I have just bought a macintosh classic but it has no applications on it.

What is the best and cheapest way to get word or powerpoint on it or games.

@Bob101 , welcome to the forum!

Since the Classic has a high density floppy drive, you can ready PC floppies with it, and you should be able to make Mac 1.44mb floppies from your existing PCs, as well. So, you can put whatever you want onto floppies for it.

If you’re willing to make the investment, though, I strongly suggest that you get Big Mess O’ Wires’ Floppy Emu device. It’s an amazing replacement for almost all Mac floppy drives, and gives you the ability to mount virtual disks very easily, from SD cards:

http://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/

- Alex

ajacocks said:

@Bob101 , welcome to the forum!

Since the Classic has a high density floppy drive, you can ready PC floppies with it, and you should be able to make Mac 1.44mb floppies from your existing PCs, as well. So, you can put whatever you want onto floppies for it.

If you’re willing to make the investment, though, I strongly suggest that you get Big Mess O’ Wires’ Floppy Emu device. It’s an amazing replacement for almost all Mac floppy drives, and gives you the ability to mount virtual disks very easily, from SD cards:

http://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/

- Alex

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i have worked out that with my usb floppy reader i can read the old hfs format on a raspberry pi but it wont yet me drag old applications off macintosh gardens on to it as it just says permission denied and i knew things existed like that floppy emu but i want to be able to do it properly using actual floppy discs

I use winimage usually. Most mac software is available in .sit or .dsk format, so pretty easy to use with winimage.


Theres a great place to find most stuff...

It drives me absolutely crazy that the "standard" way to provide mac DISK IMAGES for download is compressed in a stuffit archive. There is no easy way to extract them on a PC

maxtherabbit said:

It drives me absolutely crazy that the "standard" way to provide mac DISK IMAGES for download is compressed in a stuffit archive. There is no easy way to extract them on a PC

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That's because only quite recently was writing floppies for the mac on a PC reliable and well documented. Before that it was EXPECTED you had another mac that could both download the file and write it out with Disk Copy. If you start distributing mac files in formats other than stuffit you get the Macintosh Garden, where images are distributed on even stupider formats and imaging programs. (and on an https site no less, so even if you do have a classic mac with networking and a browser you still can't access the trashpile of a website)

Compact macs, or really any mac that doesn't have a CD drive are easy traps.

NeXT said:

(and on an https site no less, so even if you do have a classic mac with networking and a browser you still can't access the trashpile of a website)

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Not true, they have a regular http site, I was using it just yesterday on my Performa 6360/180. Though the pages are completely broken because Netscape Navigator 4.5 can't properly render modern websites. Classilla is far too slow on my 6360 and usually hangs.

I can also navigate it on my LC III, but that's a painful experience, even overclocked to 33 MHz with 36 MB of RAM.

But it is true that the format the downloads are stored in is a crap shoot, there's no consistency at all. Sometimes it's an ISO, other times it's a sit, hqx, bin, dsk, img, image or even Mac OS X disk image formats.

There's also the problem that many of the archives are corrupt and don't decompress properly.

These are my recollections from my LC II running System 7 back in the day:

If you have the extension that allows you to read DOS floppies, or a late enough version of system 7, the Mac can read PC floppies without any trouble. However, the files won't work at first, because System 7 stores its files as a "data fork" (text) and a "resource fork" (icons, sounds, code, picts, etc etc). You must restore the resource fork for the file to work right, and the easiest way to do that if I recall correctly is to drop it into Stuffit Expander. You must copy it off of the DOS floppy onto an HFS filesystem first, of course, as DOS not supporting the resource fork is the whole problem to begin with. In this way, you can transfer files from your PC.

You could also do the same with a null-modem cable over serial, but you'll still need to restore the resource fork in the same way. Note that the serial asic in the old Macs is an RS422 device. It will run at like 250kbit in RS422 mode (ie, LocalTalk), but when you are using it as an RS232 port you will be limited to 9600 baud, which bites.

If you don't already have Stuffit Expander on the machine, you'll have to obtain a Mac floppy somewhere that has it on it. Mine is currently out of commission, or I'd offer to send you one. ;(

If you have the uh.... I think it's DB-19(?) floppy port on the back... I don't remember if the classic was old enough to still use that interface or not; I think it did though, the FloppyEmu is far and away the best choice if you have a non-booting machine that needs an OS installed to a hard drive. Assuming he is able to get the chips to make them still. Read the docs, as there is different firmware required depending on whether you are attaching it to an old Mac or an Apple II.

If you can get hold of a SCSI Zip drive that still works, and have a way to write to Zip disks on your PC, there are some System 6 and 7 bootable Zip disk images out there, although I can't recall the URL. That was how I got my IIci going the first time.

Note that if you have to replace the hard drive for some reason (I recommend SCSI2SD), Apple's "HD SC Setup" (partitioning) program only supports "official" Apple-branded disk drives (which is a crock). If you put a non-apple drive in, you'll need to get a patched version of the partitioner to allow you to partition the drive for HFS. This patched utility is on the Zip disk images mentioned above.

Sorry I can't be more help. Not much time tonight. But if you can't find what you need, please do post back and I'll do a little more looking as soon as I get a chance. If all else fails, I can write you a set of System 7 installation floppies here at some point once I get all my stuff put back together.

Good luck! They are cool machines, although I can't say I am a huge fan of the monochrome screens in the Classic. It was an odd choice, as I think they also had color Macs out at the same time. The Classic was contemporary with the original LC, yes?

