Software on a MAC IIci

[JoJo_ReloadeD]

Hi everyone!

Lately I got my hands on a Mac IIci and I'm trying to set it up, mainly for games. It comes with 20mb of ram and a 80mb hard drive.

I managed to install System 7.0.1, wolfenstein 3d and civilization from floppy disk images; but trying to get more games I noticed they come on a .sit file. This seems to be a mac archive format, stuffit. I decompressed them on linux and copied the files to the mac hard disk (mounting the hfs volume on a linux box).

On every game directory there is either a .rsrc file, what I do not know what is... or a no-extension file, which I thought it was the executable one. None of the two can be executed on the mac, they are identified as 'documents', and doesn't present any icons on every file of the directory.

The question is.. how can I execute them ?

Sorry if I'm asking something very obvious, but my experience with these machines is very limited.

 

[DFinnigan]

On every game directory there is either a .rsrc file, what I do not know what is... or a no-extension file, which I thought it was the executable one. None of the two can be executed on the mac, they are identified as 'documents', and doesn't present any icons on every file of the directory.

The question is.. how can I execute them ?

Macintosh files have a data fork and a resource fork. What you have are the two forks in separate files. You need to combine them.

If you have the tools on the Macintosh already, such as ResEdit or HexEdit, it's fairly straightforward to do this.

I'm not familiar with what tools may be available for Linux, so I will let someone else answer. So the simplest solution I can think of for now, with the knowledge I have now, is to have someone send you a Mac floppy with StuffIt Expander.

 

[SomeGuy]

I noticed they come on a .sit file. This seems to be a mac archive format, stuffit. I decompressed them on linux and copied the files to the mac hard disk (mounting the hfs volume on a linux box).

What you usually should do is copy the .sit files over to the Mac and decompress them there. The tricky part is getting Stuffit expander over there first - you will need either a native Mac CD image or floppy disk images to run the installer.

After that, just create an alias to Stuffit Expander and drag and drop .sit files to the icon (that works even if the .sit file is missing its creator type information)

The early Macintosh file system is very different from that of Linux, Windows, or even modern MacOS X. It is usually not possible to extract .sit files on any other OS 100% correctly.

 

[David_M]

My solution to getting files onto a Mac was to put the Mac SCSI drive into a linux box, transferred the floppy disk images onto the drive and then created a dd image of the drive. I then used that image on my PC as the hard drive image in a MAC emulator.I found a pre built image that had the tools to expand the disk images. I transferred those tools to my disk image using the emulator. Then having done all that used linux to dd the image back to the MAC drive. Then on the Mac used ResEdit to associate the disk image files correctly again so they could be expanded properly and disk images created. In my case I need to create a set of System 6.08 installation disks because my SCSI drive only had a partial install of the operating system.

Needless to say I'm looking to a newer Mac that has ethernet support to act as a go between in future.

 

[olePigeon]

NuBUS ethernet cards are pretty cheap. You should definitely snag one. Then you can transfer files over ethernet. I think you can do networking with Basilisk II, which can work as an intermediary on a modern computer.

 

[NeXT]

The early Macintosh file system is very different from that of Linux, Windows, or even modern MacOS X. It is usually not possible to extract .sit files on any other OS 100% correctly.

I want to add to this that the Microsoft NTFS filesystem is much gentler on handling Macintosh files and applications. FAT on the other hand is the polar opposite.

 

[SomeGuy]

I want to add to this that the Microsoft NTFS filesystem is much gentler on handling Macintosh files and applications. FAT on the other hand is the polar opposite.

That is what I have heard, but it still depends on the applications that may touch the files, and any other media types it has to jump through. If anyone has a well established work flow for moving Mac applications in that manor, I would be interested in hearing details.

BTW, for network connected Macs, Freenas does (or at least did, have not checked in ages) support apple file sharing over TCP/IP. On the Mac end it looks like a normal share, but if viewed from a SMB share or native file system, the forks are all separated out. Useful for moving some kinds of files around.

 

[NeXT]

That is what I have heard, but it still depends on the applications that may touch the files, and any other media types it has to jump through. If anyone has a well established work flow for moving Mac applications in that manor, I would be interested in hearing details.

My entire fileserver server backend is Windows Server 2003 which is the last to support Appletalk file and printer sharing. You still get the ability to connect network drives and folders with SMB shares and Appletalk connects as if it's any other network volume. From my main PC I can download the file, drop it on the server, connect to the drive via the mac and drop it onto the mac's hard drive. Resource fork handling is also supported by Removable Storage Manager.

 

[geoffm3]

My entire fileserver server backend is Windows Server 2003 which is the last to support Appletalk file and printer sharing. You still get the ability to connect network drives and folders with SMB shares and Appletalk connects as if it's any other network volume. From my main PC I can download the file, drop it on the server, connect to the drive via the mac and drop it onto the mac's hard drive. Resource fork handling is also supported by Removable Storage Manager.

Interdasting! I may have to set that up.

 

[JoJo_ReloadeD]

What you usually should do is copy the .sit files over to the Mac and decompress them there. The tricky part is getting Stuffit expander over there first - you will need either a native Mac CD image or floppy disk images to run the installer.

After that, just create an alias to Stuffit Expander and drag and drop .sit files to the icon (that works even if the .sit file is missing its creator type information)

The early Macintosh file system is very different from that of Linux, Windows, or even modern MacOS X. It is usually not possible to extract .sit files on any other OS 100% correctly.

This just did the trick. Now playing games without problem, thanks!