Is there a beige Power Mac that can make 800k disks?

[Gorgonops]

Also, just food for thought: someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is a new old-stock Ethernet card of the comm slot type you need for a performa 630. $25 isn't that much in the grand scheme of things. Get that and set up an AppleTalk server on a PC with an Ethernet port (there are convenient turnkey VMs for doing just that) and your file transfer issues are a thing of the past. Plug the SE into the Performa and run the freely available AppleTalk bridge software and you'll even be able to extend your Ethernet network server to it.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Farallon-EtherMac-YPN598-TP-YPN598-Comm-Slot-Network-Card-NIB-LAST-ONES/371762935087

 

[Gorgonops]

A USB floppy will work fine.

Also, what is "1.44MB software", anyway? I'd venture that 95+% of Mac games that boot from a floppy are on 400 or 800k disks and just about everything that's on 1.44mb floppies is meant to be installed to a hard disk. And if you have another Mac and a network there are ways to get around the problem.

 

[Gorgonops]

Also, regarding the SCSI2SD, there would be *plenty* of space to stash one inside a dual floppy SE. Or just whip up a trivial external box.

 

[EvieSigma]

I originally thought my copy of Super Munchers was only for SuperDrive machines, but it turns out its an 800k disk. Huh.

And can I have that Ethernet card AND an A/V card?

 

[bunnspecial]

With regard to the earlier question of reformatting 1.44mb disks as 800K, my success has been very poor with this at least when it comes to previously written disks. Roughly 9 times out of 10 in my experience, the disk will erase but will still fail to correctly initialize. Sometimes 2 or 3 attempts at initializing works. I can USUALLY get it to work okay with virgin 1.44s, and as mentioned a bulk eraser may "revirginize"(is that a word?) a 1.44 well enough to at least let it work.

I was fortunate in that my dad gave me probably 500 PC 3 1/2s and after an evening of sorting I had about 150 LD disks. The only time these will fail to initialize at 800K is if the disk is damaged. There are still places that will sell you "new" LD disks, although they run about $1 each. There's still somewhat of a niche market for them as there's a decent bit of legacy industrial equipment that requires them, and when you're looking at $1/disk to keep something going rather than a couple of million dollars to replace it, that's a pretty attractive trade-off unless you have an otherwise compelling reason to upgrade. 

 

[EvieSigma]

I used to have a bunch of 1.44MB floppies but they all vanished, and now buying floppies at all seems like such a pain in the butt.

 

[Gorgonops]

And can I have that Ethernet card AND an A/V card?

So far as I'm aware the A/V card in those machines has nothing to do with the Comm slot.

 

[Gorgonops]

buying floppies at all seems like such a pain in the butt.

I bought a pile of 5.25"'s from flopydisk.com a while back and it wasn't that big of a deal. They charge $60 for 50 "new" 720ks, which one one hand might seems a little steep compared to how cheap disks got in the mid-90's, but it's actually cheaper than they were in the 80's, particularly if you factor in inflation. They also have guaranteed "recycled" disks for 50 cents each.

 

[Gorgonops]

as mentioned a bulk eraser may "revirginize"(is that a word?) a 1.44 well enough to at least let it work.

It's probably just black magic/coincidence, but I had several 1.44's that I was trying to format with my Mac 512k that failed in the initial attempts but worked after I took a high-power magnet off the fridge and waved it around in a circular pattern over the disks for about 30 seconds. (Didn't have a bulk eraser handy.) I haven't had many issues with them once you actually get a format to take, but then all I use them for is slapping games on. I reserve my small hoard of double density disks for important things like OS boot disks.

 

[EvieSigma]

So far as I'm aware the A/V card in those machines has nothing to do with the Comm slot.

I know, but I heard something about PDS and comm slot cards not playing nice.

 

[Gorgonops]

I don't see anything in the Apple documentation saying you can't do it. Perhaps there's a conflict between having both a Comm slot Ethernet card *and* an LC PDS one that performs similar functions, but, well, the AV stuff doesn't even use the LC PDS slot, there's a dedicated connector for it.

 

[EvieSigma]

Oh right! Yeah, I forgot that.

 

[Gorgonops]

$25 for that Ethernet card actually looks like a pretty darn good deal, especially considering it's brand new. Cards with an RJ-45 connector built-in sell at a premium compared to ones with Thinnet or AAUI connectors. Add that to your Performa and you'll have a perfectly good "bridge mac"; about the only thing you'll be missing out on relative to a beige-era floppy-equipped Power Mac is the ability to run slightly newer browsers and whatnot.

