[barbarian]

I just downloaded vMac for OS X and have been having a ball running some old black and white favs I haven't seen in years.

While I had no problem finding old ROMs,various old system versions, and some of the major programs (macpaint, macwrite and so on), I haven't been able to find some of the older defunct classics like Dark Castle in .dsk format.

Some questions:

Does anyone know of an archive old programs in .dsk format?

Does anyone know how to convert folders of old programs into .dsk images.

Does anyone have any of the really old system versions lying around in .dsk format... for example system v .9x that had big rounded icons for disks, or a version of the system with Servant installed?

I'd love to find some of this stuff

[CharlesS]

You can actually make vMac work with the OS 9 NDIF .img disk images or even the Mac OS X .dmg images! I do not know why this is true considering that the author states to the contrary, but in my experience it has worked. I can make floppy-sized images, or virtual hard disks of larger size containing all my black and white stuff in one image. It all seems to work.

However: the disk images have to be set up very specifically for vMac to accept them. If you just create a .dmg with Disk Utility and try to load it into vMac, you will get "This disk is not a Macintosh disk." As far as I can tell, these two things are required:

1. The image has to be formatted as Mac OS Standard and not Mac OS Extended (obviously, since System 6/7 couldn't read HFS+).

2. This part is more tricky - the disk has to have no partition map. Getting a disk image set up this way can be a bitch since Disk Utility and hdiutil want to make the image with a single partition and a partition map, and will format it that way if you try to use them.

Therefore, to make a .dmg that works with vMac, I recommend the following steps. Please note that I am not responsible for any damage you cause while doing this.

1. Open the Terminal.

2. Type the following commands:

cd desktop

hdiutil create -layout NONE -megabytes <whatever you want> test.dmg

hdiutil attach -nomount test.dmg

At this point, you will see a line that begins with a path that looks something like /dev/diskX where X is some integer. This is the dev entry of the image - note it because we will need to use it later.

newfs_hfs -h /dev/diskX (Replace /dev/diskX with the appropriate dev entry. Do NOT make a typo here or you could reformat the wrong disk, and it really sucks when you reformat your hard drive by mistake. Remember, I'm not responsible if you damage something.)

hdiutil detach /dev/diskX (Again, replace /dev/diskX with the appropriate dev entry.)

3. Cross your fingers, and try to open the 'test.dmg' image which should be on your Desktop in vMac.

If that process is too complicated for you, you can create an image in the OS 9 version of Disk Copy - this usually seems to result in workable images, although they are in .img format rather than .dmg.

In either case, you can rename the image so it ends with .dsk, and this seems to work just fine with vMac.

Hope that helps,
Charles

[CharlesS]

Oh, and as for the old System 0.97 - I have it, but I can't seem to boot vMac with it - vMac just doesn't like it. So I wouldn't get too excited about running that in emulation...

Charles

[himself]

I've been albe to make the .dsk images simply by making an image in DiskCopy and changing the extension from .dmg (or .img) to .dsk. Worked without a hitch for me. However, I don't know if Disk Utility in Panther handles disk images differently, since I havent created any disk images for use in vMac with Panther.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by himself:
I've been albe to make the .dsk images simply by making an image in DiskCopy and changing the extension from .dmg (or .img) to .dsk. Worked without a hitch for me. However, I don't know if Disk Utility in Panther handles disk images differently, since I havent created any disk images for use in vMac with Panther.

That works with the OS 9 version of Disk Copy, and you don't even really need to change the extension. However, with OS X Disk Copy/Disk Utility, it's never worked for me unless I used the method I described above. The OS X Disk Copy and Disk Utility seem to insist on making a partition map for the disk images, causing vMac to go "This disk is not a Macintosh disk." when I try to load the image.

[barbarian]

Charles you are a god....

I'm having a blast going through my huge archive of old software and opening documents I thought were long dead (does anyone here remember cricketdraw, fullright, thinktank or multiplan)?

---

Do you mind if I post this hint on the web somewhere. I've been thinking about making a vmac tutorial page...

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by barbarian:
Do you mind if I post this hint on the web somewhere. I've been thinking about making a vmac tutorial page...

Go ahead, but I'd appreciate it if you credit me, as it took me quite a while to figure it out.

