Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-27, 00:22:

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

I don't mind. I enjoy sharing what I know.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-27, 00:22:

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

Yes but, at least by the Drive Setup 2.0.7 that came with the Mac OS 9.2.2 reinstall disc for my Power Mac G4 (From what I've seen, emulators aren't real enough to satisfy Drive Setup), Apple made that simple too.

Assuming it wasn't something they introduced later, you just open up Disk Utility and then, after clicking "Initialize..." on the drive you want to use, click "Custom Setup...", choose "2 Partitions" under the "Partitioning Scheme" dropdown, and leave both partitions on whichever "Mac OS ..." partition type they default to.

(Well, unless they defaulted to Mac OS Extended and you want to install something that predates HFS+.)

Judging by the screenshot used as a decorative sidebar on System 7.6.1 With Patched Drive Setup, I'm guessing this also applies to at least the 1.7.3 for running on PowerPCs. (See also: Format Any Hard Drive for Older Macs with Patched Apple Tools)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-27, 00:22:

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

Yes. You can share files and even applications between them so long as the applications don't need to add something to the System folder as part of their install process. (If they do, you can probably do what I did to share things between Windows 3.1 and Windows 98SE by installing the second install over top of the first so only the System Folder bits are duplicated.)

You may, however, need to use the "rebuild the desktop file" key combo on whichever OS you didn't install the thing from inside of in order to get it to re-scan and pick up the new file type associations. I can't remember if classic Mac OS is smart enough to make that Just Work™ too. (There are things like the Virtual CD Autotyper utility for Virtual DVD-ROM/CD Utility which require a manual "Rebuild Desktop" to become registered as drag-and-drop recipients even in single-OS configurations.)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-27, 00:22:

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.

It's "DOS-Like" in that it's not a singly-rooted filesystem, but it's "Linux-like" in that there are no drive letters and thus no juggling of which partition is C: for which OS.

You'll just have a second hard drive icon show up on your desktop unless one partition is formatted Mac OS Extended (i.e. HFS+) and the other drive's OS predates HFS+, in which case that OS won't be able to read the other's partition.

(In fact, that's how New World macs like the Power Mac G4 implement loading their BIOS equivalent off the hard drive so it can be soft-updatable without needing flash memory. If you plug any bootable macintosh hard drive into a Linux box, you'll discover that the boot partition is actually something like partition number 9 in the Apple Partition Map indexing scheme and there are lower-numbered partitions of special types the OS hides from the user which contain things like the firmware the motherboard's baked-in loader stub will read into RAM. Apple wanted to make it difficult for users to delete or temporarily disable any hardware support modules that are required for the mac's equivalent to Safe Mode to still boot successfully.)

Once you've got two partitions, the Mac OS installer just lets you pick a "drive" to install to, and both OSes will see both drives but anything which uses the API to query for the system folder (which, remember, might have been dragged and dropped out of its default location by J. Random User) will get the system folder for the drive you booted from.

It's the most "you don't need to be a techie to feel you understand this" way to handle multiple OSes that I've ever seen. (Fitting from the people who brought you "To make a bootable backup, just include the System folder when choosing what to click-and-drag to a new drive".)

On a macintosh, the desktop literally does double duty as My Computer.

Once again, thank you for all the info. 😀

You have no idea how big of a help this has been. I keep scouring the internet and finding just a weird mish-mash of information about everything. As someone who is extremely comfortable being knee-deep in any version of DOS or Windows, having to use a Mac feels like being forced to use my left hand to write Chinese... I am right handed and I do not know Chinese. It is literally headache inducing for me. 😮

Update on the CD situation:

The Mac has all of the needed files in the system folder, and in fact it does read standard data disks from my Windows 10 PC, created by just dragging and dropping files to the CD (and finalizing of course). So, I didn't really need to do all the research... I just hate making coasters. 😀

Next issue I ran into was that nothing on Macintosh Repository mentions that Stuffit! (the program that opens .sit files) is packed in... you guessed it... a .sit file. Scouring the internet yet again, I found this post:
https://www.applefritter.com/node/17675
And this download:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/citonx600/ … .5.exe?download

Which did in fact automatically set up a floppy that should contain Stuffit 5.5...

However...................... the computer does nothing when I insert the floppy. No lights, no sound, nothing changes on the desktop. I have to use a paperclip to eject the disk (why the heck isn't there a button??).

Is there some kind of dance I have to do to access this thing, or is this a hardware issue?

I have looked for a button buried in a menu somewhere labeled "Look at square-ish shaped thing..." to access floppies, but I have found none. Sorry, that's just what the menus look like to me. Like all the terms seem deliberately vague and any reference to physical hardware is obfuscated as much as possible. 🤣

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-27, 02:53:

You have no idea how big of a help this has been. I keep scouring the internet and finding just a weird mish-mash of information about everything. As someone who is extremely comfortable being knee-deep in any version of DOS or Windows, having to use a Mac feels like being forced to use my left hand to write Chinese... I am right handed and I do not know Chinese. It is literally headache inducing for me. 😮

Yeah. Finding stuff on vintage macs is difficult because search engines are so determined to point you at advice for Mac OS X or modern Mac OS.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-27, 02:53:

So, I didn't really need to do all the research... I just hate making coasters. 😀

That's why I have some CD-RWs for whenever I have a machine with a drive that can read them and why I tend to swap in a healthy CD or DVD rewriter A.S.A.P. with my vintage machines. I like to have options.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-27, 02:53:

Next issue I ran into was that nothing on Macintosh Repository mentions that Stuffit! (the program that opens .sit files) is packed in... you guessed it... a .sit file.

The .sit files were intended for the in-the-day common case that you already had an earlier version of StuffIt installed.

StuffIt Expander was traditionally initially installed from a floppy disk or CD and was bundled with just about everything.

Grab a floppy image or ISO of Stuffit Expander 5.5 from https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2475-stuf … pstuff-w-ee-5-5

If you want to try avoiding the need to burn a 1.44MiB CD-R, the .dsk file should just be a raw byte-for-byte image of a 1.44MiB floppy disk that can be written using a simple raw read/write tool like dd on Linux or macOS or https://www.macintoshrepository.org/22566-hdd … ool-for-windows on Windows.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-27, 02:53:

why the heck isn't there a button??

