Picked myself up a Macintosh plus.
No software, but all the hardware appears functional and it came with documentation.
Now I need a boot disk, a scsi hdd or a way to emulate one, and some software.
Anyone have tips on getting a #vintage #Macintosh plus talking to modern computers?
I know it can boot from SCSI Zip Disks or from a serial 'floppy' drive (which can be emulated, but not easily, with a raspberry pi) or from a real floppy disk,
Once I have it booting, and I have an external storage device of some sort, I can do file transfer over the serial port, and get it networked with a mac emulator running on a more modern computer.
Then I gotta get a decent HDD. I don't think SCSI2SD will work with the Plus because it has a finicky SCSI port. If it will work, though, that'd be my preference.
Alternately, I could just get a SCSI zip disk drive, and format it in basilisk II or similar.
Okay! Some news!
SCSI2SD will work with the plus, as long as you follow some configuration stuff documented on their wiki. I would still need an external scsi enclosure (or, at least, a box to put the chip in, an adapter cable, and a power cable, and possibly a termination thingy, because scsi is archangel magic.)
Final cost would be between $80 & $140 (the actual diy route comes in around 80. Getting an enclosure would cost about 60-80 on its own.)
(Cont.)
Other news!
Floppy emu is badly named!
It will emulate anything that sat on an Apple floppy port! That means 400k and 800k floppies, but it also (and more importantly) means the Apple HD20.
Originally, this was a 20MB HDD that sat on the floppy port.
From the perspective of the Mac Plus, the floppy emu can make disk images stored on an SD card (in sizes up to 2gb) appear as just a regular hard drive.
While ‘floppy’ transfer speeds are slower than scsi, I think this is my best option.
@ajroach42 wth does the interface look like that it can take both a floppy and a hard drive? (even old school hard drives)
@penguin42 external hdd or floppy drive on a Mac plus uses a db19 connector. It’s basically just serial access.
@ajroach42 so they had a micro on the floppies like on the commies?
@penguin42 I don’t actually know the details of how it worked.
I know the floppy port was a modified serial port, but that’s all I got.
Floppy emu costs ~$100 ($130 with the Bells and whistles) and has more utility (can be used for file transfer with modern machine, images are the same type used by most Mac emulators, allowing me to continue work when I’m away from my Mac, scsi port remains free so that I can eventually get a scsi to usb cable and use it for networking (I think.))
One SD card of more or less any size can be turned in to as many floppy disks or HD images as I’d like. I can swap between floppies, or mount an HDD.
Both floppies and hard disks are bootable.
Unless anyone can give me a reason not to, I think I’m going to pull the trigger on this option.
@ajroach42 That's a really good option! Sometimes you just have to go with compatibility over speed.
@profoundlynerdy it’s not even really about compatibility as much as overall utility.
This doohickey is more generally useful than the similarly priced, faster alternative.
It’s rare that I’ll need to access files larger than a few Kb, so the speed is less of an advantage.
@ajroach42 I haven't used FloppyEmu in my Mac Plus yet but it's amazing on my //c. With every penny and it was actually kind of fun to put the case together myself.
@daveross that’s all the endorsement I needed!
@ajroach42 is floppy emu like a boneless chicken?
@ajroach42 Wait, since when could a RPi emulate a Mac floppy?
(There are specialized products like the Floppy Emu, though, that can do it.)
In any case, there's a bunch of ways to solve this issue - if you get a LocalTalk to EtherTalk bridge, you can get it talking to netatalk 2 on Linux, if you have the DDP kernel modules loaded.
@bhtooefr Floppy Emu is what I was thinking of.
got it mixed up with https://hackaday.com/2017/05/01/the-raspberry-pi-becomes-a-scsi-device/ in my head.
@bhtooefr @ajroach42 Hasnt HFS and HFS+ fs support been supported by the linux kernel for a very long time? ;P
@ajroach42 @dewb None. (BTW, I won't be able to see replies from dewb, who appears to be silenced on mastodon.social.)
You gotta use the old drives, or use something like a Floppy Emu to emulate the drive while writing to SD media.
@ajroach42 @dewb Also worth noting that an Apple II with a 3.5" drive is the easiest way to get an old Mac like this bootstrapped yourself, because you can bootstrap things from the bare firmware and just serial on that machine using ADTPro, write to an 800k disk, then take the disk over to a Mac.
But, that's a lot of infrastructure if you don't want the Apple II in the first place.
If you need the system disks to boot the os...
You're probably going to want to install 7.x
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1185-mac-os-7-0-7-0-1
Pretty sure system 7 is supported on your guy. I ran system 6 on mine... but then again, I didnt have the Plus.
I had the original classic SE (black and white) which was the one right before the PLUS was released if I recall.
These are great pictures, thanks for this.
@dewb Can't boot system 7 from an 800k floppy.
I'll need a system 6 floppy to boot, and then system 7 install disks to install system 7 to the HDD.
I'll also need an HDD.
And my ability to run system 7 will be dependent on the amount of RAM I have installed. (Came with 1mb, I dunno if it has been upgraded.)
@ajroach42 Yeah totally understand now. Thats such a bummer.
@dewb Nah, it's not too bad.
If I can get some kind of a drive that I can access from a modern PC and from the mac, I can do all the hard work via an emulator (or, rather, I can take the hard work that someone else has done and use an emulator to move that on to my hard drive.)
Once it's working, and I've got all the proper adapter cables 'n such, it's a really easy system to work with and keep running. It's just hard to bootstrap without software.
@bhtooefr I mean, I wouldn't say no to an Apple II with a 3.5" drive, but I was surprised to find the Mac, I don't know where I could get an Apple II locally for a price I'd be willing to pay (nor, really, how i would use the Apple II to solve this problem.)
@ajroach42 @bhtooefr
I don't know..
I have an old mac SE at my parents place, and I used to have a subscription to diskworld..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
I think I recall compiling the required linux kernel module back then and was able to read those floppies that diskworld would send out monthly in their magazines.
I'm not sure though, it was in the late 90's. :( I wish i had access to my old mac.
@dewb The SE used 1.44 MB HD floppies, rather than the 800KB DD floppies.
@ajroach42 Ahhh that would explain why I was able to read them. Makes sense.
My goal is to make this a regular part of my daily workflow, but there are challenges.
First, i need to crack it open and see how much RAM it has. It has at least 1MB, but I want it to have a full 4MB (or, if I can find the extra hardware required, more.)