[diamondsw]

I actually have many of those old things. I have a 20MB disk image with Dark Castle, Beyond Dark Castle, Arkanoid, ResEdit 0.8, CopyIIMac, etc. I also have a disk image with the Ancient Art of War which works *except* there's no way to limit the emulation speed for some reason. Every other game works, but not AAoW. Running it in Mini vMac runs at the proper speed (and full screen, thank God) but can't get beyond the "rules" screen... So frustrating...

Of course, this is what my Mac Plus is for on my desk...

[ryaxnb]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
Oh, and as for the old System 0.97 - I have it, but I can't seem to boot vMac with it - vMac just doesn't like it. So I wouldn't get too excited about running that in emulation...

Charles

System 1.1 runs though.

[thePurpleGiant]

I have an image of system 1.0 running. Ah the memories.

[themexican]

I just created an image with a ton of old programs... seeing these run under OS X is wild...

some favs:

Servant: where you can see a few hints of the OS X finder (for example icon info, scaling of icons sizes, etc)

Photoshop 1.0

Multiplan

Illustrator 88

Thinktank

MacWrite

Ready Set Go

Switcher - uggg

MacProject

CricketDraw - I can't get this to run because it requires a printer selected in the chooser. Anybody have a way around this?

FileVision- A surprisingly forward thinking program....

PFS File

Fullwrite

Dark Castle

Musicworks

Videoworks -sort of a flash precursor

Dark Castle -too bad the sound doesn't work under vmac

and so on

One thing that is so impressive about opening up all this old software is how inventive it is. Fullwrite and FileVision stand out as being new ways of thinking about word processing and databases (respectively)... Even today there is very no program that allows you to do what cricketdraw did (draw directly in postscript and mix drawing with programming). It also makes me remember how exciting software used to be and how people were defining whole software categories... and you wonder what OS 9 could have become if the ideas of Servant had been incorporated...

Anyway I hope vMac continues to improve... it would be cool if sound worked properly or if we could copy text back and forth....

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by diamondsw:
I actually have many of those old things. I have a 20MB disk image with Dark Castle, Beyond Dark Castle, Arkanoid, ResEdit 0.8, CopyIIMac, etc. I also have a disk image with the Ancient Art of War which works *except* there's no way to limit the emulation speed for some reason. Every other game works, but not AAoW. Running it in Mini vMac runs at the proper speed (and full screen, thank God) but can't get beyond the "rules" screen... So frustrating...

Of course, this is what my Mac Plus is for on my desk...

I know, it's so frustrating. vMac has sound and works great, but runs too fast for a lot of games. Mini vMac lets you limit the speed, but it has no sound...

[diamondsw]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
I know, it's so frustrating. vMac has sound and works great, but runs too fast for a lot of games. Mini vMac lets you limit the speed, but it has no sound...

And Mini-vMac can go full screen. Playing Arkanoid in vMac is no fun when you click outside the window on accident...

Sadly, it seems Richard Bannister isn't very interested in these projects anymore.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by diamondsw:
And Mini-vMac can go full screen. Playing Arkanoid in vMac is no fun when you click outside the window on accident...

I don't like the way it stretches the pixels out and makes them huge, though.

What I would prefer is if the emulator would decouple the mouse and the cursor, the way many games and MacMESS work.

Barring that, you could make a full-screen window that acted as a "bib" to keep the user from accidentally clicking on the desktop.

Sadly, it seems Richard Bannister isn't very interested in these projects anymore.

Yeah, I know. Any query about vMac gets a reply of "you have the source code." Which, yeah, is true, and if I had time that could work, but time is a problem. I suspect it's probably a problem for Bannister, too, which is why vMac hasn't gotten any development lately.

Now Mini-vMac, OTOH, seems to be in active development. I wonder why they couldn't have worked from Bannister's version, instead of creating a brand new one, though. Adding speed limitation and full-screen mode to Bannister's vMac would make it about perfect... but I guess it is not meant to be.

Maybe one of these days the Mini vMac guys will take Bannister's sound code and incorporate it into Mini vMac. One can hope...

[diamondsw]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
Now Mini-vMac, OTOH, seems to be in active development. I wonder why they couldn't have worked from Bannister's version, instead of creating a brand new one, though. Adding speed limitation and full-screen mode to Bannister's vMac would make it about perfect... but I guess it is not meant to be.