Because then someone would push it before writing finished and corrupt their data. Remember, macs are designed to be something a non-techie in 1984 need not fear.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-27, 02:53:

Is there some kind of dance I have to do to access this thing, or is this a hardware issue?

Could be a hardware issue or it could be that the disk wasn't written properly. I've never used that tool, so I have no idea if it's buggy, but did you turn off your virus scanner during writing to make sure the boot sector virus protection didn't block writing the first sector of the mac floppy disk?

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-27, 02:53:

I have looked for a button buried in a menu somewhere labeled "Look at square-ish shaped thing..." to access floppies, but I have found none. Sorry, that's just what the menus look like to me. Like all the terms seem deliberately vague and any reference to physical hardware is obfuscated as much as possible. 🤣

It should just appear on the desktop when inserted.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-27, 02:53:

Like all the terms seem deliberately vague and any reference to physical hardware is obfuscated as much as possible. 🤣

To avoid seeming scary and "this isn't for me" to a non-techie in 1984.

I'm thinking it must be a hardware issue with the floppy drive, because it doesn't even try to read it. There is no sound of the disk being accessed, no lights, etc.

I've been avoiding taking the front panel off of this thing because I have heard that it is way harder than it should be to do so without damaging something.

Sounds like I will need to get into it sooner than I thought though. 🙁

The floppy needs lubrication for sure. look for a tutorial on yt.

There is a stuffit 5.5 on macgarden that comes with an installer.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2024-12-27, 10:43:

There is a stuffit 5.5 on macgarden that comes with an installer.

That statement after I already linked to disk images suggests you don't understand what a task it is to get archiving software onto a mac that doesn't already have archiving software.

It's not possible to just download a bare executable like you could with a PKZip self-extractor because of Apple's decision to make resource forks intrinsic to how the process of executing a binary works back before TCP/IP and HTTP became an obvious necessity to support. (A .sea self-extracting archive that has lost its resource fork is an ordinary .sit file but that's not a problem with AppleShare, because it knows how to serve up files with intact resource forks.)

They need to be wrapped in something like StuffIt, MacBinary, BinHex, etc. to pack the data and resource fork into a single data-fork-only file before being put on a server or they'll be destroyed and that means that, if it's not an existing copy of StuffIt doing the unpacking, then it has to be something like the web browser or the FTP client. (and StuffIt is more proprietary and closed-source than RAR, so that's why MacBinary and BinHex existed to be integrated into tools and you find stuff from Apple coming as .smi.bin files where SMI stands for "self-mounting disk image"... the disk image version of a self-extractor and the precursor to a .dmg file.)

Yes, Macintosh Garden does have an additional copy in MacBinary format, but I don't remember 7.6 coming with a MacBinary unpacker. Those usually were included on the mac flavour of those "get started" floppy disks your ISP would send you that also included a TCP/IP stack, PPP/SLIP dialler, and web browser back before Microsoft got all antitrust-y and baked Internet Explorer and all support components into the OS. (Remember Trumpet WinSock?)

(Basically, at the same time that Microsoft baked Internet Explorer into Windows in response to skyrocketing interest in the Internet, Apple came out with the iMac (Internet Mac), which had Mac OS 8 preinstalling a copy of StuffIt Expander and that finally addressed the problem.)

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. 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.

Macs are so different in part because, in many ways, they came first:
- ADB precedes PS/2 (launched on the IIgs first)
- the DB15 monitor connector precedes VGA by about a month or so
- Macs adopted 3.5" floppy drives first (and had things like software-controlled eject)
- Macs were pretty much the first GUI personal computer, or at least the first to hit some critical mass
etc.

And it is important to remember that the classic Mac OS was designed for a single-tasking machine with a 9" B&W screen, no hard drive, and one or maybe two 400K floppy drives. That's it. And... most expansion past that point was basically hacked together because they just didn't plan that people would still be using binary-compatible versions of what they were creating a decade or more later. Check out folklore.org's stories. The original team certainly did not plan ahead for a Mac II-class machine, or even for a machine with a 20 meg hard drive (hence why they had to replace the file system less than two years into the Mac's life cycle).

To pick one example of this: the classic Mac OS has no equivalent to the start button. (In System 7, you can manually turn the apple menu into somewhat of a launcher, then the System 7.xP versions for Performa had an improvised 'Launcher' thing) And it didn't need one - you put in your 400/800K floppy that contains two programs, the disk contents appear, you double click on the program you need. In a world without a hard drive, who needs anything else? But in a world with hard drives, that rapidly becomes unwieldy and confusing. Windows 95 comes along a decade later, targets hardware that's got 1000X more storage, replaces the clumsy Program Manager interface with the brilliant start menu.

Same thing, you were talking about the multiple-mouse button thing - well, PC world only really started using the second mouse button with Office 4.x in 1994 (Windows 3.1 didn't use the right mouse button), and then the same principles were applied OS-wise in Windows 95. (I believe *NIX workstations had 3-button mice at this time; I have no idea what they did with the extra buttons) The context menus were such a brilliant idea that Apple (or maybe Microsoft in the badly-regarded Mac port of Office 4.x) hacked the same thing together using the control key. And suddenly a single-button mouse looks silly. But... in 1993 (i.e. 9 years into the Mac's life), no one thought it was a problem that the Mac had a single mouse button. And honestly, the idea of a mouse was so revolutionary/confusing/etc that, with no obvious idea in mind for what to do with the second button, I can definitely understand the Apple design team going with a simpler, harder-to-confuse-people single-button design. And also, I have a vague recollection that PC world may have gone with two-button mice in part because Apple had some kind of a patent on a one-button mouse... and then it took them close to a decade to find a good, consistent use for that second button.

In my case, I was a hardcore Mac guy until my dad (wisely, in hindsight) decided to move to DOS/Windows in early 1995, and PCs were such a step backwards compared to the Quadras I had been lusting after or the IIxes I had used at school. Took until the late 1990s for the hardware to somewhat catch up and/or for some advantages of the Mac to become moot (e.g. the brilliant floppy/removable disk handling mattered a lot less as floppies became less important...) But yes, I can definitely see how the classic OS (and the pre-1998 beige hardware) would look insanely weird 3 decades later. In some ways, the classic Mac OS and the beige hardware are like the computer equivalent of something like a Citroen DS - uniquely ahead of its time, quirky, and... most of its major innovations were never adopted by the rest of the industry so they look even weirder decades later.

