exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Good show. I did read somewhere that it was possible to play Dark Forces on a 68030.... ohh.

http://www.mac.org/system/pseud040/

Any easy way to get software off the PC and on to a Mac?

System 7.1 and later came with an extension allowing you to read and write PC floppies. So just stick the SIT or HQX archive on the floppy and copy it across.

The biggest problem is bootstrapping StuffIt Expander without StuffIt Expander to extract the archive.

I've had to learn Amigaese which has similar disk/archive issues but never really invested any time into Macese. Not a lot of point when Atari is perfect. :-)

Well, the most important thing you need to know is that a "file" on a Mac is actually two files in the filesystem, the "resource fork", holding the meta data about the file, such as it's type, whether it's executable and if so how to start it, and what program should be used to open it, and the "data fork" the code or data. Without both of those the file is useless.

So, to transfer files between machines files have to be put into an archive of some kind to bundle them up. StuffIt was the most popular program to do this and files it produces have the suffix HQX or SIT (self-extracting archive). You'll also see "binhex" files which further wrap files into 7 bit ASCII encoding, designed to be transmitted over serial connections, very much like UUencode.

Well, it's fully upgraded now. So that's 20MB RAM, 768K VRAM, 68882 FPU and a 4GB drive courtesy of the BlueSCSI V2, and with a fresh install of the British version of MacOS System 7.5 with QuicktimeGX.

Could do with a network card though.

One thing is that the supposed 33MHz Freescale 68030 is running extremely hot even at 25MHz with a heatsink fitted. You have barely keep your finger on the heatsink, which is larger than the package. You have to wonder if the CPU is actually a slower part that's been relabelled.