Maybe one of these days the Mini vMac guys will take Bannister's sound code and incorporate it into Mini vMac. One can hope...

I e-mailed them, and it looks like it won't match vMac intentionally - they want to keep the code as simple and vanilla as possible, but we will see sound soon. Here's hoping we can see some full-screen performance improvements, or simple mouse "trapping", ala VirtualPC.

[themexican]

sort of off topic, but interesting... When I was resurrecting old files with vMac I came across this file with a first hand description of a Servant demo... Servant was a finder branch that died... it had many forward looking ideas some of which got rolled into the finder, but some of which didn't appear on the mac until OS X.

This was the file:
----
Andy Hertzfeld said, "Someone told me that multitasking for the Macintosh was impossible. So I decided to do the impossible." Saturday the12th of April at GTE Andy Hertzfeld demonstrated Servant (a real gas of a program). In a nutshell it is a replacement for the finder. Supposedly, when finished in late summer or fall, it will be 100% compatible with the desktop environment as we know it today, yet it will operate twice as fast as the a finder with the new roms and up to five times faster than the older roms. We are talking about booting, launching applications, and general tasks the present finder performs. The first thing you notice is that the desktop screen no longer has any scroll bars. The way you "scroll" around in the desktop is by pointing the mouse to an area where there is no icon. Then just click and hold. The pointer becomes a grabber like hand (shades of thunderscan software). You can move it, toss it, or roll it slowly. Very nice feature. A little box on and drag an icon it keeps the shape of the icon as you move it around the window (the present finder only blackens a rectangular area). You may also set the background to any MacPaint picture.

Andy had a digitized picture of himself and said something about his most admired personality. Under one pulldown window were Zoom-in and Zoom-out options, Name, Size, and Date (modification). The size and date option do not make the file icons disappear, but rather where the name would be found on a file you get the size in K or the date last modified (depending on which option selected). Another neat feature was the use of an option for enabling MacIntalk (if present) to read the text name of a file/application clicked on. Folders may have icons displaying the type of material found within.

The real delight came when Andy opened an application (MacWrite in this case); the desktop stayed visible. He resized the MacWrite page down and showed us that in the Servant "The Finder" was still there. He then ran his moving icon routine and showed us that Servant was indeed a multitasking-like program. At this point several IBM owners fainted (just kidding boss). On a Mac plus you may have up to eight applications open.
Andy asked the audience if Servant should only be usable with the new roms. The majority of people said yes! He says that this may come down to a design choice on this matter. As for programs that completely wash the Mac screen (like MacPaint), they will still work because, like Switcher, Servant can be evoked from the DA menu. One nice feature that Andy wants to incorporate is to allow direct modification of resources. Essentially, he wants to replace the resource editor with options evoked from Servant (I keep wanting to say Finder).

Andy says that he is about half done and that there will be lots more features to this program--although he did not want to comment about them at the time. He took questions and some ideas and suggestions from the audience for improvements and enhancements. There were some other features talked about, but I think this gives you an idea of what went on. I really believe that this program will mean a real shot in the arm for the Mac. As switcher made the Mac more desirable, Servant will make it more powerful. As Andy put it, "Servant will take the Mac to the next level of computing power".

The resource editor inputs to Servant may be the most interesting portion of all. Resources most often used and changed or updated, such as fonts and desk accesories will be able to be installed or removed with a click of the mouse. To add a resource you would simply drag it to the system file(if I remember right) then to remove I think you can examine the contents of the System File under Servant, then merely drag un-needed
Resources to the trash...Also there was discussion of opening documents by merely dragging the document to the application, and that would launch the application!

All in all, a very interesting afternoon!

[themexican]

sorry double post

[diamondsw]

Originally posted by themexican:
sort of off topic, but interesting... When I was resurrecting old files with vMac I came across this file with a first hand description of a Servant demo... Servant was a finder branch that died... it had many forward looking ideas some of which got rolled into the finder, but some of which didn't appear on the mac until OS X.

