As you all know, many of the downloads available on this site are in the form of loose files rather than any kind of disk image. And as you all know, this is not a desirable situation for many reasons. It's especially undesirable for the early files that don't work on MacOS 8 or later. Those files must be loaded from HFS volumes, and current MacOS can no longer create HFS volumes. For those files to be used, they must first be processed by older hardware.
This situation is a pain to fix because each download has to be checked by hand. If it's found to be a collection of loose files, those files then need to be imaged with a program that can create HFS volumes like Disk Copy 6.x or similar. That usually means the download check has to be made from an older machine, or the files have to be transferred to an older machine to fix. We're talking many, many hours.
I propose that we crowdsource a fix.
What we need are volunteers who have the ability to safely download loose vintage Mac files (i.e., they're using a Mac) and who have the ability to create HFS (not HFS+) images of those files.
We also need a method of dividing up the labor. I propose the following.
Most of the downloads on here are tagged with a year. If you click on a year, you are shown all the available downloads tagged with that year. Let's have volunteers claim a year and then go through and check all the downloads available for that year and fix the ones that need fixing. I'll do 1988.
1984:
1985
1986:
1987:
1988: Arthegall
1989:
1990:
1991:
1992:
1993:
1994:
1995:
1996:
Anything released after 1996 should work fine on an HFS+ volume and is not as immediate a concern. Once the early years are done, we can do the later ones.
Thoughts? Volunteers?
