How best to showcase classic Macs to non-believers?

[System6+Vista]

I'm bringing my Classic in to work tommorow (I work at a camp, but in a digital music classroom) and I'm wondering how I can best showcase the slickness of System 6 and my Mac Classic to the kids and staff. Right now I like to show people how fast it boots, QBert, Shufflepuck and a very original looking Tetris. I'm wondering what others' tricks are in showing off the Compacts. I will leave it on "dark side of the Macintosh" while idle. What do you do?

Also, I have a Mystic Color Classic running 7.1, any particular ideas for showing that off? I'm thinking Maelstrom and Qbert.

 

[porter]

MIDIManager, PatchBay and a MIDI adapter. Plug in a keyboard and couple of synths and expanders and wire them up in different ways using PatchBay, that'll blow their minds.

Grab some MIDI capture tools.

 

[joshc]

I second porter's suggestion. I have never tried it myself, but I do know that all the music for the original Myst game was made on a SE, with that sort of setup.

 

[Bunsen]

There's a shareware sequencer called MIDIgraphy which should run on at least the Mystic, IIRC. If you hunt around ebay and the download sites you might come up with an old version of Logic or Cubase or another sequencer (Dr T? Mastertracks?) that will run on the SE. Try the website Shareware Music Machine at hitsquad.com

A serial port MIDI adapter for Mac should be around $10 on evilbay

 

[System6+Vista]

Fantastic; I was actually going to make a second post about MIDI and sequencing on the Compacts because I am a keyboardist and always looking for another way to use my Classics. What about games that showcase well?

 

[JRL]

Shufflepuck Cafe and Crystal Quest would be suitable for the job.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

For early PPCs, Graphing Calculator alone is usually sufficient.

For older, pretty much any app that is 'unexpected' in a computer that old. Videos playing on a Color Classic, for example.

 

[Mike Richardson]

Look on the Mac OS 8 CD for a music video by Barenaked Ladies. It's a Cinepak, 400x256 or some such size. I use it to show off pretty decent-looking full screen video running smoothly on a 68K Mac. You need at least a 33 MHz '030 or 25 MHz '040 for it to run well though. I'm not sure if an FPU helps or not. If the Mac can run at 800x600, switch to that mode first (assuming you have Thousands at that mode) if running full screen so the scaler can perform a much-easier 2x scale rather than a harder 1.3333 scale.

Copy it to the hard drive for the best performance.

Also look on an old AOL 3.0 CD for a 1 minute Cinepak commercial for AOL. It's in 320x240 format and runs on a 25 MHz '030 pretty well, and it scales perfectly to 640x480 so full screen is easier for this video.

Color Classic with a stock board is too slow to play the AOL commercial satisfactorily, so you would want at least an LC 520 board in there. 640x480 hack is nice for 2x scaling but not required.

 

[System6+Vista]

Fantastic. I'm thinking of converting some of my Seinfled collection into Quicktime files to play on my Mystic CC from an external 2GB SCSI drive. Maybe I should be using this thing called Cinepack? I have a Mystic CC (33mhz, 12mb RAM but no FPU currently) but I haven't done the VGA mod so I'm running at 512x384 still - will see how that works. It does run in thousands of colors!

In terms of the 1-bit B&W Compacts, any particular games that show it off? MIDI stuff would be great, but ideally I'd like to show it off alone. The kids at my camp had a blast paying Bouderbund shufflepuck. And I had a blast finishing their games.

The other reason that I ask is because I did not live during this era (born August 1989, like my SE/30) so I don't have a memory of what was smashin' at the time. I guess I lived during the CC/LC575 era, but I lived on the Windows side of things so other than Simcity and Oregon Trail I'm completely oblivious as to what was rockin Mac users' socks in the early nineties.

 

[Scott Baret]

Startup time alone should be an attraction as long as you're using System 6.

 

[LCGuy]

Fantastic. I'm thinking of converting some of my Seinfled collection into Quicktime files to play on my Mystic CC from an external 2GB SCSI drive. Maybe I should be using this thing called Cinepack? I have a Mystic CC (33mhz, 12mb RAM but no FPU currently) but I haven't done the VGA mod so I'm running at 512x384 still - will see how that works. It does run in thousands of colors!

What program are you using to convert them? Cinepak is one of the several codecs used by QuickTime, and depending on what software you're using, and on what machine you're doing it, you should be able to choose to encode the video using Cinepak.

 

[returningmacuser]

Rig up an ethernet connection and get iCab 2.9.9 and Acuty (an RSS reader) on the thing. That oughtta shut up the non-believers. :b&w:

 

[Mike Richardson]

Fantastic. I'm thinking of converting some of my Seinfled collection into Quicktime files to play on my Mystic CC from an external 2GB SCSI drive. Maybe I should be using this thing called Cinepack? I have a Mystic CC (33mhz, 12mb RAM but no FPU currently) but I haven't done the VGA mod so I'm running at 512x384 still - will see how that works. It does run in thousands of colors!

What program are you using to convert them? Cinepak is one of the several codecs used by QuickTime, and depending on what software you're using, and on what machine you're doing it, you should be able to choose to encode the video using Cinepak.

