StuffIt 5 archives on 68000 Macs

[Joris W]

Hi,

I'm reviving my Mac Plus and have System 7.5.3 running on it, using the wonderful FloppyEMU kit.

A lot of the vintage software on the web, unfortunately, is stuffed using StuffIt 5.

By virtue of some long sessions of Google-Fu, I was able to find a StuffIt4-compressed StuffIt 5.1.2 expander:
http://www.macuser.ro/Freewares/stuffitexpander512.sit

However, it refuses to install on a Mac with less than 8 MB of RAM.

Would anyone happen to know whether once installed, perhaps by emulating another Mac, StuffIt Expander 5.x could run on a Mac Plus?

Or are Mac 128K/512K/Plus owners just plain out of luck when it comes to StuffIt 5.x archives?

 

[Joris W]

Would anyone happen to know whether once installed, perhaps by emulating another Mac, StuffIt Expander 5.x could run on a Mac Plus?

This part didn't work. Emulating a Mac II and installing the Expander worked, but booting the Mac Plus with the same drive, and trying to use the Expander to expand a StuffIt 5 archive, yields a system bomb with Error 10.

 

[Crutch]

Ugh.  I didn’t like StuffIt in the 90s (so many splash screens and versions and Expanders and Deluxes “Hey Look We Made Our Logo Take Up The Whole Finder Window In OS8 By Splitting It Up Into Icons For Lots Of Tiny Nameless Files“ ... I was a simple Compact Pro guy) and I have been reminded of all the reasons why since getting back into this hobby over the last year.  How was Aladdin so incapable of building some magic number checks or similar futureproofing into its archive format so old versions would be able to detect future archives without crashing, silently quitting, or other nonsense?  And why did they have to keep changing the archive format in a compatibility-breaking way in the first place?

I’m sorry I don’t know your answer.  I assume you don’t just want to emulate a later Mac on a modern Mac, as it sounds like you are already doing, and use that for your uncompressing before hooking the drive to the Plus?  (In my case, I have never noticed this problem because I get software onto my Plus via 3.5” SneakerNet after downloading and unStuffing on my Wifi’ed SE/30.)

 

[Cory5412]

“Hey Look We Made Our Logo Take Up The Whole Finder Window In OS8 By Splitting It Up Into Icons For Lots Of Tiny Nameless Files“

There were entire utilities that did this, it was a common thing to do on software installation media at the time. I've got images of a few Stuffit CDs and as far as I can tell it never translated over to the installed software.

Stuffit isn't actually "good software" but for better or worse, it is pretty much the defacto standard.

I think part of it was because they built some tools that were reasonable for installation, such as the self-extracting archive, and some of its' just forced brand recognition (similar to how Iomega won by buying lots of ads and paying for retail shelf space and catalog/magazine page space.)

Unfortunately, calling back to the original point, I believe people who only have a 128/512/Plus are kind of out of luck when it comes to software archived by Stuffit 5. In reality, those Macs started needing helpers and bridge boxes in the mid '90s, so this isn't something new, per se.

One thing I think is fair to say that we can do to help (especially on newer repos where we're looking at addressing accessibility concerns like this) is to package software for those machines as Disk Copy 4.2 files, instead of archived files at all. DC6 should be able to mount them, so you can still do existing transfers, and DC4 and DC6 can write them to floppies for use on the older machines.

 

[Crutch]

There were entire utilities that did this,

Acknowledged. But I never liked it. 

 

[Dog Cow]

One thing I think is fair to say that we can do to help (especially on newer repos where we're looking at addressing accessibility concerns like this) is to package software for those machines as Disk Copy 4.2 files, instead of archived files at all. DC6 should be able to mount them, so you can still do existing transfers, and DC4 and DC6 can write them to floppies for use on the older machines.

I use PackIt for the Mac 512K-era machines. I don't use disk images for any software transfer--- waaaay too much overhead.  In the past 2 years I've never written out any disk copy images. PackIt is built-in to FreeTerm 2.0 and maybe some other terminal emulators. Use MacBinary for encoding if needed (but NOT BinHex, again too much overhead).

XModem transfers with FreeTerm 2.0 is still the most efficient way I know of to transfer software to the Mac 512K without using AppleShare. FreeTerm 2.0 has both MacBinary and PackIt support built-in.

I need to write a Mac 512K Blog article on how I do things, because I suspect based on what I commonly read around the forums that I don't do things the same way as most others. ;-)

 

[LaPorta]

One clunky solution: if there’s something you REALLY need, I’d unstuffit and repackage it into a 1.5.1 archive for you and ship it back.

 

[olePigeon]

At the very least, Stuffit 4 since it's System 6 compatible.  That's what I use when I have to stuff something.  Otherwise I just create an empty Disk Image container and put files in that.

 

[nglevin]

Another option for friendlier Mac Plus usage, without having to make the user finagle with the right versions of StuffIt or archive apps at all...

One thing I think is fair to say that we can do to help (especially on newer repos where we're looking at addressing accessibility concerns like this) is to package software for those machines as Disk Copy 4.2 files, instead of archived files at all.

Yes, the nicest way i know to avoid bootstrapping problems like this is; build a Compact Pro or StuffIt <= 4 Self-Extracting Archive (SEA) split up as a sequence of floppy-sized files. Move each of those files to a floppy (virtual or real). Generate Disk Copy 4.2 images from each floppy.

The first file of the SEA is an app that doesn't care what software is on the Mac barring the OS itself. Intel versions of StuffIt Expander can still handle those apps-as-archives gracefully.

 

[LaPorta]

The image option is a good one as well. SEAs are good too as long as you don’t do something like FTP them over and strip their resource forks. This would render the self-extraction part useless.

 

[nglevin]

Ideally the user keeps the SEA and its associated files in individual Disk Copy 4.2 images to avoid resource fork portability problems. The forks for the images can be recreated easily, if needed. Most Mac Plus adjacent solutions, like the Floppy Emu and Mini vMac, handle DC42 images with few strings attached.

It is most useful if you need to preserve the contents of a folder/file and the folder/file is larger than a single floppy disk.

 

[LaPorta]

Yes true, you can use res edit to copy them from one to the other, as well as type and creator codes.

i never realized how much easier I have it as a dedicated generational Mac user. The common “I have a PC and a Mac Plus, now what do I do?” never even occurred to me until I saw it on this forum. I assumed the only ones interested in classic Macs would be Mac users.