Extracting SIT files on Macintosh Classic

[Magicanz]

Hello again!

I have a Macintosh Classic with system 7.1 and 4mb ram and I am trying to get some programs onto it. I have got Apple File Transfer working so I can get programs from my PC to the Mac, but I cannot extract many of the files I download. I have got Stuffit expander 4.0.1 on the mac, but it doesn't extract SIT files! I have tried some solutions, like downloading Dropstuff with Expander Enhancer 4.0 (Didn't fix the problem) and upgrading to Stuffit expander 4.5 with Dropstuff 4.5 (Needed at least 7.1.1 and couldn't find any installation files online). Could anyone assist me in how I may be able to fix this?

Thank you!

 

[mraroid]

What version of Windows are you running on your PC?  What software are you running on your PC that lets you use Apple Talk on your Classic?  This sounds like a good idea if it will work properly.

mraroid

 

[Magicanz]

I might have phrased something wrong, I use 1.44Mb disks from my W10 PC with the transfer program on the 7.1 Tidbits disk (I think the program is called Apple File Transfer) on my macintosh 

 

[sixsevenco]

Ahh. Good old sneaker-net. Transfeing by floppy works but you will be really limited due to disk size limitations and the slowness of floppies. You might want to consider using that modem port to make the process faster and easier. 

There is a pinned post titled "The Definitive Guide to Connecting your SE/30."  Read through this to see what speaks to you. I've played with a direct serial connection, ppp, and MacIPgw.

For now, I don't remember that file transfer tool you're using. Instead, you could use HFSExplorer to read Mac formatted disks on your PC. This might fix the problems your having with stuffit expander. 

http://www.catacombae.org/hfsexplorer/

 

[nglevin]

Addressing this a bit more on the nose, StuffIt 5 (1998) was when the format changed a fair bit, and most files you'll find on the internet that are ".sit" files are probably StuffIt 5 files.

Before then, StuffIt files were dependent on resource forks that weren't particularly friendly to non-Mac file systems. If we want to be period specific, there were several other formats like MacBinary, and BinHex which were what were really used to send Mac files across the Mac unfriendly skies. Those two are a fair bit faster to decompress because they're essentially solutions to preserve the resource fork across file systems and encodings that would otherwise strip that metadata (in a sense) away.

Long story short, StuffIt is terrible for compact Macs unless you're trying to take a large file and spread it out across multiple floppy disks as a Stuffit self-extracting archive, which was kind of its niche back when StuffIt was popular in the Mac II era through the 90s. Disk Copy 4.2, MacBinary and BinHex are a fair bit better for bridging the Windows world. I believe you can find MacBinary II if you want to shuffle files that way between an emulator on Windows and a compact Mac.