Help running files SE FDHD

[HerpestOfTheDerp]

I really need some help with this, I've been searching the web for hours and I'm just going in circles now.

I got a Mac SE FDHD from my grandmother and I'm trying to play some classic mac games like A Mind Forever Voyaging and whatnot. It's a .sit file, and some other games are .hqx, but I apparently don't have stuffit expander installed and can't for the life of me figure out how to install it. I found Stuffit 4.0 as a .bin file, thinking that that is the closest I could get to uncompressed to run it, but it's still giving me the error about not knowing what program to use. (I actually chose the Fastcopy option, and know I don't know how to unpair that extention with that program). The .sit files apperantly open in MS word, so I don't really know what that's about.

It says it's running system software 7.5.5

This is really frustrating and I really don't want to give up on this; I've already bought a replacement mouse ball and USB floppy disk drive to get files, and I even kludged a replacement retaining ring for the mouse ball.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Welcome to the 68KMLA!

I think the best thing to do here is to create a .dsk (that's a disk image of a floppy disk) you can then deploy to a 1.44meg floppy disk using the USB drive you already have.

The .sit files can be opened using "Stuffit Expander" on any vintage or modern mac (there are other alternatives, TheUnarchiver works great most of the time)

Microsoft Word won't open them correctly. Basically they're archive files. A word processor isn't meant to open archive files.

Are you running windows or osx ? There are different ways to deploy images. Windows has Transmac, osx has its own way (you can write to a floppy using Terminal)

On Windows:

1/ Get Transmac. It's not free (unless you can find a .torrent of it on the pirate bay... you never know)

2/ Install

3/ Open the .zip file I created just for you

Stuffit.zip

It contains Stuffit 1.5.1 in an auto extractible archive. You can expand it directly.

4/ Format a 1.44meg floppy using the USB drive and Transmac

5/ Drag the file from the .zip to Transmac's main window. It will put the file on the floppy disk.

6/ It will almost certainly loose all its attributes. Right click, properties. Type is "PACT" and Creator is "CPCT" (without the quotation marks)

7/ Eject

8/ Insert floppy inside Mac SE.

9/ Extract the archive by double clicking on it.

10/ Install Stuffit.

11/ Enjoy, you can now extract .sit and .hqx images on your SE FDHD.

12/ Repeat the process when you want to import .sit files (games etc). I can't remember what the type and creator should be for a stuffit file. Apparently it's "SIT!" for both. Not sure though.

Alternatively, you could buy a Floppy EMU from BigMessO'Wires. I got one myself 'cos I transfer things from my macbook pro to my SE/30 quite often, and it's a lot easier to transfer things using the Floppy EMU.

Hope this helps!!

 

[HerpestOfTheDerp]

Thanks for having me, and thank you for the speedy reply!

So I am running Win 10 as my daily driver, and I installed the trial version of TransMac. I formatted the floppy to a mac drive on the SE, but I can't find where to format it in TransMac. It also doesn't say anything about the creator in properties. I do have MacDrive trial, so I can copy stuff to the drive already, but something like the stuffit file you provided only gives me an error saying that it could not be opened because the application program that created it could not be found.

Also, you mentioned making a .dsk? I looked into that briefly and it looks like that's just another way to either copy to the floppy or get a .bin on there. I think the problem is that the SE I have doesn't have any of the important programs to read .bin files, otherwise I should be able to run that stuffit.bin right?

 

[Scott Squires]

BadGoldEagle, self-extracting archives have a resource fork, which is going be lost during that transfer.
 
HerpestOfTheDerp, this is what I would try:

• Get a disk image that has stuffit expander on it: StuffIt Expander. Download the .zip file and extract it in Windows to get the stuffit_expander_40.dsk file.
• Download HFVExplorer.
• Run HFVExplorer, choose "Write volume to floppy" from the File menu. Click the ">>" button to select the stuffit_expander_40.dsk image. Choose your floppy drive and click OK.

I'm not sure if HFVExplorer works with USB floppy drives. Hopefully it does. Now you should have a working copy of StuffIt Expander that you can use to expand archives.