(Also, I'm sorry I missed your earlier posts - as someone with many years of experience/trauma using a 2x800K floppy Mac SE with 1 MB of RAM and System 6, well, I have lots of classic Mac OS memories...)

The big thing that absolutely killed the classic Mac OS in my view, and set the stage for the Mac's rebirth under OS X, was the ubiquitization of TCP/IP networking and the Internet. No one in the early 1980s or even the very early 1990s thought a personal computer needed to communicate with anything other than personal computers of the same general family. But once TCP/IP becomes the standard (and at a time when the Mac was at its weakest, i.e. there was no opportunity to influence things to be Mac-friendlier), all the cool Macisms (type/creator codes, data/resource forks, etc) become a huge, huge liability. And this happened very quickly - reading Mac magazines in 1993-1994, you barely had any indication that TCP/IP existed or might be important unless you were in a large university and needed to do stuff that Mac magazines didn't talk about; by late 1996, if not earlier, just about any tech enthusiast (and many others) has dial-up Internet. Suddenly the Mac's vaunted simplicity is just... not there, not when you need to mess with MacBinary and the like. Enter OS X which, of course, is largely BSD UNIX, i.e. the very OS that TCP/IP and the like were developed on. And it's worth noting - people don't seem to develop OSes anymore, they just start from a Linux/BSD/etc kernel that has good TCP/IP support and then customize it for whatever their particular product is (see, e.g. the PlayStation 4/5 and maybe 3)

Thanks for the info VivienM! Very interesting read.

Small update on my Mac:
It was actually pretty easy to pull the front bezel off and I didn't damage anything at all. I just used a medium sized flat blade screwdriver and pressed up on the tabs (with the computer standing upright on its back panel), without even having to pry against the edge of the bezel. Just even flat pressure and the clips started to lift. I did one side partially, and then did the other and the front was off in a minute or two.

There was quite a bit of dust collected in just about every part of the drives and the front bezel. I unplugged the floppy and hard drives, dusted them off a bit, reconnected them and powered on the system. Once it booted I inserted the floppy and this time I heard it actually flip the disk's dust shield open and it proceeded to read it no problem at all. It was very slow and the whole computer had to wait for it to pop up the icon on the desktop, but then I got a floppy-disk icon titled "Stuffit". Opening it up showed "Aladdin Expander 5.5 Installer". I went through the install process, and now Stuffit 5.5 is ready to go! Since this works so well, I have attached the program to this post. It just requires a blank floppy to be inserted in the computer (you can pick the drive if you have two for some reason), and it worked fine for me in Windows 10 with a USB floppy.

There were some quirks in the process (I can't "Put Away" the Stuffit disk for some reason. I could eject it using the Eject Disk button, but the icon still shows on the desktop.) but right now it seems to be working. It is extracting .zip and .sit files from the CD... slowly. I don't have quite enough hard drive space to be pulling them off the CD, putting them on the hard drive and then unzipping them, but this will work for now.

Soon, I will see if Sam and Max Hit the Road works alright on this machine. If it seems like these games all work decently (I only got games from 1991-1996, and nothing too elaborate looking), then I will upgrade the storage and install the OS fresh.

So far this seems like a solid machine, even if the performance is pretty bad. Hopefully some solid state storage will help that out a bit.

... I will say though, all of the razor sharp metal edges on the front when the bezel is removed are just terrifying. I'm going to leave it off until I get the storage situation worked out, but yeesh... I'm going to have to be pretty careful. 😮

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-28, 03:08:

So far this seems like a solid machine, even if the performance is pretty bad. Hopefully some solid state storage will help that out a bit.

Have you done some googling on these machines? The 52xx/62xx have a reputation as the worst Mac designs pretty much ever, for a number of reasons having to do with the logic board design (heavily compromised to cut cost and maintain compatibility with the LC "P"DS slot) and the PowerPC 603 apparently not having enough cache for optimal performance of the Mac 68K emulator (and remember, the classic Mac OS largely runs in emulation, especially 7.x...)

Funny/sad, in a way - back when they were new, they were quite desirable. Lots of people who couldn't afford a 6100, really wanted a PPC, etc wanted the 6200, plus the 6200 appeared to have some advantages over the 6100 (soft power, the comm slot for the modem rather than needing a typical Mac external modem), etc. Lots of people who liked the 630s (and the 630 seemed like a quasi-ideal home Mac in late 1994, except that it wasn't PPC) immediately transferred that love to the 6200s. Interestingly a friend of mine had one, he was a big Mac guy like me, had an LC II when I met him, a few months after I moved to DOS/Windows he got a 6200, then by 1997-1998 he... had a Dell. Everybody was dumping Apple in the darkest times of the dark era. It's a miracle Steve Jobs managed to keep the ship afloat until the iPod era and until the Intel switch (which is really when the Mac fully dug itself out of the dark era).

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-28, 03:36:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-28, 03:08:

So far this seems like a solid machine, even if the performance is pretty bad. Hopefully some solid state storage will help that out a bit.

Have you done some googling on these machines? The 52xx/62xx have a reputation as the worst Mac designs pretty much ever, for a number of reasons having to do with the logic board design (heavily compromised to cut cost and maintain compatibility with the LC "P"DS slot) and the PowerPC 603 apparently not having enough cache for optimal performance of the Mac 68K emulator (and remember, the classic Mac OS largely runs in emulation, especially 7.x...)

Of course, I did all that research as soon as the machine was given to me. That is what 90% of the information about these consists of, just people griping about how they are the worst Macs... with the odd comment here and there saying they aren't bad if you don't expect too much of it.

I have no intention of using this or any other Mac for any software past 1995 or so because, as you eluded to, by 1996-1997 Windows\DOS systems and games were just flat out better.

If this can't handle Lucas Arts adventure games without having serious performance issues, then I'll see if it's any better on OS 8.1. If that's still a no-go, then yeah... I'll just dump it on Facebook marketplace and be done with it. If it can run 2D-only stuff that is less resource intensive, then I'll be trying to move it on to a relative that isn't PC-savvy but has an interest in "experiences" from the 90s.

I only called it a solid machine because it basically works fine with just a little tweaking after sitting unused for at least 25 years.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-28, 19:23:

I have no intention of using this or any other Mac for any software past 1995 or so because, as you eluded to, by 1996-1997 Windows\DOS systems and games were just flat out better.

