Hello, I recently got a Macintosh Power Book 190. I bought it because the assembly language class I am taking is focusing on the Motorola 68k processors. I didn't think it would be hard to find a development environment and install it, but I was wrong. My biggest problem is that there is no cd drive so I have to transfer everything on floppies. I have not been able to find floppy images of apples MPW. I recently downloaded Think C v6.0, but I can't figure out how to write the 750KB images to a 1.44MB floppy. Any suggestions on what environment to use and how to install it would be greatly appreciated.
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2012, February 22 - 5:39am
#1
What development environment should I use, and how would I get it on my system?
Comments
2012, February 22 - 6:18am
#2
Do you have to make clones of the images? In the classic Mac OS it is almost always enough just to copy the files over to the floppies.
2012, February 22 - 8:11am
#3
There are images of MPW3.3 on floppy disks at
http://www.macintoshgarden.org/apps/macintosh-programmer%E2%80%99s-workshop
2012, February 23 - 2:27pm
#4
There is no way for a PC to write a 800k macintosh disk. There are compatibility issues. You can use 1.4 mb floppies to transfer. What I would suggest is get a copy of Disk Copy(its free). Copy that and your disk images to a dos formated 1.4 mb floppy, then use Disk Copy to mount the images in Mac OS.
There is another route. The 190 has a PCMCIA slot. Get a Compact Flash card, a CF to PCMCIA card adapter, and a CF card reader for your PC. I found all these at Radio Shack, Best Buy or something similar. This will look like a hard drive to the mac. One thing you might try, is partition it to have a Mac OS partition, and a Dos Partition. Then you can use it to transfer all sorts of large files. You can also boot the Mac from it. This has some power and speed advantages. Does your battery still work?
No matter what, I would transfer programs like Think C in their disk images and mount them in Mac OS. I have always had better luck that way.
2012, March 2 - 7:54pm
#5
I might try the cf card some time to run the OS from, my batter is dead.
2012, March 2 - 7:58pm
#6
I am trying to copy the MPW images over on a dos floppy, but the Mac is shortening the name, the icon shows PC, and I cannot open them with image mounter. Should I wipe the drive and install 7.5.5 to start from scratch? How hard would it be to do that, I've never tried to boot off anything but the hard drive so I don't know how it works.
2012, March 2 - 10:40pm
#7
Dont kill your System unless you are sure to know how to restore!
What other computers do you own or can get hold of?
Did you get a HDI30 or HDI29 SCSI cable with the PB190?
What operating system are you running with your PB190?
Macs could read data on PC formatted floppies fine, but a System Extension was needed, PC-Exchange IIRC.
Some old Windows box with BII build 142 might serve well for writing Mac floppies.
There is HFV Exporer of course and a null-modem should work too for moving some .sit files to the PB.
2012, March 3 - 3:00pm
#8
I have a Windows 7 machine, a Linux machine, and an OS X hackintosh. No, I don't have a
SCSI cable or even another device with a SCSI controller. The PB190 is running 7.5.2. Is Disc Copy better than Image Mounter? Maybe I could do what rpangrazio said with the CF card, take my HDD out and install 7.5.5 on the CF. That way if I screw something up I can always just put the HDD back in.
2012, March 4 - 1:05pm
#9
If your Win7 machine has a floppy drive, it should not be too hard to write HFS 1.4MB disks with BasiliskII build 142 or with HFS Explorer.
The same goes for the Linux box and a suitable BII build.
7.5.2 should read PC floppies without issues, at least my PowerMac does that all the time.
If you should use PC floppies, be sure to transfer stuffed files and unstuff only as you got them on the PB.
For intermediate file handling, I would set up BasiliskII. So you could also chop bigger files to floppy chunks with Stuffit´s split and join.
PS: Sure a good idea to make use of the PCMCIA/CF stuff, if you got the needed hardware.
2012, March 3 - 8:07pm
#10
I didn't realize system 8 would run on a 68k machine, but all I can find are CD images, not floppies. I have a usb floppy drive, but I think I remember seeing something about those not working with Basilisk. I installed stuffit expander on my PB, but it still won't open .sit files, so I have been extracting them on my OS X machine and transferring the extracted files on PC formatted floppies.
2012, March 4 - 6:53am
#11
I installed stuffit expander on my PB, but it still won't open .sit files
Some technical reasons (or bad programming, who knows) prevents .sit files from unstuffing by Stuffit by double-clickin' in the Finder. The files needs to be drag & dropped onto Stuffit (or use the 'File' -> 'Unstuff' menu item).
2012, March 4 - 1:33pm
#12
Whats your location, Ferminator?
Floppy images are available from Apple´s server: http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates...
Floppy install is not such a big thing, was quite common in the days of yonder. 
Some notes for creating the floppies are here: http://macfaq.org/software/macos.shtml
2012, March 4 - 2:46am
#13
I'm at Wichita State University. (That is in Wichita, KS) I would love some disks or raw images that I could write to disks with my other machines. If someone has disks they would be willing to send me shoot me an email and I will tell you my mailing address. I would like to get my PB running 8.1.
2012, March 4 - 1:45pm
#14
If you can manage to have Mac OS 7.5 running on something else than your HDD, it should be possible to install 8.1 from a disk image on CF or else. I must admit, I never did that, as I always had plenty of SCSI drives. Seems the adapter you´ll need is still available, grab one while you can: http://www.partsdata.de/Powerbook_SCSI-Adapter_HDI30_an_CEN-50_mit_Dock_...
Edit: Replaced 'xxx 7' by 'Mac OS 7' - IIGS User
2012, March 4 - 8:30pm
#15
Definitely the PC Card slot is the way to transfer files back and forth to the 190. My PB540c has the PC Card expansion and I use it all the time for transferring files. Making floppies is a waste of time. I have an adapter to use Compact Flash cards for the PC Card slot, and a USB adapter to use the CF card with my Windows 7 machine if I need to, though usually I just move files with the PC Card adapter to my Pismo. (This is how I make disk images of most of my floppy-based uploads to the Mac Garden.) I use a 4GB CF card formatted for PC's.
2012, March 4 - 10:43pm
#16
MCP what model card are you using? I want to make sure I get one that will work if I decide that is the way to go.
2012, March 4 - 11:50pm
#17
SanDisk products have always worked for me, the adapters and the cards, and Office Depot has USB adapters for Compact Flash. I wouldn't pay more than $10US for any adapter. My largest card is 4GB. They didn't come pre-formatted and I can't remember if the PC-formatted one was achieved by formatting with the PowerBook in DOS format or whether I had to format it with another machine or not.
2012, March 5 - 1:13am
#18
I already have a universal usb card reader that should work. Thanks for the help. I hope I can install the OS on it in so I can keep the HDD in it's current state to go back to if I mess something up.