You might know what SoftMac is, but are more likely familiar with Basilisk II, SoftMac was a commercial Macintosh Emulator created by Emulators Inc in the 1990s that is now freely available on their site. SoftMac has a few benefits over Basilisk II for helping you set up your Classic Mac: SoftMac supports both System 6.x and […]
Macintosh 68k
Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh – Installing the full version of System 7.5.5 or 6.0.8
In one of my previous blog entries I mentioned that I could not include the full version of System 7.5.5 or System 6.0.8 with my drive images due to copyright restrictions, but you could download the full versions from Apple’s FTP site…. that option is gone, and is now replaced with the files being available […]
Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh – Initializing and Partitioning your Hard Drive
I recently acquired a SCSI2SD adapter to replace a failing SCSI drive from the 1990s, so thought I’d document some of the options I’ve found for initializing and partitioning bootable drives for classic Macintosh systems.
Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh – Creating a bootable hard drive starting with a image file and an emulator
With SCSI being essentially obsolete, and the fact that Macintosh systems (since OS X 10.6 I think) can no longer write to HFS formatted disks, the best way to use modern systems when setting up your classic 68k system is to create a bootable disk image using a Macintosh 68k or PowerPC emulator then writing […]
SCSI on Windows 10 64-bit: Adaptec AHA-2940 (29xx) Ultra, AIC-7870 (78xx), or 29320LPE Ultra 320
When I first started playing with 68k macintosh systems around 1999/2000 (a Macintosh Plus) I connected an external SCSI drive to my Windows 98 system and was able to use an early version of Basilisk II with SCSI pass-through to format the hard drive. Now 18 years later, SCSI is an obsolete technology, and in general […]
Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh – Using Basilisk II
You probably know what Basilisk II is, but if not, a quick summary: Basilisk II (manual)is an open source emulator for 68k-based Macintosh computers that support 32bit memory (therefore you can NOT boot System 6, but you can setup System 6 on a secondary drive, see Section 5) that runs on Windows, OS X and Linux […]
Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh – Using a SCSI2SD adapter
I recently purchased a SCSI2SD V.5 adaptor (3.5″ and 2.5″) to replace a failing 1980s SCSI HD, and realized once I had it set up I could “image” the Micro-SD card to make boot-able images anyone could use.
Mac OS Standard Format Specifications (Apple KB Article 8647)
This is a copy of Apple Knowledge Base Article 8647 taken from the internet archive, this article explains the various limits for partition sizes, and number of files on Hard Drives under OS Before discussing hard drive block allocation, and the intricacies of determining allocation block sizes and such, let’s first review the Macintosh Standard […]
Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh: using a 100MB SCSI Iomega Zip Drive
I’ve recently been experimenting to see if I could somehow use of my old Iomega Zip drives (a 250MB USB version, and a 100MB SCSI) to move files between my Windows PC and my various 68k Macintosh Systems. After a bit of experimentation I discovered how I could not only move files, but also create […]
Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh – Using a 3.5″ HD Floppy Drive
Booting your classic 68k Macintosh from a 3.5 inch floppy disk was the most common and the easiest way to get most classic macs working when your starting with a more modern machine (most, but not all, more on that in a bit). This post focuses on 3.5″ High Density (HD) disks that can be created […]