I don't know if 'flat out better' is how I would put it, but I think the Mac has... always... struggled as a platform for gaming, especially in the early 1990s, because of Apple's market segmentation philosophy (which, interestingly, they revived with the iPhone and iPad to some extent). Expensive machines for pros, then a few years later, those expensive machines' internals would be paired with cheaper logic board designs and sold at a much cheaper price. You see a number of examples of this, e.g. the late-1990 Classic offered roughly 1984-86 Mac performance at a cheap price, the late-1990 LC offered 1987-era 68020 Mac II performanceish at a cheaper price, the 605/630 offered cheap Quadra 68040 performance in 1994 as the pro market was going to PPC 601, etc.

This strategy utterly crashed and burned by about 1997 or so when you suddenly see the whole lineup running on the PPC G3 processor with a relatively minor MHz difference between the iMac and the Power Macs. They had to do that to keep up with the massively increasing performance of low-end x86 Windows systems; certainly if the low-end system in Windowsland is a K6 or something, Apple can't be offering a 68030 or 68040 or even a 66MHz 60x PPC at the same price.

But, certainly prior to about, oh, 1993-1994, for example, most Mac developers did not want to abandon support for 68000 9" B&W machines (at least if they had a hard drive and more than a meg of RAM) because those still made up a huge percentage of the installed base. Especially on software designed for home users - the vast majority of the installed base of home Macs in 1994 would have been Classics, Classic IIs, LCs, LC IIs, and maybe some LC IIIs.

So Mac games tended to be the types of games for which a GUI makes a lot of sense as opposed to 'let's use every CPU/GPU cycle we can get our hands on to do cool graphics'.

Then by about 1997-1998 or so, you start seeing the adoption of the same (ATI) graphics chips on the Mac as you had in Windowsland, and suddenly you start to see ports of a lot of the big name graphically intensive Windows titles.

What I like about Macintosh games up to ca. 1995 is their higher graphics quality.
Macintosh games were closer to Windows games in terms of resolutions.
The DOS typical lo-fi resolution of 320x200 wasn't used, the minimum resolution was 512x348.
Classics such as Sim City or Prince of Persia on Macintosh had higher res graphics than the Amiga, even.
Colour was an option, though. Some games had separate colour versions if the original game release was in monochrome.
If someone wanted even higher resolutions at the time, he/she had to resort to using Unix ports or Japanese ports (X68000, FM Towns, PC-98)..
Or try out the console ports. Some Sega Genesis/MD games had used 320x240, without making use of interlacing yet.

Okay, I tested Sam and Max on it and it seems to run okay. The problem I'm running into is that the process for actually playing the game is about as tedious as I could imagine.

The download for the game was a .sit file containing a .toast. I had to drag the .sit to the stuffit icon (because double clicking does not open it in stuffit and there is no obvious way to change this) to extract the .toast CD image, then open Toast (a CD\DVD burning suite), wait for the whole program to load, then go to the menu, choose to mount an image and then find and navigate through folders to locate and mount the .toast image. Once that is mounted, I have a "Sam and Max" CD icon on the desktop, and on that mounted disc is an executable "Sam and Max" file with the appropriate icon, a text document and some supporting extensions for making the game work on older operating systems.

To play the game someone has to open Toast (which is slow), navigate the menus and find the .toast image (slow and a clunky), wait for it to mount, then open the CD's folder and run the game. This is not a process that I think will appeal anyone that doesn't already love messing with old slow computers.

I'd love to just put the game directly on the hard drive, but where the heck are the game files!? "Get Info" tells me that the CD has 100MB+ used, but the handful of files on the CD are barely even 1MB. So where is the game data? Is it even possible to install an entire game to a hard drive (so that the CD isn't required) on this machine?

If you really cannot just copy files to the hard drive or do a full install because "Mac", then is there a way to at least make the .toast file mount when I double click it?

EDIT: Just noticed this...
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1616-virt … -rom-cd-utility

Is that the best I can do and the game can't simply be installed or copied to the hard drive without having to mount an image? Also, it seems it will only work with Toast images.

Welcome to the hell fun of gaming on a classic Mac, especially when it comes to disc images. Both Toast & that Virtual CD/DVD utility are the best I could find too. They're a lot smoother to use on a faster Mac of course.

What I did on my gaming Mac setup was to put the disc images of the games into a single folder, aliased to the desktop for easy access. Some games you can indeed install to the HDD and then add no-cd patches if required, but it varies from game to game.

Just wait until you start exploring games further and you hit those many titles that require you to manually lower the colour output to 256 or less. It adds yet another manual step to the process.

PTherapist wrote on 2024-12-30, 19:51:

Welcome to the hell fun of gaming on a classic Mac, especially when it comes to disc images. Both Toast & that Virtual CD/DVD utility are the best I could find too. They're a lot smoother to use on a faster Mac of course.

What I did on my gaming Mac setup was to put the disc images of the games into a single folder, aliased to the desktop for easy access. Some games you can indeed install to the HDD and then add no-cd patches if required, but it varies from game to game.

Just wait until you start exploring games further and you hit those many titles that require you to manually lower the colour output to 256 or less. It adds yet another manual step to the process.

Thanks for the input.

To me it seems like they had a great idea, but the execution seems to have been a mess for years, judging from what I'm reading. The idea is perfectly sound: Create a computing environment that doesn't require much technical knowledge and is limited enough that the end user is unlikely to be able to break anything.

The reality of it though, is that it is so inflexible that the functionality of the OS and software will feel "way ahead of it's time" one second, and then bafflingly incapable of doing basic things the next. Like, I can make an old Windows or DOS machine do almost anything that the hardware should reasonably be capable of doing, thanks to the flexibility of the OS and the years and years of third party software and knowledge available. The end user can MAKE the computer dead simple to run, either for themselves or for others. Or, someone can even create a program (or tutorial) so that a less experienced user can do these things for themselves and still end up with something that just works and is easy to use.

Also, this is just an observation... and I could be entirely wrong about this... but I think this "It either just works or it is probably impossible" kind of computing environment has lead to a totally different kind of community online. I greatly appreciate the information that users have posted here (ssokolow, VivienM, others...), but it doesn't seem like that level of understanding and knowledge of the hardware and software is found in all of the Mac help-forums and such.

