Software that can connect to a AppleShare file share

[jamie marchant]

Hi; 

 Does anyone know of any software that can connect to an AppleShare file share? I want to use AppleShare so I don't have to install additional software on my Mac. 

 

[Cory5412]

Are you asking for how you can connect to an AppleShare you already have and are using on your Mac, from another kind of computer, or how to connect to AppleShare from y our Mac?

Here is what you need to do, for example, to connect to VTools: http://vtools.68kmla.org/connection.html 

 

[jamie marchant]

I mean to connect to the AppleShare using Windows(also have Linux).  

 

[Unknown_K]

My approach back in the day was to set up a Windows NT (Win2000) server and have Appleshare installed (comes with W2k server) and all my macs could connect to it. NT was just easier to use (plus my PCs used it), and easier to backup.

There are FTP options as well if you just want to share files.

 

[NJRoadfan]

On the PC side, the long discontinued PCMacLan 9 did the job nicely. It was never updated for anything past Windows XP though. Linux can use netatalk, although you'll need 2.2.4 if communicating with a "classic" AppleShare server on a DDP AppleTalk network.

 

[jamie marchant]

PCMacLan does not run on Windows 10 and so it's not convenient to use and I don't know how to use NetaTalk(I think it's server) to connect to an AppleShare.  

 

[Cory5412]

Yeah, unfortunately the answer to this is "no".

If your server is Linux, also set up Samba on it for use with your Windows client and for much newer OS X machines. VTools has plain FTP enabled for transfer with newer systems and with non-Mac systems as well.

Even Windows Nt4/2000/2003 Server, which can run appleshare over IP and appleshare over appletalk for old Macs is probably not the best modern option any more because they can't run newer versions of SMB, which Windows 7 and newer need by default.

 

[olePigeon]

Theoretically there's a way to give Basilisk II access to the ethernet port on your computer, but I never got it to work.  However, I'm also not terrible software savvy, so maybe it'd work for you.  If you get Basilisk working with your PC's ethernet port, then you can use that as an intermediary.

 

[jamie marchant]

I think I'll stick with Zip disk and CDs to transfer things to my old Mac. It's new enough that I can probally load a live Linux distro and SSH if I need more direct access to the disk remotely.(which is why I want to do this). 

 

[olePigeon]

What sort of Mac are you using?  If it has ethernet, then you can just use FTP for direct transfers.

 

[jamie marchant]

Power Mac G4 with Mac OS 9.2.2 installed. Hmm interesting idea, I'll see what I can find. 

 

[olePigeon]

@jamie marchant Oh, that's more than enough.

http://www.stairways.com/main/netpresenz

This will give you FTP, WWW, and even Gopher.  You can also use Apple's own AppleShare IP.  That'll do ftp, too.  If you have an FTP server for your PC, then there're lots of FTP clients for OS 9 as well.  I think that's your best bet.  Just remember to binhex (or MacBinary) the files before sending them to the PC.  Windows wills trip the resource forks.

 

[jamie marchant]

Oh good point so SSHd on a Live Linux CD might be better for what I want. (remote diagnostics) 

 

[Cory5412]

Just remember to binhex (or MacBinary) the files before sending them to the PC.  Windows wills trip the resource forks.

Incidentally, do you know of any utility that will un-binhex on Windows?

This is A Problem with VTools, because the ASIP6 FTP server automatically bins things on the way out.

The other aspect to this is is that NTFS itself will let a Mac file hang around with its resource fork. The thing in that scenario that strips the resource fork is the FTP file transfer. That's realistically even true of a Mac-Mac transfer. (And, from NT4 until OS X server, MacWorld in particular tended to favor the idea of Mac shops using a Windows NT based file server, for performance and reliability reasons.)

For @jamie marchant What's the overall use case here? Are you moving compatible files back and forth or are you moving things from one Mac onto a modern computer to then be transferred back to a different Mac?

 

[jamie marchant]

I am experimenting to see if I can read the data(videos, sound clips, pictures) in my games on Windows, the modern media tools I have on Windows are better then on my old Macs. So for this to work I need to be able to see the hidden folders. 

 

[Cory5412]

Classic Mac OS doesn't really have hidden folders (the idea outright doesn't exist), only the data fork/resource fork thing, so the closest I can think of might be if you have a game with some kind of proprietary binary bundle file.

Mac OS X has what are called bundles, (.app files themselves for executable applications are bundles), and Apple did a little bit more trickery with hiding certain files from the Finder's view in OS X, but in OS X, you can inspect a bundle by right-clicking on it and saying "open package contents."

One possible helper if you think tomes might have been involved (and: it should be relatively obvious because tomes have a specific icon and are usually named "[something] Tome") then you can use TomeViewer to look at what was inside.

 

[jamie marchant]

I have a Windows program called "FMV Extractor" that looks through any kind of file for playable formats, but I don't know anything like that I can run on my Mac. 

 

[Crutch]

Classic Mac OS games will very often have some of the sounds/graphics in the resource fork as ‘PICT’ or ‘snd ‘ resources, either in the game application file itself or (often, particularly in cases where the author anticipated users creating their own sound libraries) in a separate file’s resource fork.  (In fact, sounds will almost always be stored this way in all but the oldest games; graphics are much more likely to end up in some proprietary format somewhere.)  You’d need to get them out of the resource fork and into a file format your Windows machine can understand.

Classic Mac OS did support hidden (‘Invisible’) files, but not folders.  But this was almost never used, because so much Mac software (certainly of the pre-CD ROM era, anyway) was meant to be “installed” just by dragging an icon or folder to one’s hard disk, and having a bunch of invisible files would have broken that paradigm and served no other purpose.

 

[olePigeon]

@Cory5412 Have you tried Stuffit Expander for Windows to decode BinHex and MacBinary files?