You can encode Cinepak on a modern Mac using QuickTime Pro. Make sure that "Show Legacy Encoders" is enabled in the system preferences for QuickTime. Obviously, encoding will be much faster (but still slow due to the nature of Cinepak) on a modern Mac.

You would want to encode Cinepak using Thousands (if that's not a choice choose Millions). The trick is choosing the correct size and FPS. 30 FPS might be too much, so 15 FPS is recommended, but also remember that the CC screen most likely operates at 67 Hz and frame rates that are not divisible into 67 will appear to have tearing. 33.5 FPS is probably more than your source files, so the next choice is 22.3333 FPS followed by 16.75 FPS which is probably your best choice to avoid tearing and a pesky infinite decimal.

Then you want to pick a size that allows you to display the most pixels, while not bogging down the computer, and not requiring too much scaling. You could choose 320x240 but this requires funky scaling to 512x384 and will therefore be slow and kind of ugly looking. Assuming your source files are something like 640x480 (so you have some room to scale down), you might try 256x384 or 512x192. The former will probably look better. Either one encodes 98,304 pixels, and only requires a scale on one axis, plus it's a nice 2x scale and not a harder in the middle scale. 320x240 only encodes 76,800 pixels so going with 256x384 will actually give you more detail on the screen.

So my recommendation would be encoding the video with Cinepak, 256x384, 16.75 FPS if you want to display on an unmodified CC screen, which operates I assume at 67 Hz.

For sound your best bet I believe is IMA 4:1, 22.050 kHz. If the Mac supports stereo then you can use stereo, otherwise choose Mono.

 

[System6+Vista]

wohoo! Thank you so much for the in-depth info. That'll save me a lot of time and frustration.

 

[Buickguy]

Sorry to chime in late, I'm new around here. I had a bunch of neat little games on a Mac Plus that ran under Sytem 6 that are shareware like the Fokker Triple demo, Hot Air Balloon, and Motorbike. I am also into the Midi stuff and it worked very well on the Plus in System 6. I'll send you a PM.

 

[MarkS]

I hate to be a naysayer, but you're probably not going to impress many people. I grew up on with the Mac and I have quite a bit of affection for the classic Mac, but it really doesn't compare to today's computers. The only part where it shines is boot time and kids could care less. People who are old enough to remember PC's before the Mac and Lisa are also old enough to be aware of the Mac and Lisa and how it revolutionized the industry. Anyone born after 1984 is probably going to be less than impressed.

You can try to explain how this computer made the current computers possible, but the kids will not get past the monochrome or 8-bit graphics and tiny screen. It's kind of sad, but that's progress. The comments and reactions you'll receive will probably do more to depress you than anything else.

 

[System6+Vista]

I'm revisiting my old posts from over 10 years ago, the time when I became fantatic about collecting old Macs. MarkS, I think we'd both be happy that you were indeed wrong - I'm not sure it impressed people, but there was an incredible amount of enjoyment that day, I still remember it! It was obvious that I'd brought something very special that day, and I was super paranoid about damage because kids are rough on everything, and all the young kids wanted to be closest to it - they'd never seen one like this before! They didn't understand why someone was treating it as normal. For the adults older than me, it jogged memories & they had more to say to me that day than usual. It was a really great experience.

What's most impressive is how fast it boots (I use System 6 so there isn't much to load). They don't believe it'll start faster than their modern computer and yet it does.

 

[Cory5412]

Great to hear that this went well, thirteen years ago (ouch, we've all been here so very long).

I think people like seeing things that are novel or out of the ordinary, even if it's a thing that's mundane or if the thing is older or lower end than what they're used to seeing.

It's interesting how the meta on some of this has shifted in the last decade. back in 2009 was before some (but not all) of the always-on and slightly less efficient software lots of people use these days, e.g. having several file sync clients, always-on chat programs with heavy server reliance (especially things that load backlogs from a server) and stuff like electron.

In 2009 we were starting to see the beginning of this but we also hadn't moved to UEFI or SSDs yet -- once that happened (and Microsoft started cheating by swapping the hibernate and shutdown buttons) startups got a lot faster again, although at this point a lot of people just... leave their computers on at all times.

One thing that was interesting back in ~2011-2012 or so was this idea of "connected standby" where computers would do updates on things like email and synced folders while in sleep mode but I don't know if anyone other than Apple really did anything with that, and I think the Macs that did it may have stopped a few years ago.

 

[joshc]

This thread confused me a lot, thinking it was a new one and then I see myself at post 3...

I've often wondered what would happen if I brought one of my old Macs into the office, and while it's true that stuff does go out of fashion/people move on and may not be interested in something this old or see the value in it, I think you'll always spark something in at least a few people when it comes to an old Mac.

 

[Mu0n]

My take in 2022 is pretty much what I'd have written at the start of the this thread:

Games: Dark Castle, Glider, Uninvited

Software: MacPaint, Studio Session or even Cubase if you have a midi module with the adapter to connect it to serial modem/printer, VideoWorks with an animation (see the music video "Level of Concern" by "twenty one pilots")