Addendum: If I had a machine like that, and I didn't already have the AsanteTalk, I think my final solution would be a SCSI2SD and mounting the HFS partition on Linux to transfer files to it.

If you have an LCIII already and a network card, just get an older NAS box that uses samba, for its what I use for anything not in a writable disk format (eg .sit archives).

You can add files in winimage, but will need a blank mac formatted diskette image, or write an image and remove files so its empty, then add whatever... If needed I can attach a blank diskette image.

NeXT said:

That's because only quite recently was writing floppies for the mac on a PC reliable and well documented. Before that it was EXPECTED you had another mac that could both download the file and write it out with Disk Copy. If you start distributing mac files in formats other than stuffit you get the Macintosh Garden, where images are distributed on even stupider formats and imaging programs. (and on an https site no less, so even if you do have a classic mac with networking and a browser you still can't access the trashpile of a website)

Compact macs, or really any mac that doesn't have a CD drive are easy traps.

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This reply makes no sense to me, unless we have very different concepts of "recently"

Macs have been using MFM 1.44MB disks since the 90s. There is no documentation required to make a raw binary sector image of such a disk on any platform.

If we were talking about 400/800kB GCR it would be a different matter.

I filled the whole 40 mb hard disk of my Classic solely by using 1.44 mb floppy disks and WinImage, HFVExplorer, Aladdin Expander, and Mini vMac on the PC. There's nothing complicated here. Just takes the will to do it.

maxtherabbit said:

It drives me absolutely crazy that the "standard" way to provide mac DISK IMAGES for download is compressed in a stuffit archive. There is no easy way to extract them on a PC

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Aladdin Expander? Then strip the first 84 bytes from the file and you get a raw disk image.

It just pisses me off to be required to download a proprietary archive tool. There is no valid justification for it. We're not talking about files with resource forks to preserve, we're talking about raw binary images.

This reply makes no sense to me, unless we have very different concepts of "recently"

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The last ten years. I recall in 2012 there was nothing mainstream for either writing out disks or emulating drives until BMOW came along and within five years there were multiple hardware tools and at least three software utilities capable of writing out mac disks on a PC. They probably existed before that but mostly being on 68KMLA back then I was stuck in a crowd that licked the schoolbus window and struggled to comprehend outward thinking.

It just pisses me off to be required to download a proprietary archive tool.

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A copy of stuffit expander came bundled starting with OS 8. If you can't download it, pop in an OS disc and pull it from the Internet Extras folder.
Also it's no different than calling zip or rar files proprietary. Hell, even lzh stuff. You were all still equally screwed if you ended up with that.

Also has it ever been a pleasant experience unpacking an archive on vice-versa? Unzipping on a mac and unstuffing on a PC has been a trip on its own.

Everything Mac is proprietary, isn't it?

so how about just don't compress the disk images at all?

If there is one thing I trust stuffit for its the fact I can trash the resource fork or get the compressed file after it was mishandled by something like an older PC or a FAT-formatted CD-ROM (EG the software pack I got with my Newton 2100 was a burned CD full of stuffed packages that was loaded up on a PC) and if I drop the "file" into Stuffit Expander, 8/10 it will recognize it as a Stuffit file still and extract everything because stuffit files don't put anything critical in the resource fork. You can blow it completely away and as long as the data fork isn't damaged you can still extract it.
The copy of Stuffit Lite you get on the Mac OS CD's is also small. You can fit the expander and the Stuffit Engine extension on an 800K floppy and solve a lot of problems.

maxtherabbit said:

so how about just don't compress the disk images at all?

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Yeah its really quite the nightmare to make old mac disks if you dont surround yourself with at least semi modern macs. I remember the learning curve was brutal. I had to first figure out the various compression utilies just to get a disk image (which is small and should not be compressed) then mount the disk image, using one of several imager programs (one programs certainly wont work for them all!) once its mounted create another disk image from the mount and then you will be able to use that new disk image to make disks without all the other steps (i.e. make a folder and save them). I remember how at first I couldnt just use any of the dozens and dozens of disk images on the internet to just make a disk.. Then It occured to me , they MOUNT to the system fine, just rip a new image.. and voila. ITs stupid and the pc world definitely makes more sense and has a better method.

Still willing to send ya a few diskettes provided its not dozens LOL. But I agree, its sometimes a pitfa to get stuff transferred easily without other mac hardware. Old LC systems are the best inbetweener in my opinion. Can do 800k and 1.44 floppies, really cheap, and if you need a network card, I have a couple still new in the box I be willing to sell/trade.

For network storage I use a galaxy 3507lr samba nas box. Works a treat with the LC era machines. Ive seen em go on ebay for 20 dollars w/o a drive. 40gb+ IDE drives are still plentiful.

twolazy said:

Still willing to send ya a few diskettes provided its not dozens LOL. But I agree, its sometimes a pitfa to get stuff transferred easily without other mac hardware. Old LC systems are the best inbetweener in my opinion. Can do 800k and 1.44 floppies, really cheap, and if you need a network card, I have a couple still new in the box I be willing to sell/trade.

For network storage I use a galaxy 3507lr samba nas box. Works a treat with the LC era machines. Ive seen em go on ebay for 20 dollars w/o a drive. 40gb+ IDE drives are still plentiful.

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Yeah I like the LC series myself I have maybe 7. 1's 2's a III, and a 475. I use the all in one 475 the most to make disks since its the fastest. They of course all need to be recapped and the psu's as well before they work. I recapped most of them last year.

An external blue scsi or external SCSI2SD is good for backing up and transfering files.