be nicer to have the newer operating systems that can make better use of the fairly weak processor.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-26, 02:34:

I want to burn some files to CD for this thing, but now I keep reading that simply burning a data CD on a modern PC will result in a CD that can't be read under Mac OS 7.6.1.

Oy...

Not sure what to believe here... haha.

Could be one of three things:

1. Old CD-ROM drives tend to be bad at reading CD-R media due to its lower reflectivity.
2. I can't remember how to check if you've got the CD drivers installed but not the ISO 9660 support, but I believe that's possible with old enough Mac OS versions.
3. They might also be referring to how a lot of OS-integrated optical burning uses UDF, which System 7 definitely won't know what to do with.

Assuming your optical drive can read a CD-R from the same batch written from a known-good ISO, the most compatible solution is to use burning software that can make either an ISO/HFS hybrid CD or a pure HFS CD. (Yes, a mac-only CD is just the macintosh filesystem stuffed onto a CD's data track, and Windows/Mac hybrid CDs are a macintosh hard drive filesystem woven into the "this space intentionally left blank for bootloader support" holes in ISO 9660 and hooked up so both tables of contents point at the same data blocks. That's why it's so important to check the Locked box in Mac OS's Get Info or the Read Only box in Windows's File Properties dialog before mounting disk images.)

On Linux, the genisoimage tool that all the GUIs call out to is capable of creating hybrid ISOs when invoked directly with the -hfs option and the appropriate additional options. No clue if any Linux GUIs support that.

I have no experience doing this stuff from Windows but you could probably create an HFS-only .iso on Windows by creating a disk image with HFVExplorer and then renaming it once you're done putting stuff onto it.

There are probably also versions of Roxio Toast and versions of the various "work reliably until you come across an application which uses an unimplemented feature" macintosh emulators that are compatible with each other, which would let you use the VirtualBox-esque shared folders support to get the files into the emulator and then the resulting ISO out again.

ssokolow wrote on 2024-12-26, 05:21:

Could be one of three things: […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-26, 02:34:

I want to burn some files to CD for this thing, but now I keep reading that simply burning a data CD on a modern PC will result in a CD that can't be read under Mac OS 7.6.1.

Oy...

Not sure what to believe here... haha.

Could be one of three things:

1. Old CD-ROM drives tend to be bad at reading CD-R media due to its lower reflectivity.
2. I can't remember how to check if you've got the CD drivers installed but not the ISO 9660 support, but I believe that's possible with old enough Mac OS versions.
3. They might also be referring to how a lot of OS-integrated optical burning uses UDF, which System 7 definitely won't know what to do with.

Assuming your optical drive can read a CD-R from the same batch written from a known-good ISO, the most compatible solution is to use burning software that can make either an ISO/HFS hybrid CD or a pure HFS CD. (Yes, a mac-only CD is just the macintosh filesystem stuffed onto a CD's data track, and Windows/Mac hybrid CDs are a macintosh hard drive filesystem woven into the "this space intentionally left blank for bootloader support" holes in ISO 9660 and hooked up so both tables of contents point at the same data blocks. That's why it's so important to check the Locked box in Mac OS's Get Info or the Read Only box in Windows's File Properties dialog before mounting disk images.)

On Linux, the genisoimage tool that all the GUIs call out to is capable of creating hybrid ISOs when invoked directly with the -hfs option and the appropriate additional options. No clue if any Linux GUIs support that.

I have no experience doing this stuff from Windows but you could probably create an HFS-only .iso on Windows by creating a disk image with HFVExplorer and then renaming it once you're done putting stuff onto it.

There are probably also versions of Roxio Toast and versions of the various "work reliably until you come across an application which uses an unimplemented feature" macintosh emulators that are compatible with each other, which would let you use the VirtualBox-esque shared folders support to get the files into the emulator and then the resulting ISO out again.

That's a huge help!

I think I found some more information about what you were referring to here:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8571998
"A Performa 6360 should be capable of reading a CD in an ISO 9660 format. To begin with, check whether something like Foreign File Access and ISO 9660 File Access together with an Apple CD-ROM extension are present in the System folder. "

That seems like a good place to start!