In my searching for answers to problems, I kept finding this really odd reply from experienced Mac users that consisted of something like this: "I have no idea what the answer to your question is, or if that can be done..." or "I don't know, and there is no way of knowing whether that can be fixed..." I ran across comments like these 4 times in a span of an hour looking for what I thought would be some really basic stuff, and I rarely recall ever seeing stuff like this from the helpers (experienced users) on message boards in all my years working on PCs. With PCs it tends to be "Here is how to do it." or "Your setup can't do that because of ___ , but ___ will allow you to do it."

And it is no fault of the Mac users obviously... they have just learned that there may be no fix to things because the OS just doesn't allow you that kind of control. And because the availability of third-party software to circumvent the issues in each OS version can be quite limited, it is hard for them to say one way or another whether there are any workarounds. I am just SO glad that I grew up in a primarily DOS\Windows environment personally, because I have learned that there is almost always a way to make something work with enough time, research and learning from others.

EDIT: Also, paid $13 for a brand new ergonomic 2-button ADB mouse and the thing doesn't even move the cursor unless I am doing a 2-3 inch swing with the mouse. I cannot do precise movements with it to click buttons. It is useless, and there are no other affordable options for a two button mouse for this thing. (Turns out the little emitters inside were installed crooked. Straightening those helped the cursor control tremendously.)

..... aaaaaaand Sam and Max doesn't use the second button to switch cursor modes. You still have to use the stinking TAB key to do that, and the right mouse click does the same thing as the left. 🔥

I installed "TheMouse2B" to add 2-button mouse functionality to the OS, and it seems to not work. No matter what I do, the right click on this mouse always acts like I am clicking and dragging. Why why why why why............

EDIT2: The mouse probably needs a hardware modification like this to change from "click lock" to "right click" : https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comment … mouse_any_idea/

The issues I'm having with this computer are even more "Apple" than I could have ever anticipated.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-30, 21:12:

Also, this is just an observation... and I could be entirely wrong about this... but I think this "It either just works or it is probably impossible" kind of computing environment has lead to a totally different kind of community online. I greatly appreciate the information that users have posted here (ssokolow, VivienM, others...), but it doesn't seem like that level of understanding and knowledge of the hardware and software is found in all of the Mac help-forums and such.

In my searching for answers to problems, I kept finding this really odd reply from experienced Mac users that consisted of something like this: "I have no idea what the answer to your question is, or if that can be done..." or "I don't know, and there is no way of knowing whether that can be fixed..." I ran across comments like these 4 times in a span of an hour looking for what I thought would be some really basic stuff, and I rarely recall ever seeing stuff like this from the helpers (experienced users) on message boards in all my years working on PCs. With PCs it tends to be "Here is how to do it." or "Your setup can't do that because of ___ , but ___ will allow you to do it."

And it is no fault of the Mac users obviously... they have just learned that there may be no fix to things because the OS just doesn't allow you that kind of control. And because the availability of third-party software to circumvent the issues in each OS version can be quite limited, it is hard for them to say one way or another whether there are any workarounds. I am just SO glad that I grew up in a primarily DOS\Windows environment personally, because I have learned that there is almost always a way to make something work with enough time, research and learning from others.

I think that's a bit unfair - there was an absolute ton of Mac utilities to circumvent the issues in the older Mac OSes back in the day. If you had a shareware CD from 1993 or 1994 you would have found an absolutely insane array of little add-ins. If you read the Mac magazines there would be dozens of pages on those things every issue. Keep in mind that, if anything, the classic Mac OS is more customizable - with no memory protection or anything, you can basically make extensions that will mess with anything. This is one of the things that made the classic OS less and less reliable in the 1990s. Many of those extensions got acquired by Apple around the time of System 7.5... and interestingly the functionality continued to be implemented the same way rather than actually integrated into the OS code.

I think part of the problem is that you're looking at this from the perspective of an experienced Windows user. And Windows and TCP/IP networking have basically shaped all desktop operating systems for the past ~29 years. Look at, say, most of the desktop environments for Linux - you can see the influence of the Windows taskbar/start menu/etc interface paradigms. And some of the things you're trying to do - let's be honest, no one had imagined mounting an ISO image in 1995. The entire point of CD-ROM in 1995 was that you could have as much storage as on your entire hard drive on a single optical disc. Not to mention - do you know how long it would take to transfer 650 megs over a dialup modem or even a $4000/month T1? Windows didn't get built-in ISO mounting until 2007; OS X actually had it first. And also - everything to do with file systems would have been completely irrelevant in 1995. You got your software on HFS floppies/CDs, everything worked just right, problem solved. That stuff is only a challenge because in 2024, your primary way of trying to get software into the thing is via TCP/IP networking.

And look, everybody knew that the Mac was... creaky... in the second half of the 1990s. You have a platform that was incredibly innovative in a 400K floppy, 128K of RAM, effectively no networking, single-tasking world designed with zero forward planning. A platform that took a decade for Wintel PC world to catch up to it in most respects. (I could write an entire post on how backwards it felt going to DOS/Windows in early 1995 as a Mac nerd... both on the software side but especially the hardware side) Had Apple not had crazy R&D problems with their OS projects (Taligent, Copland/Gershwin/etc), the completely new OS would have shipped in ~1996.

Also, I would note that, ultimately, Mac OS X is utterly different in almost all of the ways one would care about. Most google searches on Mac stuff will turn up OS X content. So you're looking for either retrocomputing stuff or 23-30 year old content. And if you're looking for stuff from the late 1990s, well, remember, this was the darkest of the dark era. A lot of Mac users, especially the younger ones with plenty of time to spend on Usenet and the like, left the platform in the dark era. And those who were around... already knew how to work Macs.

What you really want, and I think it will be difficult to find, is someone who can translate 'Windows/PC/etc user thinking' into 'classic Mac user thinking'. And I think those people will be rare because no one made that migration. The migration was the other way around - Mac users abandoning the classic Mac platform for Win98 PCs. People started leaving Windows land back towards Mac in the very very very very tail end of the PPC era, then with the Intel OS X era.