 

[Scott Squires]

Here's an explanation of why we're using a disk image. In the Macintosh filesystem (HFS), each file has two "forks" -- the data fork and the resource fork. Most other filesystems don't segment the data that way. If you copy a file that has a resource fork to a system that doesn't have resource forks, then only the data fork gets copied. When you compress a file on a Macintosh, the software combines both forks into one so that it is safe to transfer to other systems. But to use the file again on the Macintosh, it has to be restored to its original state.

This creates a chicken-and-egg situation, because executable code is stored in the resource fork. You need the resource fork intact in order to decode the compressed files. But you can't copy the decompression tool from another system because it won't have its resource fork.

A disk image gets around this because it's a raw copy of the entire disk, stored as a single "forkless" file. If you write it back to a floppy, the new floppy will be an exact copy of the floppy used to create the image.

 

[novusgordo]

This is also the same reason for MacBinary (.bin) or BinHex (.hqx) encoding: it encodes both forks into the data fork, so they can be preserved cross-platform.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

HerpestOfTheDerp, if it was already formatted, you don't need to format it again.

BadGoldEagle, self-extracting archives have a resource fork, which is going be lost during that transfer.
 

Your method is better, I agree, but IIRC mine worked. That's how I transferred stuff from my windows 7 machine to my SE/30 (back and fourth) before I got the Floppy EMU.

If we're going the .dsk way, I'll tell you how to create your own .dsk files if you want to add games etc... Because you'll have to create one every time you want to get something over to your SE.

You'll have to set up SheepShaver/BasiliskII on your windows 10 computer. That way you can use Disk Copy 6 to create and customise 800k and 1440k floppies. SheepShaver and basilisk both have a "unix" folder: it is quite useful because this allows you to transfer things easily (through a shared folder) between your modern windows 10 environment and OS7/8/9. 

Just create a disk image using disk copy 6, select size: 1.44meg floppy, then it will ask you to initialise the disk and after that it will mount your fresh, new .dsk or .img or .image (it doesn't matter)

Add what you want to the "floppy"

Eject the disk image

Follow anthon's instructions on how to write the .dsk to a disk.

Done.

Maybe someone has a better, more efficient method... There are a lot of different methods!

 

[Scott Squires]

You don't need to create a new disk image every time to move something to a floppy.  You have StuffIt Expander on a disk now, you don't have to worry about bootstrapping anymore. Just mount a floppy in HFVExplorer, or one of the other tools mentioned in this thread (but HFVExplorer is free), and copy the file (.sit, .bin, .hqx, etc) from your pc to the floppy. Done.

If you do want to create a new disk image, just use HFVExplorer to do it. No need to install an emulator.

It's true, there are many methods. Personally, I serve an AppleShare file share from my linux NAS (using netatalk) for transferring files.

 

[HerpestOfTheDerp]

Thanks for the speedy replies; I'll give it a try in a day or two when I don't have work. I hope it works.

 

[HerpestOfTheDerp]

Anthon, this worked perfectly. It did work with a USB floppy drive, though I had the cheapest, so jiggling the plug causes it to disconnect, and for whatever reason some of the floppies say that they were corrupt or unable to be read despite having been formatted. I'm guessing that they are just old or something. Kings Quest is a little janky  and laggy, but 3D Brick Bash works perfectly (though with the mouse problems it's also a bit janky). Trying to get AMFV to work, too.

BUT, I think I have one last question: are there any recommendations for games? Stuff like ZORK or text/ASCII based adventure games; I dont' think anything more graphically intense would be easy.

Oh, and I guess I'm wondering how I can easily figure which games will work, like what types of files can I run or what OS would be the limit of what I could run, Like i think I can run Apple II programs, but maybe not Mac?

 

[Scott Squires]

I'm happy that you got it working! The failures are probably just that the floppies are old and deteriorated. Try some different ones. I'm amazed that so many floppies still work, as it is.

You can't run Apple II programs. What you're looking for is early Mac programs that are black and white, designed for System 6. You say you have System 7.5... but the programs designed for System 6 will run better on this Mac.

