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Macintosh Classic.

Tupin

Experienced Member
Joined
Jun 7, 2009
Messages
436
Location
St. Louis, MO
I'm getting a Macintosh Classic tomorrow, and I have a few questions about it. How can I expand the RAM past 1MB? Does it use a SCSI harddrive and if so, can I install a Quantum ProDrive? And lastly, what do I have to do to run games downloaded from the Internet? Most of them are .sit files, are those compatible?

Sorry for all the questions, I just want to know about what I'm getting.
 
It uses SIMMs. The hardest part is opening the case. ;)

Yes, the internal hard drive is a SCSI drive.

Go get the Stuffit Expander software for the .sit files.
 
What version of Stuffit do I need? Do I install it on the Mac or the PC I'm using to copy files with?

Oh, I thought I needed a special card to increase the RAM, it just has SIMM slots?
 
The Mac, 128 Mac, and 512 Mac uses jumpers/DIP RAM or special boards... the Mac Plus, SE, SE/30, and Classic all use SIMMs for memory. You CAN put accelerator boards in the SE, SE/30, and Classic to speed it up and add more memory if you want.

Stuffit is an executable program you put on the Mac.

RJ
 
Where can I download Stuffit?

Just realized I have some Macintosh 72-pin SIMM RAM boards that I have from when I got my Quadra. Two are 4MB, but I'm not sure what the other one is.
 
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Yes, so long as you keep your hands from the vertical-standing analog board and the majority of the material that's attached to the tube you will be fine
Also, I would like to point out that aside from the Classic being a horribly slow unit you can boot system 6 from RAM. I think the key sequence is "Command (apple key) + Option + X + O".
Also, quite a few people upgraded their classics so you should already have the ram expansion board already installed.
 
Cool, and I found 1MB RAM chips for $1 each, but I heard problems with the two-chip rather than eight chip ones.

Oh, and about the Stuffit, I found one, but it needs 8MB of RAM, so that's out of the question. I can't really find any earlier versions so I don't know where to go from here.
 
I picked it up and it works! It was giving me a black-and-white lined screen initially, but it worked and booted to System 7 with a whopping 4,096K of RAM, the maximum. :D

I got the following:
Macintosh Classic w/4MB RAM
Apple Keyboard II
ADB Mouse
Print Shop
Macintosh Plus (?!?!) manual with disks and instructional cassette/manual
StyleWriter II printer and instructions
Manual for a DASCH- Disk Acceleration/Storage Control (?!?!)
Macintosh Classic manual
Guide to System 7.1
AppleWorks Guide
Microsoft Word 3.1 Guide
August 1993 issue of MacWorld

The computer had several programs installed on it as well.

Paid $25 for all of it, I'm happy with it and the magazines and instructions are almost as fun as the computer itself. :D

Now, to figure out how to copy files from a Windows PC to a Macintosh...
 
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Now, to figure out how to copy files from a Windows PC to a Macintosh...

It's a good thing it came with more than 1 MB of RAM. The tricky thing about the Classic is that while 1 MB is soldered to the motherboard; any more than that requires an accessory memory expansion card. The expansion card has another 1 MB soldered, plus two 30-pin SIMM slots; each of which will accept up to a 1 MB SIMM.

So if you ever see a Classic with only 1 MB, avoid it. It means it doesn't have the expansion card, without which, you're not going to add any more RAM. And those RAM expansion cards are hard to come by now.

Second, for copying files; try putting in a PC-formatted floppy. It might have the "PC Exchange" software already on there, which allows the Mac to read PC-formatted floppies. The real trick is that hopefully it has Stuffit already on there.

The Mac OS uses files that have two 'forks' to them. One is the 'normal' data fork, the second is the 'resource' fork, which contains things like the icon, metadata, the file type (no .xyz extensions, after all,) and the creating application. When you copy a file from a PC, it only has the data fork; so the Mac OS doesn't know what to do with the file. If you have PC Exchange loaded, that software will translate the three-letter-extension into Mac-friendly 'creator code' file type, so you can open them. But many Mac-specific files *MUST* have their resource fork, or else the file becomes useless. (Applications, for one, suffer from this.) If you try to download the file in Windows, it will be missing its resource fork.

That's where Stuffit comes in. By compressing Mac files into an archive, it retains the resource fork. Even if the Stuffit archive (.sit) doesn't have its resource fork any more, the files inside do. And Stuffit Expander is nice enough to work on .sit files that have lost their resource fork.

Other online formats you will see for older Mac software are:
.bin: Raw Macintosh binary, with resource fork. If you download this on a Windows machine, it will become useless.
.hqx: Bin-Hex file. A 'text encoding' format, like UUENCODE, that includes the resource fork. You'll need a software transcoder (Some later versions of Stuffit will do this,) to translate back to native Mac. This not only doesn't save space (like a Stuffit file,) it takes *MORE* space, since the file has been encoded with plain text characters instead of the more space-efficient binary.
 
I got a disk with PC Exchange and Stuffit on it, and it recognizes it's a PC formatted floppy and can UnStuff .sit files, but I can't open .exe files on DOS disks.
 
Another issue, I can UnStuff some .sit archives, but others after I click UnStuff, it does nothing. I'm downloading them from Macintosh Garden, the only thing I can think about is not being compatible with System 7.
 
Question: I'm trying to hook up an Imagewriter II printer to the Macintosh Classic, and it doesn't show up in Chooser. How do I select it?
 
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