Okay, so I bought a wonderful Macintosh Classic off of the ol' craigslist for $45 and I need help with the software. Okay, so I use TransMac to copy stuff onto floppies, but stuff like StuffIt 1.5.1 just turns into a "file". The only program I have gotten this to work on was Mac paint, but that was because it was on a .DSK and I used HFSExplorer. Thanks!
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2013, August 11 - 4:59am
#1
I need help.
Comments
2013, August 11 - 11:14am
#2
Nice bargain! Consider exchanging the 3,6V Li battery if it is older than six years.
You may know that "Command-Option-X-O" will boot your Classic from ROM.
If you use HFSExplorer only choose .sit or .img files for transferring. Apps not inside a "container" will be destroyed when moving it though the PC´s file system.
The Mac emulator Basilisk_II can write to 1.4MB HFS floppies. That way you can move Mac apps to your Classic without corrupting them like this:
Download data to your host.
Copy data to the emulators virtual disk.
Write to floppy.
2013, August 11 - 4:42pm
#3
I'm also planning to put a new clock battery in mine (which is a G3).
2013, August 11 - 4:57pm
#4
1/2AA 3.6V Lithium batteries can be sort of expensive. I found an eBay listing, though, that sells 5 of them for about the price ($11) of what 1 can cost by itself. I'll let you guys know if the product is good when I get it.
2013, August 11 - 5:40pm
#5
Not AA, ER3S.
2013, August 11 - 9:58pm
#6
ER3S, is apparently a specific model, from Maxell, of a 1/2 AA-sized battery. Note the "1/2" in front of the "AA."
2013, August 11 - 9:43pm
#7
Okay. So the computer I use has to have a floppy drive for Basilisk? Or am I just reading this wrong? I would like to create a Classic/Classic II thread to assist other dummies on these sorts of problems. Thanks!
Edit: Spelling 
2013, August 11 - 10:14pm
#8
Both HFVExplorer & Basilisk II are capable of formatting and writing to Macintosh floppy media. Caveat here is that your PC has to have a floppy drive and the floppy media must be 1.4MB HD only.
2013, August 11 - 10:20pm
#9
I wrote to a floppy in Basilisk and now I am booting up an old eMachines to write to me eComputronics World floppies. I have about 100 of em'.
2013, August 11 - 11:35pm
#10
Okay. Some stuff. I got a serial drive with the purchase of the Classic, my thought was to copy the SSW 7 files to it with my serial port on my PC. My PC will not detect the drive. Probably because it is a Mac-Formatted drive. Anyway, my thought is to one-by-one copy the SSW 7 installs to the Classic, then to the serial drive connected to the Classic, boot from the ROM, then install on the system drive. Sound good?
Edit: Crap, the serial "scuzzy" drive just farted. Now it is just clicking. Dang it.
Edit: Replaced 'xxx 7' by 'SSW 7' - IIGS User
2013, August 12 - 3:22am
#11
Okay. Was just trying to use Disc Copy to copy the Mac OS 7.5.3 updaters. Disc Copy would give me error -89 on good floppies! And if I tried to use them, I would get a -99 error on the installer. Ugh. Suggestions?
Edit: Replaced 'xxx 7' by 'Mac OS 7' - IIGS User
2013, August 12 - 4:01am
#12
The 7.5.3 updaters aren't really a good thing to use, *unless* you use an emulator to join everything up into the single .smi image, which then can be stuffed with Stuffit or CompactPro, or binhexed, then pushed out over the network. It also won't work in System 6.
By looking through the index of the following website, you'll find loads of information on how to do everything you'd need to for this machine, from networking with Ethernet, serial data, how to install the OS, how to write disk images, and more.
2013, August 12 - 4:26am
#13
Serial ports on PC's are usually 9 pins. Parallel ports are, on the other hand, 25 pins. SCSI and parallel ports were often confused by users. This often (not always) leads to killing the hardware by mistake, pinouts are not the same.
Could you please elaborate more on how are you creating the floppies?
2013, August 12 - 4:03pm
#14
Back in the days, when almost every computer had a 1.4MB floppy drive, it was rather easy to prepare 1.4 MB HFS floppies for Mac with B_II version 0.8.0.142 (Also referred to as Build 142) on a PC.
To be on the safe side, one would initialize a HD floppy with the Mac, eject an cram it in the PC floppy drive. Normally HFS floppies should auto load in Basilisk_II, but it was not uncommon to use Ctrl-Shift-F8 to force floppy load.
If you have a USB floppy and MacOS 10.5 or lower, you can also write HFS floppies that way.
If you need to transfer large files to the Classic, a SCSI HBA for PC may be worth a thought.
B_II Build 142 can handle Mac SCSI drives. You would have to find a suitable SCSI storage device though.
I happen to have two spare PCI SCSI HBAs in my crap box. If you live in Europe, you can have one for postage. Drop me a note here: 3x8bit(at)gmail(dot)com The HBAs have been working with XP or W2K but I don´t think there were drivers for W7.
2013, August 12 - 8:14pm
#15
Dang. Wish I was in Europe. Okay, this classic has no network access and the only way for me to get info across is to manually copy it over via floppy.
2013, August 14 - 5:13am
#16
@vintagecoke
Just use an emulator (Such as SheepShaver) and run Toast to make a uncompressed CD image that you can then burn using cdrecord (part of cdrtools) to bun on your host OS (windows), burn the CD, and spend $20USD on an external SCSI CD-ROM (4x or 8x read [needed to corectly read most CD-R disks for some reason]) and plug it in to the Classic, in line after your SCSI HDD (get a new one they are cheep now), also get an ISO image of Mac OS 7.1 and burn that to a CD (can get that from winworldpc). Now make sure that the SCSI ID of the HDD is 0, and the SCSI ID of the CD-ROM is 3 (it will make a difertence), use a pached version of the apple CDROM extension for a driver that does not require an Apple branded drive. Now clear the PRAM on the classic, put the OS 7.1 CD in (with a copy of the patched CD-ROM extension) the CD-ROM and cold power on the computer, it will boot from the CD-ROM since it has a higher SCSI ID than the HDD, install the OS, then copy the pached CD-ROM extension into the Extensions folder replacing the original BEFORE ROBOOTING, then reboot from the HDD and have fun.
See it is simple.
DO NOT FORGOT TO TERMINATE THE LAST SCSI DEVICE IN THE CHAIN
@24bit
you said:
"Back in the days, when almost every computer had a 1.4MB floppy drive, it was rather easy to prepare 1.4 MB HFS floppies for Mac with B_II version 0.8.0.142 (Also referred to as Build 142) on a PC."
I can not speak for any one else, though I will not use a computer that does not have a floppy drive, they still come in handy to often to abandon. And almost all motherboards still have the controller, so it is easy enough to attach an internal floppy drive to any computer (and NOT A USB UNIT they are of very poor compatibility)
2013, August 14 - 6:46am
#17
Don't use a PC floppy drive, they cannot read/write 400/800kb floppies!
I found this out the hard way 
I have two clean, working 1.44MB PC floppy drives in storage for emergencies.
2013, August 14 - 6:16pm
#18
@themacmeister
That is why I recommended getting and using a SCSI CD-ROM on the Macintosh Classic.
2013, August 15 - 11:48pm
#19
Was just making general comment kd0tpc, wasn't referring to any other posts...