• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

Best Stuffit version or alternative for IIsi

RickNel

Well-known member
My IIsi has 7.5.3 on it and two versions of Stuffit Lite (3.6 and 4.5). Both show registration nag screens but registration is of course impossible, and neither version will work.

Is there a way to get Stuffit to work on a IIsi, or is there an alternative to expand .sit files?

Rick

 

RickNel

Well-known member
I found that Stuffit 5.5 will process a .sea archive, but doesn't recognise some .sit files that I have downloaded from sources recommended in this forum. I wonder if those downloaded files were made on a later version of Stuffit that is not compatible? Is Stuffit always backwards-compatible with older versions?

Luckily I have both SCSI and USB ZIP drives. I can download and expand files on a G4 iMac, save to the USB Zip drive, then move the Zip disk to the IIsi with it's SCSI Zip drive. I made the mistake of trying to download on a PC with internal zip drive, and it made the zip disk unreadable with 50Mb of software backups on it xx(

The IIsi is the best machine I have to make 800k disks, from downloaded images, for my Compact models. My Plus with superdrive and SCSI can also do it, but is slower and less convenient to use.

Rick

 

volvo242gt

Well-known member
5.5 should support the earlier archives without issues. I've used it in the past on pretty much anything I could get my hands onto.

-J

 

bigmessowires

Well-known member
StuffIt Expander 5.5 won't open .sit archives that don't have the right file/creator types, which often happens if the file was transferred through a non-Mac system. There's no option to "show all files" like there is with the full version of StuffIt. That's stumped me more than a few times.

Very small claim to fame: I went to college with Raymond Lau, the creator of StuffIt.

 

RickNel

Well-known member
StuffIt Expander 5.5 won't open .sit archives that don't have the right file/creator types, which often happens if the file was transferred through a non-Mac system.
That could be my problem. I'll make sure to download .sit files only on a Mac. It's possible some of the problem files have been downloaded via PC then copied to zip. Fuzzy memory on that.

Rick

 

volvo242gt

Well-known member
The other thing to do is have a copy of ResEdit on hand. You can get info on a file and change the type and creator using it.

-J

 

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
Dragging and dropping the .sit file with the wrong file type/creator onto the Stuffit Expander icon usually does the trick for me. The problem I usually have is when archives get "cooked", or were downloaded in the wrong transfer mode. Things like 7-bit ASCII instead of binary for SIT and MacBinary II files. I have run across servers that force browsers to download BinHex files as binary, which doesn't end well either. Back in the old days, I would avoid this problem by downloading via FTP, but that option is no longer available in many cases. Now I have to rely on buggy web browsers and people who don't set the MIME types correctly on their web server.

 

bigmessowires

Well-known member
Dragging and dropping the .sit file with the wrong file type/creator onto the Stuffit Expander icon usually does the trick for me.
My experience with Stuffit Expander 5.5 is that it just does nothing if you drag/drop an archive with the wrong type or creator: no error message, no output file, no response of any kind. But maybe those archives were also "cooked" as you described it. I still haven't managed to uncompress them, so I'm not sure if they're good.

 
Top