So, here's my actually-planned-for-this-year #MARCHintosh project. Attached is a photo of four very dusty containers full of floppy disks. These are the actual disks from my childhood IIfx!

Most of these disks aren't original. The originals lived at Dad's workplace. He would periodically bring home software from work, make a copy of the disks, and return the originals to work. These were, I'm told, the "off-site backups", in case there was a fire at the workplace or something like that. But we also had all this software installed on the family IIfx so Dad could read any files that he brought home from work with him.

Of course, we also bought our own software for the home, and those are mixed in with these disks as well. And that stack of CD-ROMs in the top left are my MacAddict cover disks - those are already archived.

Anyway, because these are just consumer-grade diskettes, they degrade quicker than the professionally-manufactured original ones. I've already lost a few, so I want to get these archived! And of course, anything that doesn't already exist on the Garden will be uploaded there and shared on #GlobalTalk as well.

(expect this to be a long-ass foone-style thread with lots of updates over several days)

Tried out InterPrint on my IIfx today and I've got to say, it works beautifully!

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/interprint-112

This Chooser extension allows you to print to LPR queues over TCP/IP. But unlike the IP printing support in LaserWriter 8 (which "requires" Mac OS 8, though I think you can manually install it on as low as System 7.5.3), InterPrint works all the way down to System 6.0.5! It fully supports PostScript, too.

What this means for me is that after #MARCHintosh is over, I can repurpose my Raspberry Pi, which currently acts as an AppleTalk print server for my local network (and #GlobalTalk, by extension).

Playing MYST as God intended…in the SheepShaver emulator running Mac OS 7.6

Today is #FloofDaughter #Mira's birthday (I decided on the day—nobody knows for sure) and the five month anniversary of her adoption (I think MY adoption by HER is just a few weeks ago, honestly ). It's also Hobbes' birthday (RIF: Rest in Floofiness).

In honor of this day, and in homage to the computer I loved most growing up, here's a picture of Mira that conforms to the display limitations of a #ClassicMac. It's also a hat-tip to #BillAtkinson, as it was made using his dithering algorithm (a variation on #FloydSteinburg).

It's funny to me that smooth scaling algorithms like bilinear, bicubic, lanczos, and others used to be so computationally expensive that you'd only see them in graphics utilities. NOW, you can't get rid of them.
Because of that, I've included a non-smoothed, non-interpolated 4x zoom of the same image. XD

Does anyone know how to swap the Command and Option keys on Mac OS 8.6?

I tried following the instructions from here: https://macintoshgarden.org/forum/how-swap-cmd-and-option-windows-keyboards-classic-mac-os (which worked for me on System 7.1), but they had no effect on Mac OS 8.6.

I even tried modifying the other KMAP resources (and substituting their IDs in ROv#) but that had no effect either.

The new Power Mac 6500, "Miracle" has been moved onto the Tower of Power

The internal hard drive is truly dead - Apple System Profiler is the only thing that is able to see it. So I connected the 4 GB LaCie SCSI drive up and formatted that to use for now, until I can pop in a new internal drive or a CF to IDE adapter.

There's still a weird problem with the video. Sometimes when I boot the machine, there's no video at all, and I have to power it off and back on again a few times before the video returns. But when it does have a picture, it's stable, and not flickering like it did on the TV or the monitor that it came with.

Finding an install disc to boot this from is troublesome. Most of my classic Mac OS install discs I burned 25 years ago, and turns out they don't work properly any more and just make the CD drive spin up and down a lot (like the 8.6 disc in the attached pic).

Eventually I found the original Mac OS 8.1 install disc from my Dad's old G3, which works, so I'm going to install that for now and see if I can upgrade the OS either to 8.6 or 9.1 later, once I have the machine on the network and can install from there.

I finally have a working 1.44MB floppy drive in my Mac SE... after two previous failed repair attempts last year

Spent much of the day cleaning, greasing, and changing out the gears on the eject motor. Unlike the last drive I tried with, this one actually powered up and booted the system. So the SE is off the repair bench and back home on the Tower of Power!