I think you're more likely to find people like me - people with extensive classic Mac experience before the dark era, lots of vagueish memories, but who have spent very little time on the classic Mac platform in the past 30 years unless, to some extent, we've waded back into the classic Mac platform in the last few years. And where our experience will be the weakest is precisely what you're looking for - that sort of early 2000s 'how do I do thing X that became somewhat reasonably feasible in 2001'. Funny thing is, I've mounted ISOs on my retro Macs, downloaded files from a NAS via AFP, and it didn't leave a lasting negative impression, but I guess my expectations were fairly low... and if anything, what was disorienting to me was some of the new stuff like USB, Ethernet/TCP/IP, the Open Firmware boot loader, etc. You could give me a IIci running 6.0.5 or 7.1 and the proper Apple peripherals and... well, the classic Mac OS is like riding a bike, you never really forget...

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-31, 01:29:

I think that's a bit unfair - there was an absolute ton of Mac utilities to circumvent the issues in the older Mac OSes back in […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-30, 21:12:

Also, this is just an observation... and I could be entirely wrong about this... but I think this "It either just works or it is probably impossible" kind of computing environment has lead to a totally different kind of community online. I greatly appreciate the information that users have posted here (ssokolow, VivienM, others...), but it doesn't seem like that level of understanding and knowledge of the hardware and software is found in all of the Mac help-forums and such.

In my searching for answers to problems, I kept finding this really odd reply from experienced Mac users that consisted of something like this: "I have no idea what the answer to your question is, or if that can be done..." or "I don't know, and there is no way of knowing whether that can be fixed..." I ran across comments like these 4 times in a span of an hour looking for what I thought would be some really basic stuff, and I rarely recall ever seeing stuff like this from the helpers (experienced users) on message boards in all my years working on PCs. With PCs it tends to be "Here is how to do it." or "Your setup can't do that because of ___ , but ___ will allow you to do it."

And it is no fault of the Mac users obviously... they have just learned that there may be no fix to things because the OS just doesn't allow you that kind of control. And because the availability of third-party software to circumvent the issues in each OS version can be quite limited, it is hard for them to say one way or another whether there are any workarounds. I am just SO glad that I grew up in a primarily DOS\Windows environment personally, because I have learned that there is almost always a way to make something work with enough time, research and learning from others.

I think that's a bit unfair - there was an absolute ton of Mac utilities to circumvent the issues in the older Mac OSes back in the day. If you had a shareware CD from 1993 or 1994 you would have found an absolutely insane array of little add-ins. If you read the Mac magazines there would be dozens of pages on those things every issue. Keep in mind that, if anything, the classic Mac OS is more customizable - with no memory protection or anything, you can basically make extensions that will mess with anything. This is one of the things that made the classic OS less and less reliable in the 1990s. Many of those extensions got acquired by Apple around the time of System 7.5... and interestingly the functionality continued to be implemented the same way rather than actually integrated into the OS code.

I think part of the problem is that you're looking at this from the perspective of an experienced Windows user. And Windows and TCP/IP networking have basically shaped all desktop operating systems for the past ~29 years. Look at, say, most of the desktop environments for Linux - you can see the influence of the Windows taskbar/start menu/etc interface paradigms. And some of the things you're trying to do - let's be honest, no one had imagined mounting an ISO image in 1995. The entire point of CD-ROM in 1995 was that you could have as much storage as on your entire hard drive on a single optical disc. Not to mention - do you know how long it would take to transfer 650 megs over a dialup modem or even a $4000/month T1? Windows didn't get built-in ISO mounting until 2007; OS X actually had it first. And also - everything to do with file systems would have been completely irrelevant in 1995. You got your software on HFS floppies/CDs, everything worked just right, problem solved. That stuff is only a challenge because in 2024, your primary way of trying to get software into the thing is via TCP/IP networking.

And look, everybody knew that the Mac was... creaky... in the second half of the 1990s. You have a platform that was incredibly innovative in a 400K floppy, 128K of RAM, effectively no networking, single-tasking world designed with zero forward planning. A platform that took a decade for Wintel PC world to catch up to it in most respects. (I could write an entire post on how backwards it felt going to DOS/Windows in early 1995 as a Mac nerd... both on the software side but especially the hardware side) Had Apple not had crazy R&D problems with their OS projects (Taligent, Copland/Gershwin/etc), the completely new OS would have shipped in ~1996.

Also, I would note that, ultimately, Mac OS X is utterly different in almost all of the ways one would care about. Most google searches on Mac stuff will turn up OS X content. So you're looking for either retrocomputing stuff or 23-30 year old content. And if you're looking for stuff from the late 1990s, well, remember, this was the darkest of the dark era. A lot of Mac users, especially the younger ones with plenty of time to spend on Usenet and the like, left the platform in the dark era. And those who were around... already knew how to work Macs.

What you really want, and I think it will be difficult to find, is someone who can translate 'Windows/PC/etc user thinking' into 'classic Mac user thinking'. And I think those people will be rare because no one made that migration. The migration was the other way around - Mac users abandoning the classic Mac platform for Win98 PCs. People started leaving Windows land back towards Mac in the very very very very tail end of the PPC era, then with the Intel OS X era.

I think you're more likely to find people like me - people with extensive classic Mac experience before the dark era, lots of vagueish memories, but who have spent very little time on the classic Mac platform in the past 30 years unless, to some extent, we've waded back into the classic Mac platform in the last few years. And where our experience will be the weakest is precisely what you're looking for - that sort of early 2000s 'how do I do thing X that became somewhat reasonably feasible in 2001'. Funny thing is, I've mounted ISOs on my retro Macs, downloaded files from a NAS via AFP, and it didn't leave a lasting negative impression, but I guess my expectations were fairly low... and if anything, what was disorienting to me was some of the new stuff like USB, Ethernet/TCP/IP, the Open Firmware boot loader, etc. You could give me a IIci running 6.0.5 or 7.1 and the proper Apple peripherals and... well, the classic Mac OS is like riding a bike, you never really forget...

(Just to be clear, because text does not convey emotions\tone... I am not saying any of this with any angst or to be combative. Merely giving my perspective on it, and I appreciate your input greatly. This is an interesting discussion. 😃 )

Fair enough, I get where you're coming from.