This was the file:
----
Andy Hertzfeld said, "Someone told me that multitasking for the Macintosh was impossible. So I decided to do the impossible." Saturday the12th of April at GTE Andy Hertzfeld demonstrated Servant (a real gas of a program). In a nutshell it is a replacement for the finder. Supposedly, when finished in late summer or fall, it will be 100% compatible with the desktop environment as we know it today, yet it will operate twice as fast as the a finder with the new roms and up to five times faster than the older roms. We are talking about booting, launching applications, and general tasks the present finder performs. The first thing you notice is that the desktop screen no longer has any scroll bars. The way you "scroll" around in the desktop is by pointing the mouse to an area where there is no icon. Then just click and hold. The pointer becomes a grabber like hand (shades of thunderscan software). You can move it, toss it, or roll it slowly. Very nice feature. A little box on and drag an icon it keeps the shape of the icon as you move it around the window (the present finder only blackens a rectangular area). You may also set the background to any MacPaint picture.

Andy had a digitized picture of himself and said something about his most admired personality. Under one pulldown window were Zoom-in and Zoom-out options, Name, Size, and Date (modification). The size and date option do not make the file icons disappear, but rather where the name would be found on a file you get the size in K or the date last modified (depending on which option selected). Another neat feature was the use of an option for enabling MacIntalk (if present) to read the text name of a file/application clicked on. Folders may have icons displaying the type of material found within.

The real delight came when Andy opened an application (MacWrite in this case); the desktop stayed visible. He resized the MacWrite page down and showed us that in the Servant "The Finder" was still there. He then ran his moving icon routine and showed us that Servant was indeed a multitasking-like program. At this point several IBM owners fainted (just kidding boss). On a Mac plus you may have up to eight applications open.
Andy asked the audience if Servant should only be usable with the new roms. The majority of people said yes! He says that this may come down to a design choice on this matter. As for programs that completely wash the Mac screen (like MacPaint), they will still work because, like Switcher, Servant can be evoked from the DA menu. One nice feature that Andy wants to incorporate is to allow direct modification of resources. Essentially, he wants to replace the resource editor with options evoked from Servant (I keep wanting to say Finder).

Andy says that he is about half done and that there will be lots more features to this program--although he did not want to comment about them at the time. He took questions and some ideas and suggestions from the audience for improvements and enhancements. There were some other features talked about, but I think this gives you an idea of what went on. I really believe that this program will mean a real shot in the arm for the Mac. As switcher made the Mac more desirable, Servant will make it more powerful. As Andy put it, "Servant will take the Mac to the next level of computing power".

The resource editor inputs to Servant may be the most interesting portion of all. Resources most often used and changed or updated, such as fonts and desk accesories will be able to be installed or removed with a click of the mouse. To add a resource you would simply drag it to the system file(if I remember right) then to remove I think you can examine the contents of the System File under Servant, then merely drag un-needed
Resources to the trash...Also there was discussion of opening documents by merely dragging the document to the application, and that would launch the application!

All in all, a very interesting afternoon!

Man, I would LOVE to see that in action. Shades of everything from System 7 (custom icons, System file access) to OS X (grabby hand, zooming icons). Just goes to show very little is truly new in computers.

[diamondsw]

Originally posted by diamondsw:
Man, I would LOVE to see that in action. Shades of everything from System 7 (custom icons, System file access) to OS X (grabby hand, zooming icons). Just goes to show very little is truly new in computers.

Nevermind that - saw some screen shots. While the zooming, grabby hand thing is neat, removing list view and scroll bars completely would *suck* for huge numbers of files.

[CharlesS]

Hallelujah!!!

The latest unstable build of Mini vMac has incorporated the sound code!

Now, we have an emulator with both sound, speed limitation, and full screen!

If you don't mind running alpha software, you can download it here:

http://umn.dl.sourceforge.net/source...wcarbs.bin.sit

[CharlesS]

Let me add to that: the new sound support in Mini vMac seems to work better than in the original vMac! I don't know why this is true, since they claim to just have taken Bannister's code and incorporated it, but you can't argue with results - in some games such as On The Contrary, sound works in Mini vMac but not in vMac.

Also, the USB keyboard problem doesn't seem to be in Mini vMac - at least after a quick testing, Dark Castle seems to be playable now!

[dgbatchelor]

Bummer... I tossed my old 68000-based Mac Plus years ago... Ran across a bunch of my old application/game disks and this thread... No old ROM file... Sad.

This thread does bring back a bunch of very good (but very old) memories.

Thanks for sharing.