I've amassed quite the collection of broken floppy drives though:
- Mac 800k that originally came with the SE, needs cleaning and a new eject gear
- Mac 1.44MB, mechanically working great but has an electrical fault
- Amiga 880k, needs cleaning, also PCB had a leaky cap and there's corrosion

Also, while I had the SE open, I installed the MacEffects Performer 030 accelerator PDS card and it's a speedy boy now at 16 Mhz. Not as fast as the IIfx but fast enough that I'll probably upgrade it from System 6 to System 7 sometime this month.

I've been using a pair of Vonets Wifi bridges from Amazon as part of my Mac #RetroComputing setup for a while now.

The reason for this is because my ISP's router lives in a closet which is quite a distance away from my office, where my old computers live.

It's well known that most Wifi routers aren't able to properly route AppleTalk packets. Unfortunately, mine is one of those routers. So my Mac mini, running a QEMU VM with Mac OS 7.1, isn't able to bridge #GlobalTalk with the rest of my LocalTalk network, when QEMU is bridged to the built-in Wifi.

This is where the Vonets Wifi bridge comes in. It _does_ support properly routing AppleTalk packets. So if I plug it into my Mac Mini's Ethernet port, and bridge QEMU to the Ethernet port, I now have AppleTalk working over Wifi, and the LocalTalk services running on my NAS and Raspberry Pi can see GlobalTalk (and vice versa).

(I've got a second Vonets Wifi bridge plugged into my IIfx as well - since there's no native Wifi NuBus cards for vintage Macs The IIfx is connected with LocalTalk - via NeitherNet - to my Mac SE and Apple IIgs, and it runs the LocalTalk Bridge control panel, enabling the other machines to see GlobalTalk and the Pi and NAS as well)

These Vonets Wifi bridges work really well, but they're not _perfect_. I learned a while back that they still mangle AppleTalk DDP packets by appending junk data to the end. This doesn't seem to effect the Mac OS implementation of AppleTalk at all, or any Apple software such as the Apple Internet Router or Apple IP Gateway.

It does, however, impact third-party software. When I tried jrouter last summer, it didnt work for me until a patch was made to strip the junk data from AppleTalk packets (https://gitea.drjosh.dev/josh/jrouter/commit/2f1b4c1ce18d8d752b3b1f0c565417b61771f510). This also affects TashRouter and MultiTalk, which I've never been able to get working on my network, because they both drop packets which have a mismatch between the length header and the actual size of the packet.

Anyway, I'd like to be able to use TashRouter or MultiTalk at some point, so that I can bridge my LocalTalk and EtherTalk networks with LToverUDP and share files easier with Mini vMac. It's not a _huge_ deal, but I felt like exploring this a little bit today.

I've heard that the DD-WRT open source router firmware is able to properly handle AppleTalk packets over Wifi, so today I dug out an old Linksys router (the WRT400N), installed the latest DD-WRT firmware on it, and configured it in Station Bridge mode. My thought was that if this works it could replace _both_ of my Vonets bridges.

But unfortunately, it didn't. After connecting my Mac mini up to the Linksys router and bridging QEMU to it, it couldn't see any AppleShare servers at all. Tried with the IIfx as well, same result. So I guess the "DD-WRT properly handles AppleTalk packets" comment only applies to certain routers, or certain router configurations.

So, ultimately I ended up right back where I started...but I learned a lot today
I've got another old router laying around too, so maybe I'll try that one another weekend?

Old Pascal Code

https://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/archives/40595

Any advice on the best method for LAN file sharing between different generations of MacOS?

I have machines running 9.1, 10.11 (El Capitan), and 15.1 (Sequoia).

Traditional Apple File Sharing works fine between the latter two, but 9.1 is excluded.

Transfers via removable media is inconvenient.

I thought it might be fun to see my personal logo as 1-bit in MacPaint

CHK yo self b4 u wrek yo self

How convenient that the security cable slot on the back of an Apple Mac Classic II is *exactly* the width of an SD slot extender cable. This allows me to use an internal BlueSCSI disk replacement board but have the SD card accessible outside for (offline) data transfer

35 years ago today, this beautiful machine came into my life.
This photo was taken in 2011, two years before I sadly gave it away (due to a rushed interstate move).

I finally got BlueSCSI updated and working properly with my Mac Classic II. Who knew there were variants that flat-out don't work with Sandisk cards?

A nice new feature is SD transfer, which allows you to import/export files direct to the SD.

And yes, this tiny postage stamp is a full-size screenshot from a Classic II. Resolution is overrated.