First post, total newbie. What do I do?

[JackSwyr]

Do you know where I can find the rest of the disks?
There was a background disk and another character disk.

[ClockWise]

What do you mean when you say that you can get the parts to run?

If the disk on Macintosh Garden is incomplete, it probably isn't available anywhere. But post a request on the forum there and someone might have it. Or try eBay.

[JackSwyr]

I got everything to run fine. What I meant was I couldn't get the parts of the character to run but I figured that out.

I just need the other character disk.
I have been searching for years on Ebay without any luck at all.
It would be nice to have a RAM disk however as I could dump it all in there like I used to do and run it all from the RAM disk.

Now that I have that out of the way and I am VERY appreciative, I was wondering how to print these comics I will create.

Is there any special hardware I would need in order to be able to print from this virtual Mac?

Thanks again.

[ClockWise]

Have you thought of asking the original developer for the files you need? He's online:

http://dwdurkee.com/

You cannot print from Mini vMac. The FAQ does say, however:

"How can I print from Mini vMac?

There is no direct support for printing, but you can use the ability built into System 6.0.8 and later to print to a Postscript file. You can then export this file to the host computer, and print it from there.

To print to a Postscript file, select LaserWriter in the Chooser, then print from your application as normal, except that in the print dialog, choose PostScript File as the destination. To transfer the resulting file to the host computer you can use ExportFl. The Preview application in Macintosh OS X 10.4 or later can open and print PostScript files. (The name of the file should end with ".ps" to allow Preview to recognize it as PostScript.) Other operating systems may require additional software to print PostScript files.

ExportPS is a specialized variation of ExportFl that saves a few steps when printing.

Warning : printing to a Postscript file in System 6.0.8 has sometimes been observed to generate invalid Postscript. This problem may be fixed in later System versions. I've not had trouble with my preferred version: System 7.1 with System Update 3.0. "

[JackSwyr]

Hi Clockwise and thanks yet again.
I have sent Trici and David emails requesting those disk files. Perhaps they will send them.
I will try your method of printing.
One thing I do know is I have now achieved what I once thought was impossible. I'm actually running it! It brings back a lot of good memories. The more I play with it the more it all comes back, the fun, the operation of the program. I am very grateful to you all.
Do you happen to know if I can find a game I used to love to play, it was some type of castle game, a side scroller where you had to avoid traps, bats and such. I remember there was even an Easter egg where if you set the Mac's clock to 25 December there would be two christmas trees outside the castle. I forget the name.

What about HyperCard? Is that available? I bought my Mac JUST because of it.
I saw a Computer Chronicles episode about it one Sunday morning in the 80's and bought my Mac the very next day. I used to LOVE HyperCard.

Thanks so very much.

Jack

[ClockWise]

You're thinking of Dark Castle. That's around.

Hypercard is around as well, of course.

Peek around Macintosh Garden for old games and things.

We have a collection of games all set to play in Mini vMac:

http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/system_6_hell

Download the images and drag them onto the Mini vMac screen. You don't even have to extract the archives.

[JackSwyr]

YES! Dark Castle, that it. Thanks.

I will look for these files.

Man, I miss those old days.

Let me ask you yet another question.

Say I buy a Mac from Ebay, and I would like to have these three programs run.
How woud I go about getting them on to the Mac?
I mean I don't have an external 3.5" floppy on my iMac, I don't know if I could get an old Mac to see the Internet, so how does that work?

I really want to get an old Mac like I had, a two 3.5" drive Mac with an external HD with a whopping 10 MB! LOL. Those were the days!

[24bit]

Which models did you own?
I found all my old stuff working with a suitable emulator, so I would not want a "classic" Mac again. If any, I would choose something modular with built in floppy, CD-ROM, SCSI and AAUI port. Maybe a early PPC Nubus or PCI, as those have been dirt cheap in the past and rather reliable.

With Apple´s move to Intel, file transfer to the oldies got harder unfortunately.
HFS support was dropped with 10.6 and the old AppleTalk vanished with 10.4, I think.
My best bet for moving files would be a ISO 9660 CD-ROM, but that would be one-way obviously.
Floppies may still work, given that you got a HD drive in your 68k/PPC Mac and a USB floppy with the Intel Mac. File transfers would work with DOS formatted floppies between 10.8 and 7.5.3 (or higher), files would have to be in SIT, ZIP or IMG containers though.
If you won´t mind to set up a 10.5 virtual machine on your 10.8 host, Mac HFS floppies would be possible too, far more convenient than PC disks, of course.

In any case, file transfer won´t be as easy as with the shared volume (Unix) in Basilisk_II and SheepShaver.

