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Boot Disks for 512k Mac

NF6X

NF6X

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Joined
Sep 9, 2013
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Location
Riverside, CA, USA
I just won a Goodwill auction for a 512k Mac system. Yay! No floppy disks are pictured, so I assume that I will need to procure or create boot disks for it after I clean it up (and if necessary, fix it). I'm looking forward to receiving it! This one looks like it was never upgraded with 800k drives.

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Aside from using my Dad's Lisa for a while before I left for college with a shiny new Amiga 1000 in 1986, I wasn't very involved in the Mac world until well into the x86 + OSX days. So, I don't have any other vintage Macs sitting around to bridge the gap between my modern computers and this new Fat Mac. I have a Kryoflux card and a SuperCardPro, but I don't know if I can write 400k Mac MFS disks with any of the common constant-RPM 3.5" floppy drives that I have. I have one of the Lotharek HxC floppy emulators, too, but I don't recall seeing any mention of it being compatible with early Macs.

I wouldn't mind buying floppy disks from other Mac collectors to get started, but I'll probably want to gain the ability to write 400k floppies from downloaded images anyway.

So, what are good options for me? Maybe I'll need to get some sort of medium-old Mac that is old enough to write 400k floppy disks but new enough to talk to a newer computer? Or maybe there's some way to download an image over the 512k Mac's serial port and write it to the external drive, if I can procure a bootable floppy with suitable software on it?

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While I have your attention, maybe a Mac historian might know what that hook stuck on the side of the case is intended for. I've seen stick-on mouse pockets before, but I don't see an obvious purpose for that hook. I'd like to think that the previous owner was an otter who hung his or her tiny little jacket there, but the reality will probably be less adorable. I'll be predisposed towards removing the hook.
 
Thanks!

I was also just pointed in the direction of Floppy Emu, and that looks promising. I didn't know that the Mac could boot from the external floppy drive; I thought it only booted from the internal drive. I had never given Floppy Emu any thought since I already have a CFFA3000 in my IIe. I didn't know that it was usable with early Macs.
 
I think that even newer Macs with the SuperDrive can write the 400k disks as long as they are running an old enough OS version that still supports MFS. But I'm not positive about that. I'm a bit bewildered by all of the Macs that came between the early 68k ones and the modern ones, since I wasn't paying much attention to them at the time. I don't know that I'll necessarily be collecting any other vintage Macs, but I decided to spring for this neat old 512k Mac since it came up cheaply on the Goodwill site. It ended up costing just over $80 with shipping!

I just ordered a Floppy Emu, so I think I'll be good to go. Yay! I should have known there would be a easy option. I found old system disk images here, which I hope I'll be able to use. Hmm, now I'd like to find a few vintage games to run on it.
 
If you're willing to spend a couple bucks, a member of the vintage computing community runs http://www.rescuemyclassicmac.com (I can't remember who it is that runs it, I know he's a regular on 68kmla, might be here, too.) $10+shipping.

As others have suggested, a Floppy Emu is good, too. And if it turns out to be a 512ke (with the newer ROM) you can use the Floppy Emu to emulate an HD20.

Lastly, if you have a newer Mac that came with a built-in floppy drive (up to the beige Power Mac G3 and "Wallstreet" PowerBook G3, although the official Apple floppy modules for those were optional, and are hard to find, as CD-ROM was the standard module,) you can write 400k floppy disk images to floppy even in Mac OS 9.2.2. (Nothing 7.6 or newer can actually *mount* the floppy disk, but it can write images to disk.)

And if you do go a route that has you writing images to disk, make sure you're using a real single-sided floppy disk or a "low density" (1.0 MB / 800 kb / 720 kb) floppy disk. Do *NOT* use a high density ("HD", 2.0 MB, 1.4 MB) disk, as while they technically can be formatted low density, they are VERY unreliable that way.
 
It's good to see there are a few options available for classic Mac owners these days. Back when I got my first Plus and my Lisa I had to bend over backwards jumping through hoops to make boot disks, from memory it was originally stuffed image to floppy on PC to Mac LCII with PCExchange to appletalk linked IIci for writing images. Things were made easier when I got a beige G3 which had ethernet, wooooo.
 
I was expecting to have to go through some convoluted computer gymnastics, requiring me to buy at least one more vintage Mac of just the right age to bridge the gap. It looks like the arrival of Floppy Emu will make things easier. Maybe I'll still look for a later Mac so I can play with the later pre-OSX operating systems.
 
Hmm, I wonder if it might also be useful and/or fun to play with AppleTalk. Maybe I could find another classic Mac that can speak both AppleTalk to the Fat Mac, and TCP/IP over Ethernet to my modern systems?
 
Protip: You can never own just a compact mac. You always need a second 68K mac in working condition to make a compact mac work. No exceptions.
Otherwise you end up with no practical way to move files or even create boot disks. Just kludgy software with weird hardware requirements or expensive disk emulators.
 
NeXT said:
Protip: You can never own just a compact mac. You always need a second 68K mac in working condition to make a compact mac work. No exceptions.
Otherwise you end up with no practical way to move files or even create boot disks. Just kludgy software with weird hardware requirements or expensive disk emulators.
Click to expand...

Depends on the compact Mac. The older ones, like the 512k mentioned, yes - you absolutely need something newer to use as a transfer devices. But anything newer than an SE, especially with an Ethernet card, can stand on its own just fine. Even the high-density-equipped SE needs just a random machine of any OS with a USB floppy drive to move things over.

I have Ethernet on most of my machines, and while the old web browsers are near-useless on modern websites (even iCab on a Color Classic II with max RAM is borderline,) I just run an FTP server inside my home network where I throw files to transfer to vintage machines. And a web server with an ultra-simple HTML 1.0-compliant web page for hosting files to download, too.

As in:

HTML: 
<html><head>My File Server</head><body><h1>Files!</h1><br><a href="file1.zip">First file</a><br><a href="file2.zip">Second file</a></body></html>

Fits on one line in the message compose window! :p
 
Depends on the compact Mac. The older ones, like the 512k mentioned, yes - you absolutely need something newer to use as a transfer devices. But anything newer than an SE, especially with an Ethernet card, can stand on its own just fine. Even the high-density-equipped SE needs just a random machine of any OS with a USB floppy drive to move things over.
Click to expand...
Garbage.

The average person who starts out with just a compact regardless of specs or floppy drive type is going to hate himself by the time he has the system software loaded, much less the driver for the ethernet card.

I have Ethernet on most of my machines, and while the old web browsers are near-useless on modern websites (even iCab on a Color Classic II with max RAM is borderline,) I just run an FTP server inside my home network where I throw files to transfer to vintage machines. And a web server with an ultra-simple HTML 1.0-compliant web page for hosting files to download, too.
Click to expand...
Again, the average person who gets his first compact mac ain't gonna have any of that. They'll have the mac and possibly a floppy disk or two.
 
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