USB support impossible with System 7?

[Paralel]

Anything from Mac OS 8.5+ is no good for 68k Macs, but it might work for the earlier PPC models.

 

[Syntho]

The USB Adapter Card Support thing is something I stumbled upon elsewhere but it won't install on 7.6.1. I'm using a 9600 which is the last system to boot 7.6.1 I believe.

 

[Paralel]

After doing some searching on this topic it appears that back around the turn of the millennium there were certain extensions, when edited using ResEdit, that could provide USB on System 7. However, I was unable to locate any detailed information, such as which extensions, what edits were needed, etc...

I feel the answers lie in the archives of various Mac specific newsgroups with posts from that peri-millenial period.

 

[Gorgonops]

As a random aside, color me not getting why you wouldn't want to run OS 8+ on a machine capable of it. You *really* should be using HFS+ on modern-size disk drives, and that includes USB thumb drives. Plain HFS has the same limit as DOS FAT16 on the number of allocatable blocks so you start wasting a *lot* of space (assuming you're storing small files) once your disk sizes get into the gigabyte range.

 

[Syntho]

System 7 doesn't have the bloat that 8.6/9.1 has. It seems speedier and it has all I need.

 

[Gorgonops]

Here you go:

http://www.silentway.com/mac-tips-better-os-9-settings

That combined with the greater amount of PPC native code in the post 8.0 OS versions will probably negate any speed advantage of 7.6...

 

[trag]

After doing some searching on this topic it appears that back around the turn of the millennium there were certain extensions, when edited using ResEdit, that could provide USB on System 7. However, I was unable to locate any detailed information, such as which extensions, what edits were needed, etc...

I feel the answers lie in the archives of various Mac specific newsgroups with posts from that peri-millenial period.

It's too bad that the xlr8yourmac discussion forums are gone. Is there an archive anywhere? I bet that if that was discussed anywhere it was probably discussed there. That was the hot spot for that kind of stuff back then.

You might also try a search through the Macgurus forums and possibly the LEM List archives for the appropriate machines -- PCI PowerMacs, back before they moved to Google Groups.

Wasn't there some kind of resedit group or email list or newsletter way back when? Something about that is tickling my memory.

 

[Syntho]

jsarchibald got this working with drag and drop. Oh how I wish we could find that magic combo again...

 

[Paralel]

It looks like at least some of the xlr8 bbs was saved into the internet archive.

 

[jsarchibald]

I know some of you are calling bs on this (but you've been polite by not saying it). But I am OCD on detail and only ran System 7 when using the TAM with the HDD. Shame I wasn't OCD enough to update the thread here though!

 

[IPalindromeI]

Use 8.x, drag and drop 7.x Finder, remove extensions (you don't need Appearance Manager anymore) and you're done

 

[Syntho]

If you ever remember any details at all jsarchibald, please update us. I'm wondering if you used just stock drivers or if you found some hacked ones somewhere. Any combo of stock ones I've tried hasn't worked.