Regarding whether I am unfairly expecting a 1995 Apple OS to do 2024 Windows things though... I feel like applying this to basic tasks is an Apple\Mac concept, and that is exactly the issue I have with their platforms. The idea that it is a problem with the user if they have a good reason for doing something that the maker of the device never explicitly intended (no matter how trivial the thing is). It feels like the whole "you're holding it wrong" debacle all over again. It would be one thing if I was asking about trying to make IPX multiplayer gaming work on a bunch of 386 DOS machines over modern wifi networks. Yes, the obstacles to doing something like that are immense and mostly hardware related, but simply making full use of entirely period-correct hardware is an entirely different thing, and I am not talking about disk images. A 1GB hard drive can store a lot of games from the 80s and early 90s... hard drives improve performance and convenience over using removable media for everything... this is a basic concept that IBM compatibles (and probably others) have embraced since the 80s. I would have no need of disk images if Macs of the mid 90s acknowledged that.

PC users have been copying programs off of floppies and CDs (or even downloaded from a BBS in the 80s) from the beginning without ever even thinking of mounting disc images. If you had a PC in 1995 you could copy the files off a CD to a hard drive and make most games work on the hard drive without the CD if you had the space. Sometimes a particularly picky game may require editing a configuration file (CD path = C:\game\CD) or installing a no-CD patch (though that was pretty rare until the very late 90s). No one needed to mount CD images on a home PC to play games or install programs in 1995 because the file system and OS just let the user see and manipulate all of the data contained on discs for the most part.

You could even do this with DOS games. Additionally, you could then type up a batch file that presented a simple game menu that any kid or non-techy could sit down at, press a key and play a game without having to do navigate unfamiliar programs, mount images, etc. This was possible in the 80s on PCs and it has always been possible.

I guess it might not have been clear from my previous post, but I mentioned before that I am thinking of setting this up for someone else (a non-techy) to use because my understanding was that Macs just made these processes simple. Just making them insert a CD to play a game is an option... but that is assuming my Windows PC is able to burn toast images without ruining them. It probably can, but I haven't investigated that yet because I've found lots of games I'd like to make available and I don't feel like burning a couple dozen CDs with 10-50Mb on each one. The the next biggest obstacle though, is that the system is already painfully slow to load programs, so I can't imagine how bad it would be loading games purely from the CD.

If the games were just "on" the hard drive they would automatically benefit from any improvement in hard drive (or SD\CF card) capacity and speed, which would make the system far more useful.

From my perspective, the issue isn't that a 2024 Windows guy wants a 1995 Mac to do modern PC things. It's that after almost 30 years a 1995 Mac still can't get out of it's own way enough to allow a person to experience using it without also having to experience 99% the flaws it had in 1995.

I will keep messing with it because I am learning a lot about old Macs, and I am making progress with it as I go, but my goal of giving it to someone to use is becoming less likely the more I use it. It doesn't matter if I am okay mounting a disc image and playing a game (I have no problem doing this, even if it is unintuitive). I just wouldn't expect a person who's computing experience is almost entirely on an iPad to do it.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-31, 03:25:

(Just to be clear, because text does not convey emotions\tone... I am not saying any of this with any angst or to be combative. […]
Show full quote

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-31, 01:29:

I think that's a bit unfair - there was an absolute ton of Mac utilities to circumvent the issues in the older Mac OSes back in […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-30, 21:12:

Also, this is just an observation... and I could be entirely wrong about this... but I think this "It either just works or it is probably impossible" kind of computing environment has lead to a totally different kind of community online. I greatly appreciate the information that users have posted here (ssokolow, VivienM, others...), but it doesn't seem like that level of understanding and knowledge of the hardware and software is found in all of the Mac help-forums and such.

In my searching for answers to problems, I kept finding this really odd reply from experienced Mac users that consisted of something like this: "I have no idea what the answer to your question is, or if that can be done..." or "I don't know, and there is no way of knowing whether that can be fixed..." I ran across comments like these 4 times in a span of an hour looking for what I thought would be some really basic stuff, and I rarely recall ever seeing stuff like this from the helpers (experienced users) on message boards in all my years working on PCs. With PCs it tends to be "Here is how to do it." or "Your setup can't do that because of ___ , but ___ will allow you to do it."

And it is no fault of the Mac users obviously... they have just learned that there may be no fix to things because the OS just doesn't allow you that kind of control. And because the availability of third-party software to circumvent the issues in each OS version can be quite limited, it is hard for them to say one way or another whether there are any workarounds. I am just SO glad that I grew up in a primarily DOS\Windows environment personally, because I have learned that there is almost always a way to make something work with enough time, research and learning from others.

I think that's a bit unfair - there was an absolute ton of Mac utilities to circumvent the issues in the older Mac OSes back in the day. If you had a shareware CD from 1993 or 1994 you would have found an absolutely insane array of little add-ins. If you read the Mac magazines there would be dozens of pages on those things every issue. Keep in mind that, if anything, the classic Mac OS is more customizable - with no memory protection or anything, you can basically make extensions that will mess with anything. This is one of the things that made the classic OS less and less reliable in the 1990s. Many of those extensions got acquired by Apple around the time of System 7.5... and interestingly the functionality continued to be implemented the same way rather than actually integrated into the OS code.

I think part of the problem is that you're looking at this from the perspective of an experienced Windows user. And Windows and TCP/IP networking have basically shaped all desktop operating systems for the past ~29 years. Look at, say, most of the desktop environments for Linux - you can see the influence of the Windows taskbar/start menu/etc interface paradigms. And some of the things you're trying to do - let's be honest, no one had imagined mounting an ISO image in 1995. The entire point of CD-ROM in 1995 was that you could have as much storage as on your entire hard drive on a single optical disc. Not to mention - do you know how long it would take to transfer 650 megs over a dialup modem or even a $4000/month T1? Windows didn't get built-in ISO mounting until 2007; OS X actually had it first. And also - everything to do with file systems would have been completely irrelevant in 1995. You got your software on HFS floppies/CDs, everything worked just right, problem solved. That stuff is only a challenge because in 2024, your primary way of trying to get software into the thing is via TCP/IP networking.

And look, everybody knew that the Mac was... creaky... in the second half of the 1990s. You have a platform that was incredibly innovative in a 400K floppy, 128K of RAM, effectively no networking, single-tasking world designed with zero forward planning. A platform that took a decade for Wintel PC world to catch up to it in most respects. (I could write an entire post on how backwards it felt going to DOS/Windows in early 1995 as a Mac nerd... both on the software side but especially the hardware side) Had Apple not had crazy R&D problems with their OS projects (Taligent, Copland/Gershwin/etc), the completely new OS would have shipped in ~1996.

