Classic Mac Emulation, Works to Excel
Conversion
From Tom:
Hello,
Thanks for your site. I was in Cupertino in early 80s as Apple
launched this frenzy. Apple a few iterations ago seems to have given up
on its core who stood by them all those years, and Classic is another
example.
Is anybody going to create a stable Classic emulator for Leopard? I
would be willing to buy (and am sure many others would, especially in
the graphics world)?
I have some old Mac MS Works 3.0/4.0 spreadsheet files that I
desperately need to convert/import to Excel with what Works called cell
'notes' attached. I can't seem to find any way to do this, could you
help or point me in the right direction?
Thanks very much!
Tom
Tom,
I agree, someone should come up with a good Classic
emulator for Intel Macs that works like Classic Mode did up through
Tiger. I've had good luck with Mini vMac and SheepShaver, although I've
never tried Basilisk II, but all get good marks as Mac emulators.
You might look into MacLink Plus for converting your
Works files to Excel format. The program supports both formats, but I
have no idea if it can bring everything over, such as your notes.
Dan
Leopard on Any G3?
From Greg Aldrich:
Hi Dan,
Now that we know Leopard can run on unsupported G4's as low as 700
MHz, is there any chance it could run on a maxed-out G3, say a 900 MHz iBook with 640 MB of RAM?
I'm really curious if any one has tried this and what the result
was....
Thanks,
Greg
Greg,
The bad news is that Leopard requires a G4 or later
CPU. The installer refuses to run if it doesn't detect a supported CPU,
and the few people who have tried installing Leopard on a supported Mac
and them moving the drive to a G3 Mac report that it won't boot.
If you want Leopard, time to replace your 900 MHz
iBook with a notebook that has a G4.
Dan
CardBus 32 Compact Flash Adapters
From Leigh Morgan:
Oh, Dan. Thank you so much. I hunted all over for specs and couldn't
find even part of what you just
summarized. Even knowing the theoreticals vs. real-world is much
more info than I had.
From what I did find, apparently CardBus in theory is faster than FW
400 - 800 too? - but who knows if that's actually true in practice? So
many ports are slowed down in Macs. It's aggravating the way Apple does
that.
I have a flash adapter around here somewhere, but I think it may be
PCMCIA card standard and not CardBus (how can one tell?). I got it for
film use with my Nikon Coolpix 990 way back when. In those days Lexar
was just starting to educate people about why 8x CF was better (and
Nikon was nearly alone using fast write circuitry in prosumer digicams
to take advantage of faster CF media).
Never could understand why people didn't use the card slot more on
laptops. Then again, I always liked expansion slots - we Newton users
were early adopters!
Thanks again for your reply. I really appreciate your help.
Happy holidays!
Leigh
Leigh,
Yeah, it's hard to find some of this information, and
CardBus is theoretically faster than FireWire 400 (66 MB/sec. vs. 50),
while FireWire 800 is faster yet. That said, even the fastest CF cards
today are slower than FireWire 400's maximum speed.
My CF adapters are ancient, so probably PC
Card/PCMCIA. Since my PowerBook G4 died over a year ago, I haven't had
any reason to really look into CardBus. I've found CardBus 32 cards
from Delkin for
US$40, and it specifies that it includes UDMA support, so it should be
a good candidate for running a PowerBook from Compact Flash. Lexar
apparently made one but has discontinued it, and I've seen reference to
one from Viking, but can't find more details. (If you Google for
cardbus compact flash adapter, about 2/3 of the entries seem
to mention Delkin!)
Let us know when you've got the system up and running.
:-)
Dan
CardBus Flash and iTunes Rentals
From John Muir:
Hi Dan,
Just been reading the Low End Mac RSS feed and have two things to
contribute.
First: Leigh Morgan's question about Running OS X from Flash Memory
with a CardBus Adapter. Unfortunately I think the reason there's so
little written about it is because it's impossible. I may be wrong, but
I don't think OS X can be booted from CardBus, but that you're
limited to the internal drive (IDE or SATA), FireWire, and optical
discs. I could try cloning an OS X install onto a spare flash card
and seeing if I can get my brother's 15" AluBook to boot from it
though. I'll tell you the result.
Incidentally, after about a year of use, my 12" PowerBook on Compact
Flash experiment came to an end when the card pretty much came to an
end. I had tried repartitioning the 8 GB card in different ways to
move the strain around, but I eventually ran out of options and took
the PowerBook apart to put in a spare old hard drive, from which it is
now running Leopard fine. I have the drive set to power down after 60
seconds (using the Unix command "pmset"), but I did prefer it on flash.
Perhaps I'll get hold of a FireWire thumb drive - or better yet a real
flash hard drive - sometime, but their availability is still poor
compared to near ubiquitous flash cards.
Secondly: Ed Eubanks Junior's wish list for 2008 includes mention of
a video rental plan for the iTunes Store. He may be interested in a
well written piece at Roughly Drafted as to how this could be done in
an Apple-like way,
How Apple Could Deliver Workable iTunes Rentals.