[JackSwyr]

Whew. That's a lot to digest.
I had a dual floppy Mac SE and it was great. I wish I never got rid of it.

[JackSwyr]

Hi, I couldn't find Dark castle or HyperCard.

[24bit]

My wife brought her SE from the office in 1988.
I was overwhelmed how marvelous this machine was. I had a Amiga 2000 at that time and spent some money afterwards to have AMaxII running to emulate a Plus at least. Some years passed until I could afford my first second hand MacII.
Nice memories, but my last Mac (PPC 7100) was only gathering dust for years.

http://macintoshgarden.org/games/dark-castle
http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/hypercard-241

[JackSwyr]

Man I was in the Air Force in 1982 and we all got into Atari 800's. Started out with a WHOPPING 16K of RAM and no storage. We typed in all our programs. Then we got a tape drive and I bought enough RAM to increase it to 64K! I had arrived!! Then two 5 1/4 floppy drives.
Through the years I had a Apple IIe, a Mac 512 that (get this) I doubled the RAM by hand soldering each pin of each chip piggyback on top of the existing chips.
Then I bought the SE, what a dream machine, wish I still had it. Been looking at Ebay and may buy one.
Had the iMac that looked like a table lamp, several new iMacs and now Apple's flagship iMac. I also hand built several PC's along the way. I'm good with hardware but not programming.

[JackSwyr]

Can't get Dark Castle or HyperCard to run.

[24bit]

HCard 2.1 seems to work fine: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/hypercard-21
No problem with DarkCastle_1_2, is working for me too.
Could you manage to expand the files, what was the problem?

[JackSwyr]

With Dark Castle I Unstuffed it and I got a folder with four files in it:
Castle Preferences
Dark Castle
Data A
Data B

I tried dragging these into vMac but nothing happened.

With H/C I must have gotten the wrong file. Downloading from your link now and attempting to run it...

[JackSwyr]

HyperCard will run but it tells me it can't mount that many images then what I do get is a box telling me I'm missing fonts.

So I have to figure out what files to drag into vMac.

[24bit]

I´ll upload my MacII stuff, should be done in an hour or so. The Mac_HD image can also be mounted in MiniVMac if you wish, for trying some apps.
The MacII image should also boot MiniVMac with some limitations.
An old MiniVMacII build is included for completeness, but the build only handles 4MB an thus cant load all extensions from the HD image.

I included a few games and utilities for you I gathered during time, but some will be in German - sorry.
There also is a Transport.dmg that can be used for moving files to/from your iMac.
Be sure Transport is only mounted on host or emulator. Files to move should be .sit, .zip or .img as its a DOS volume trashing the Mac´s resource forks. IMG files can be mounted with DisCopy even if the resource fork is missing. Copy the img to your emulated System volume an drag it onto the running DiskCopy Window. (Double click does not work without repairing resource fork).
Please check your PM.

[adespoton]

Say I buy a Mac from Ebay, and I would like to have these three programs run.
How woud I go about getting them on to the Mac?
I mean I don't have an external 3.5" floppy on my iMac, I don't know if I could get an old Mac to see the Internet, so how does that work?

I really want to get an old Mac like I had, a two 3.5" drive Mac with an external HD with a whopping 10 MB! LOL. Those were the days!

You've got different options for connecting the old mac, depending upon what you get.

For the original all-in-one line, they had localtalk and modem connectivity. If you're going for an ADB Mac that's pre-NuBus (expansion slot), your best bet is probably to get a serial adapter for your iMac (USB -> Serial) and a null modem cable with a Mini-Din-8 to phoneNet adapter for the old Mac end. These can be kind of hard to find now; I made my own 10 years ago when I tried this experiment. Then you'll need ZTerm for both machines -- an old 68k or Fat version for the old Mac, and the latest Universal Binary for the iMac. ZTerm talks over a serial connection and can be used to do file transfers.

You could also set up a PPP server on your iMac and use MacPPP on your old Mac over the null modem cable; this would allow the old Mac to have internet access via a PPP bridge on your iMac. I never got this to work, but didn't try too hard; I was mostly just transferring files over, so ZTerm worked just fine.

If you end up with a NuBus Mac, you can probably get an Ethernet adapter (might be hard to find now) and just plug the old Mac into your local network. You'll probably want to use OpenTransport instead of MacTCP to connect.

No matter what you decide to do, it'll involve a lot of learning how the different bits fit together, and learning about how old tech worked and how the new tech worked. There's no "just do this and this and presto!" solution.

[JackSwyr]

Thank you for your help. I does indeed look like a steep learning curve ahead of me. But I don't plan on buying a Mac right away for financial reasons but I will get one eventually, maybe early next year.