Just bought a couple of Mac Plus'

[kingchops]

Hi All,

Great site.

I recently bought a couple of old Mac Plus'. One is in really good condition and has a CMS 20 meg hd, it fires up and everything on it seems to work great. The other one works but has a damaged case and defective floppy but would be good for some of the parts i.e. screen keyboard etc. The broken plus has 2.5 meg in it whereas the good plus has the basic one meg so I've trasplanted the memory into the good model.

There's not a whole lot on the CMS hd just really the system folder. I've never used Macs before so it's pretty exciting to see how these things work. I've managed to create a boot disk to fire it up without the HD.

My main goal is to connect the plus to my pc to start getting software onto it. Plenty of stuff on the net the only probelm is getting it on there. My plan is to connect the plus to the pc via a serial cable which I've got on order.

All I need aside from the cable is a copy of ZTerm on disk, does anyone have any idea where I could get one?

 

[Mac128]

Not sure you will be able to just connect the Plus to a PC. Check out this link for some cross platform networking tips.

http://www.vintagemacworld.com/netmain.html

Now, I have been able to use Mac OS X Terminal to send files over a serial connection, so theoretically this may work just as well with a modern PC. I'm using MacTerminal on my compact Mac, but ZTerm may work just as well.

 

[kingchops]

thanks for the link 128, yeah I've been doing a fair bit of reading on this subject and I've read that it can be done by connecting the plus to the PC via a null modem serial cable to each computer's serial ports. I've got an old null modem cable that I used to use between pc's so I've odered the Mac cable which goes from the din connector to the pc 25 pin connector, then I will use the null modem cable in between.

Getting a terminal program for the pc is easy enough, then if I run a terminal prog on the plus that can do file transfers I should be in business (I hope).

 

[kingchops]

Just bought a Powerbook 520c laptop for $40, so my plan is to use the laptop which has a 1.4hd superdrive and ethernet connection to transfer stuff to the plus. I'll let people know how it goes.

 

[techknight]

one way would be terminal, but another way would be appletalk via null-modem cable between PC/MAC and use a macintosh emulator for PC with appletalk.

 

[kingchops]

one way would be terminal, but another way would be appletalk via null-modem cable between PC/MAC and use a macintosh emulator for PC with appletalk.

That's not a bad idea, I have MiniVMac running on the PC. Although I didn't think the serial port in MiniVMac would be mapped to the pc serial port, does anyone know if it is?

 

[Mac128]

Mini vMac does not talk to the outside ports of the host PC, other than mouse and keyboard inputs. All file transfer must be done with supplied scripts or disk images. This is by design. Believe me I have appealed to the current developer to add this kind of interface, but it's not a priority.

 

[Gorgonops]

BasiliskII can map a physical serial port to the emulated Mac environment. It's easy as pie under Linux, no idea under Windows.