John
John,
Thanks for writing. It's entirely possible that Macs
can't boot into OS X from a PC Card or CardBus device, although
that's unexpected, as older PowerBooks can boot into the classic Mac OS
that way. I think the CardBus hardware interface is sufficiently low
level and comparable to PCI for it to work without needing to load any
drivers, but there are things about OS X that make it unbootable
from a USB drive with pre-Intel Macs, so you never know.
Your Compact Flash card failure does point to the
importance of backing up your drive. Flash memory is very robust, but
cheaper cards tend to support a lot less rewrites than better, more
costly ones.
I'll forward your thoughts to Leigh and Ed.
Dan
Even Older Versions of BBEdit Lite
From Don Warrington:
Older versions than the one you mention in a recent piece on Low End
Mac can be found at
http://www.vulcanhammer.org/downloads/macintosh.php
You have a great site. God bless and have a great Christmas.
Don C. Warrington
Don,
Thanks for writing - and for some great downloads on
your website.
A blessed Christmas to you and yours.
Dan
Other Oddball Mac Video Connections
From Chris Kilner:
Other "vintage" Mac video quirks include:
- the HDI-45 video connections used by early Power Macs and the Apple
AudioVision monitors that used this connection
- the Apple Studio Displays with the Apple Display
Connection (ADC) cable
Chris,
The definition of "vintage Macs" varies a bit. At Low
End Mac, we try to apply it to only 680x0-based Macs, and I think we're
going to standardize on "classic Macs" for Macs that can run the
"classic" Mac OS, whether 680x0 or PowerPC.
Regardless, Apple has made a couple of really dumb
moves in the video department. While Apple's old color connection
predates VGA and is thus excusable, HDI-45 and ADC deliberately broke
with industry standards to combine video, audio, and keyboard/mouse
support in a single proprietary connector. Those AudioVision monitors
are essentially useless without a Power Mac
6100, 7100, or 8100, and ADC monitors can only be attached to
modern Mac with an expensive adapter.
We posted an article about ADC last week (already #3
behind Wikipedia and Apple.com) and hope to cover HDI-45 soon.
Dan
Getting System 7 on a PowerBook with No Install
Disks
From Kevin Heaton:
We are a Mac family. I recently discovered my first Mac laptop in
the attic. It is a PowerBook 180c. It
turns on, but I only get the icon with a disk and question mark. I
don't have any floppy disks to get it going. Do you know where I can
get some type of start up disks for it?
I think a system 6 or 7 would work. I have a 4-year-old that is
wanting to play on it, and we have some educational software we can
reload.
Thanks,
Kevin
Kevin,
The good news is that Apple offers free downloads of
System 7.5.3 plus the 7.5.5 updater, which would probably be ideal for
your PowerBook 180c (it requires 7.1 or later). Problem is, the
installer is available as 19 parts of a self-mounting Disk Copy image,
and you have to be running System 7.1 or later to mount these images.
That's the catch 22.
You'll need either a Disk Tools floppy or Apple's
Network Access Disk 7.5. Assuming you have a more modern Mac with a
floppy drive, you can download the file and make a boot floppy for your
PowerBook.
<http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/
English-North_American/Macintosh/Utilities/Network_Access_Disk_7.5.sea.bin>
Then you'll need some way to get the System 7.5.3
files where you can use them. Unless you have an external CD-ROM drive
or SCSI hard drive plus the appropriate HDI-30 adapter, you'll need to
network your PowerBook to an older Mac that supports LocalTalk using
either an ImageWriter II cable or a couple PhoneNet adapters and the
appropriate phone wire. Turn on file sharing on this Mac, connect, and
copy the files to your 'Book's hard drive.
If you don't have an older Mac, your other option is
to find a LocalTalk-to-ethernet adapter, but they're few and far
between.
Dan
Problem Faking Out the Leopard Installer with Open
Firmware
From Joe Holland:
DK,
Bottom line: didn't work and locked-up my Mac to the point that it would not start
up at all, just the Apple logo and the spinning ball forever.
After start up into Open Firmware commands, first time I
entered:
For dual CPUs, use the following five lines:
dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@1
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
boot cd:,\\:tbxi
Mac booted back to my normal start up drive and mounted the Leopard
install disk. After start up into Open Firmware commands second time, I
entered:
For dual CPUs, use the following five lines:
dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@1
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
mac-boot
Mac returned to normal start up drive and mounted Leopard install
disk. This is not what I expected (thought I would be in the Leopard
installer), but what the heck, I doubled-clicked the install icon,
restart, on the Leopard disk thinking, "this will just undo everything,
and I'll be back to my normal start up drive." However, the Mac locked
up, as I said in the opening statement. Tried 5 or 6 time to start up
with no success uttering words that I usually reserve for the golf
course (your name may have been mentioned a couple of times). I did get
back to Open Firmware commands and entered the first set of commands
with no success. I began to think that I had killed the machine
for good, but resetting the PRAM got me back to normal.
A response would be nice.
Joe Holland
Mac Specs.: G4, dual 800 MHz, 1.25 GB SDRAM, 75 GB HD, bought the
first of 2000, I think.
Joe,
Thanks for your note. You're the first to report
problems using this
method. I'm adding information on resetting the PRAM to that
article.
Dan
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