There are a lot of great games that fall into this category. One of my favorites is Lode Runner. It doesn't use the mouse much at all, so it will be a good choice until you fix yours or find a better one. Dark Castle is a classic, but be warned it is a difficult game compared to modern standards! I enjoy the "World Builder" type adventure games. They are called World Builder games because they were all created using a program called World Builder. These games are a step above a text adventure -- you have the rooms that you navigate and text descriptions and type text commands, but there is also a picture of the room you're in, and you can click on things in the picture in addition to the text commands. Two good games to start with are A Mess O' Trouble and Mountain of Mayhem. World Builder games often have a lot of puzzles... so you might get stuck. Take a break and don't get too frustrated. I wonder if we have a hints thread somewhere around here. Also... they might take a really long time to load. But once they have started up, they are fine.

Hopefully others will chime in with their favorite compact Mac games.

 

[HerpestOfTheDerp]

Thank you again! I'll check those out.  I realized that 26MB is actually a sizable amount of memory for games like this so I can save them to the internal memory, meaning that as long as I have one good floppy, it's not that that big of a problem, though I might look into it if I find that I need them.

You wouldn't happen to know if there's a copy of A Mind Forever Voyaging that's compatible, would you? I found a 2-sided dsk version and a .sit, neither of them worked.

Also, is there any way to unpair .sit files with Wordapp and pair them with Stuffit? I'd be nice to be able to just doubleclick to expand

 

[Scott Squires]

First, just to make sure you're starting from a clean state, rebuild the desktop file by holding down command and option during startup. Hold it down until the desktop appears and you get a prompt asking if you want to rebuild the desktop file.

You'll need to configure HFVExplorer with filename extension to creator/type code mappings. Classic Mac OS doesn't use filename endings to determine what program to open the file with, but type and creator codes which you can't edit without special programs. The type/creator codes don't copy over from a PC. But you can have HFVExplorer assign a type and creator code when it does the copy, based on the extension of the file it copied.

In HFVExplorer, choose Options from the View menu. Go to the "Copying files" tab. Click the "Raw copy file type mappings" button at the bottom. Click New. The edit boxes at the bottom will fill with ????. For DOS extension, enter 'SIT' (no quotes). For type, enter 'SIT!' (no quotes). For creator, enter 'SITx' (no quotes). Where it says "Your description here" you can enter StuffIt Expander, but that is just a reminder for you what these codes are for. Then press OK.

When you copy a .sit file to a disk from now on, it should get assigned the right creator and type codes, and be associated with StuffIt Expander. If I have the codes right, anyway. I haven't done this recently.

If that doesn't work, you can also use drag 'n drop. I'm not sure how you've been doing it up to now, but you don't have to open StuffIt Expander and then choose the file to expand. You can drag the file you want to expand onto the StuffIt Expander icon in the Finder and it will automatically expand it. It's convenient if you keep StuffIt Expander on the desktop. Also handy for .bin, .hqx, and such files that I'm not sure what the correct type codes are.

 

[HerpestOfTheDerp]

Oaky, I'll have to try that later, though, because apperenty my PC doesn't want to recognize disk drive anymore :-/ I think I have enough games to last me a while, at least, so if it a restart doesn't work then it's not a big deal for now.

One last thing i'd like to ask is that some of the .sit archives can't be opened, saying they are corrupt. I don't know if that could be because the files are actually broken or there's something wrong with stuffit or the computer. Mountains of Mayhem did this as well as AMFV, so I'm not sure what's up with that.

 

[BlueBoy]

One last thing i'd like to ask is that some of the .sit archives can't be opened, saying they are corrupt. I don't know if that could be because the files are actually broken or there's something wrong with stuffit or the computer. Mountains of Mayhem did this as well as AMFV, so I'm not sure what's up with that.

What version of StuffIt are you using? If you are using 1.5 that may be the problem. I believe that the format of the stuffit files changed as they added features. If a file was compressed with the new reformat, it may not open with such an old version.

Try stuff it expander version 4.0.2. I believe it's the latest version which will run on a Mac SE. It requires system 6.0.5 or later. If you install DropStuff with Expander Enhancer 4 as well, you should be able to unzip .zip files.

Good luck!

 

[HerpestOfTheDerp]

I'm running at least Stuffit 4, but i'll find out which version exactly and try to install 4.0.2 if I don't have it. I do have dropstuff, too, so maybe I'll try that as well