Also, I found some more info here that sounds like I have some options if things don't just work. Also, I will probably use imgburn to test out making a pure ISO9660 file system CD, rather than any combinations of UDF, Joliet, etc. Also, one post in that 68kmla thread mentions that 8.1 comes with the universal CD driver out of the box.

I will mess with it some more tomorrow and hopefully be able to get to the point of installing a game to test the capabilities of the computer. If it seems like it'll do what I want I will work on getting the hard drive swapped out for something higher capacity (and performance) and the OS installed fresh.

Still not sure what version to put on it though... 7.6.1 again, or upgrade the RAM further and go with 8.1... or 8.5...?

Decisions decisions...

I guess the biggest question is: From a retro gaming perspective, what, if anything, do I lose by going from 7.6.1 to 8.1, 8.5, etc. ? I have seen some posts saying that some old games simply won't run on 8.0+.

PTherapist wrote on 2024-11-07, 13:11:

integrated. It literally started breaking apart in chunks and 1 day I went to lift it from the ground and it shattered into pieces. Those old plastics on Apple computers of the time get extremely brittle!

Yes I had that with a 5200, the beige case seemed to have turned to cheese and disintegrated (could literally push your fingers into it and crumble chunks off). I bought a black 5400 case and decanted the hardware into that. The problem did not recur with the black case. Suspect by that time I'd already replaced the motherboard with a 5400 (simple slide-out/slot-in upgrade!), and eventually went to 55o0 and a Sonnet G3 upgrade. Because the 5400/5500s are faster, have a PCI slot (so say a cheap RTL8139 can be used), think there may be a memory change (72 pin to the next one along, probably a higher limit), and of course can take the Sonnet upgrades. Which inevitably led to OS9.1 but in retrospect 8.1 was probably the sweet spot as a system for old games.

I'm guessing a similar upgrade path would work for the 6214CD but obviously that entails costs as parts are rarer now. And even a G3-upgraded 128mb 5500 felt pretty slow compared to similar-aged Windows machines.

I recall some issue with hard disk compatibiliity (certified by Apple or some such), but presumably by now someone has found workarounds for such restrictions.

ratfink wrote on 2024-12-26, 06:39:

I recall some issue with hard disk compatibiliity (certified by Apple or some such), but presumably by now someone has found workarounds for such restrictions.

Wouldn't that just be the usual "You need a hacked copy of Disk Utility or it'll refuse to partition Non-Apple-OEM drives" that was going on until some time prior to my G4's Mac OS 9.2.2?

ssokolow wrote on 2024-12-26, 07:18:

ratfink wrote on 2024-12-26, 06:39:

I recall some issue with hard disk compatibiliity (certified by Apple or some such), but presumably by now someone has found workarounds for such restrictions.

Wouldn't that just be the usual "You need a hacked copy of Disk Utility or it'll refuse to partition Non-Apple-OEM drives" that was going on until some time prior to my G4's Mac OS 9.2.2?

yep that'll be it

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-26, 06:19:

I guess the biggest question is: From a retro gaming perspective, what, if anything, do I lose by going from 7.6.1 to 8.1, 8.5, etc. ? I have seen some posts saying that some old games simply won't run on 8.0+.

You could set up dual-booting. There's a standard Startup Disk control panel that lets the user pick which drive to boot off of next time.

ssokolow wrote on 2024-12-26, 16:23:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-26, 06:19:

I guess the biggest question is: From a retro gaming perspective, what, if anything, do I lose by going from 7.6.1 to 8.1, 8.5, etc. ? I have seen some posts saying that some old games simply won't run on 8.0+.

You could set up dual-booting. There's a standard Startup Disk control panel that lets the user pick which drive to boot off of next time.

That's always a possibility.

I don't want to take up more of your time, but regarding dual-booting Mac OS:

Does it require drive partitioning like Windows\DOS, or can there actually be multiple versions of Mac OS on the same "drive"?

Will the two operating systems both be able to easily access the same files (or even programs) on the hard drive?

I know how this works in Windows and DOS, but I honestly haven't even looked at a file explorer (or whatever it'd be called) in Mac OS 7.6.1 yet, so I have no idea what the file structure looks like or how drives are listed. I am assuming it is more Linux-like than DOS-like.