Also, I would note that, ultimately, Mac OS X is utterly different in almost all of the ways one would care about. Most google searches on Mac stuff will turn up OS X content. So you're looking for either retrocomputing stuff or 23-30 year old content. And if you're looking for stuff from the late 1990s, well, remember, this was the darkest of the dark era. A lot of Mac users, especially the younger ones with plenty of time to spend on Usenet and the like, left the platform in the dark era. And those who were around... already knew how to work Macs.

What you really want, and I think it will be difficult to find, is someone who can translate 'Windows/PC/etc user thinking' into 'classic Mac user thinking'. And I think those people will be rare because no one made that migration. The migration was the other way around - Mac users abandoning the classic Mac platform for Win98 PCs. People started leaving Windows land back towards Mac in the very very very very tail end of the PPC era, then with the Intel OS X era.

I think you're more likely to find people like me - people with extensive classic Mac experience before the dark era, lots of vagueish memories, but who have spent very little time on the classic Mac platform in the past 30 years unless, to some extent, we've waded back into the classic Mac platform in the last few years. And where our experience will be the weakest is precisely what you're looking for - that sort of early 2000s 'how do I do thing X that became somewhat reasonably feasible in 2001'. Funny thing is, I've mounted ISOs on my retro Macs, downloaded files from a NAS via AFP, and it didn't leave a lasting negative impression, but I guess my expectations were fairly low... and if anything, what was disorienting to me was some of the new stuff like USB, Ethernet/TCP/IP, the Open Firmware boot loader, etc. You could give me a IIci running 6.0.5 or 7.1 and the proper Apple peripherals and... well, the classic Mac OS is like riding a bike, you never really forget...

(Just to be clear, because text does not convey emotions\tone... I am not saying any of this with any angst or to be combative. Merely giving my perspective on it, and I appreciate your input greatly. This is an interesting discussion. 😃 )

Fair enough, I get where you're coming from.

Regarding whether I am unfairly expecting a 1995 Apple OS to do 2024 Windows things though... I feel like applying this to basic tasks is an Apple\Mac concept, and that is exactly the issue I have with their platforms. The idea that it is a problem with the user if they have a good reason for doing something that the maker of the device never explicitly intended (no matter how trivial the thing is). It feels like the whole "you're holding it wrong" debacle all over again. It would be one thing if I was asking about trying to make IPX multiplayer gaming work on a bunch of 386 DOS machines over modern wifi networks. Yes, the obstacles to doing something like that are immense and mostly hardware related, but simply making full use of entirely period-correct hardware is an entirely different thing, and I am not talking about disk images. A 1GB hard drive can store a lot of games from the 80s and early 90s... hard drives improve performance and convenience over using removable media for everything... this is a basic concept that IBM compatibles (and probably others) have embraced since the 80s. I would have no need of disk images if Macs of the mid 90s acknowledged that.

PC users have been copying programs off of floppies and CDs (or even downloaded from a BBS in the 80s) from the beginning without ever even thinking of mounting disc images. If you had a PC in 1995 you could copy the files off a CD to a hard drive and make most games work on the hard drive without the CD if you had the space. Sometimes a particularly picky game may require editing a configuration file (CD path = C:\game\CD) or installing a no-CD patch (though that was pretty rare until the very late 90s). No one needed to mount CD images on a home PC to play games or install programs in 1995 because the file system and OS just let the user see and manipulate all of the data contained on discs for the most part.

You could even do this with DOS games. Additionally, you could then type up a batch file that presented a simple game menu that any kid or non-techy could sit down at, press a key and play a game without having to do navigate unfamiliar programs, mount images, etc. This was possible in the 80s on PCs and it has always been possible.

I guess it might not have been clear from my previous post, but I mentioned before that I am thinking of setting this up for someone else (a non-techy) to use because my understanding was that Macs just made these processes simple. Just making them insert a CD to play a game is an option... but that is assuming my Windows PC is able to burn toast images without ruining them. It probably can, but I haven't investigated that yet because I've found lots of games I'd like to make available and I don't feel like burning a couple dozen CDs with 10-50Mb on each one. The the next biggest obstacle though, is that the system is already painfully slow to load programs, so I can't imagine how bad it would be loading games purely from the CD.

If the games were just "on" the hard drive they would automatically benefit from any improvement in hard drive (or SD\CF card) capacity and speed, which would make the system far more useful.

From my perspective, the issue isn't that a 2024 Windows guy wants a 1995 Mac to do modern PC things. It's that after almost 30 years a 1995 Mac still can't get out of it's own way enough to allow a person to experience using it without also having to experience 99% the flaws it had in 1995.

I will keep messing with it because I am learning a lot about old Macs, and I am making progress with it as I go, but my goal of giving it to someone to use is becoming less likely the more I use it. It doesn't matter if I am okay mounting a disc image and playing a game (I have no problem doing this, even if it is unintuitive). I just wouldn't expect a person who's computing experience is almost entirely on an iPad to do it.

Okay - maybe I am missing something here, but if anything, classic Mac apps, because they were designed to run on floppies and they were designed on the assumption that you wouldn't have an 'Installer' program Windows-style (although those started to pop up as soon as you had multi-floppy applications being installed to hard drives), should be easier to move between drives. (Something they've continued to do with app bundles in OS X) And the software you're using is... too old... to have CD checks for piracy reasons?

If I scroll up in this thread, will I find a reference to exactly what software it is that's giving you this trouble? Given my retro project of the evening isn't going anywhere, I'm tempted to fire up one of my vintage Macs (all G4s, so much newer than yours) and see if I can figure out where you're getting tripped up.

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-31, 03:36:

If I scroll up in this thread, will I find a reference to exactly what software it is that's giving you this trouble? Given my retro project of the evening isn't going anywhere, I'm tempted to fire up one of my vintage Macs (all G4s, so much newer than yours) and see if I can figure out where you're getting tripped up.

Okay, I found a Sam & Max toast image on a well known Mac abandonware web site. Mounted it on OS X Leopard (that's the only OS that supports the wifi card in my TiBook) and I see what they did. There's a teeny Sam & Max application and then a hidden giant "Sam & Max data" file.

I think the real problem here is that the game developer did something cute. I don't think putting hidden files on HFS CD-ROMs is really something super-proper... although my suspicion is that if you copied that file and made it unhidden, the game would run fine from any volume. I'm just trying to think about how one could do that with only classic OS tools...