Anyway, really, personally I think your hobby money would be much better spent and it'd be more educational to cobble together a working Mac network than it would be on tracking down new floppy drives and other conversion parts to upgrade a perfectly good 800k SE to Superdrives. Alternatively, if you really don't care about networking, I'm guessing the total cost of upgrading your SE would be in the same ballpark as a SCSI2SD card which, likewise, would in most respects improve your experience with the machine far more than higher density floppies will. 800k floppies were basically the standard medium for distributing Mac software up until at least System 7 was well-established, so bluntly speaking anything that's going to run well on your SE is going to be fine with 800k floppies.

 

[EvieSigma]

I honestly didn't know that, I assumed everything released after SuperDrives came standard would be 1.44MB, like how OSes stopped coming out on floppy once CD drives became standard equipment.

Guess I'm not getting new drives after all.

 

[bunnspecial]

I honestly didn't know that, I assumed everything released after SuperDrives came standard would be 1.44MB, like how OSes stopped coming out on floppy once CD drives became standard equipment.

Guess I'm not getting new drives after all.

I have System 7 on both 1.44 and 800K. I also have 7.5.5(1.44) on floppies, and I think it also came on CD. 7.5.5 is a big stack of disks-I think 14 or 15.

Apple has OCCASIONALLY conceded and offered an alternate medium for distribution, especially when the OS will officially run on computers that didn't ship with the standard distribution format. As an example, OS X Tiger was the first OS released on DVD, but there were a handful of supported computers that shipped with CD drives. If you bought the Tiger DVD, you could go into an Apple store or call Apple and they would exchange it for a 4 CD set.

Another one was the USB Snow Leopard installer for the early Macbook Airs since they didn't have built in disk drives. Granted, there are ways around this, but doing something like using disk sharing is SLOW(I think it took me about 3 hours to install SL on my first gen MBA with that method). Of course, now there is no physical distribution of OS X, although I have installers for everything since 10.7 saved on my computer and can make a USB installer pretty easily if I need to. Newer Macs also have Internet Recovery, which allows you to install the shipping OS over the internet if you have a hard drive failure or something like that. It's not the fastest either, which is why I make flash drives.

 

[EvieSigma]

Yeah, I figured 7.6.1 would have been the end of Mac OS on floppies.

 

[Gorgonops]

Apple sold the Mac Plus, which of course couldn't have 1.44mb floppies, just as late as they sold the SE (the official discontinued date for both is the same, October 15th, 1990), and there were also a significant number of Mac 512ke/EDs kicking around in educational settings for quite a few years. It probably wasn't until the Classic and had been on sale for several years that the number of 68000 Macs equipped with SuperDrives outnumbered those not so, if that *ever* happened. So, yeah, 800k was the lowest common denominator for software distribution for quite a while.

 

[beachycove]

It's probably just black magic/coincidence, but I had several 1.44's that I was trying to format with my Mac 512k that failed in the initial attempts but worked after I took a high-power magnet off the fridge and waved it around in a circular pattern over the disks for about 30 seconds. (Didn't have a bulk eraser handy.) I haven't had many issues with them once you actually get a format to take, but then all I use them for is slapping games on. I reserve my small hoard of double density disks for important things like OS boot disks.

Please explain the theory and practice of magnet-waving as a means of making dead diskettes live again!

 

[Gorgonops]

*snirk* Well, first, you need to make a hat out of coathanger wire. Cut and bend into the shape of a pyramid and cover with tinfoil...

Really, all I did was take a particularly strong refrigerator magnet, held it, I dunno, a quarter inch or so above the disk, and spiraled it around a few dozen times, alternating directions once or twice. It genuinely seemed to work more than once but, again, could have been coincidence or the earth's ever-changing spatial relationship with the moon and Mars that really made the format take.

 

[just.in.time]

edited: I'm removing my own post because I think it strayed from the original question asked, despite offering solid advice.

Instead:

As has been answered, yes any beige mac, as well as PowerBook, that shipped with a floppy drive from Apple can make the 800k disks, including the Beige G3 (desktop/minitower/AIO) and Wallstreet G3, so long as they aren't booted to OS X.  9.2.2 and below will work fine.