jjclay Posted May 19 Report Share Posted May 19 I guess it's lockdown boredom or something - that and I've been trying to boot a vintage Mac Plus with external drives (which it does with a Zip100 SCSI and recent enough ROMs). With a spare Zip 100 USB drive kicking about, I wondered if I'd still be able to read & modify my bootable Zip 100 System 6.0.8 disk on my Power Macintosh 5,1 (2010 vintage) running OS X 10.13.6 High Sierra. To my utter shock, it mounted flawlessly first time. Even dragging the Zip to the trash to eject, and auto re-mounting works. Unfortunately, it is read-only (it's a MacOS Standard format disk) - but it did format as a Mac OS Extended volume to enable writing. But since that's not compatible with Vintage Mac booting, I'll leave it out there as an "interesting but not entirely useful" fact. What is the most surprising vintage peripheral you've managed to get working on a more modern Mac, and do you use it for file transfer between Vintage and modern Macs? enjoy your day... Joe Quote Link to post Share on other sites
cheesestraws Posted May 19 Report Share Posted May 19 It's the everlasting versatility of the humble serial port that always gets me (in a good way). It almost feels like shipping files between worlds, sometimes, going from a modern MacBook to some ancient machine. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Byte Knight Posted May 19 Report Share Posted May 19 4 hours ago, jjclay said: What is the most surprising vintage peripheral you've managed to get working on a more modern Mac, and do you use it for file transfer between Vintage and modern Macs? That's cool that you got a modern Mac to recognize an old Zip drive! I guess it's more of an emulated vintage peripheral, but A2SERVER on a Raspberry Pi works as an AppleTalk file server for modern and old Macs and even an Uthernet-equipped Apple IIgs! That's my go-to method for transferring files to and from all of my old Macs. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Juror22 Posted May 22 Report Share Posted May 22 On 5/19/2020 at 4:37 AM, jjclay said: What is the most surprising vintage peripheral you've managed to get working on a more modern Mac, and do you use it for file transfer between Vintage and modern Macs? I don't know that it is very surprising, but I use a USB floppy drive attached to my High Sierra MBP to write files to a floppy and then read the file off of the floppy onto my LCIII, running 7.1. The floppy is formatted for MS-DOS and I have PC Exchange on the LCIII. I have to fix the filename when it arrives, but to quickly move a couple of files, it is pretty handy. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
jjclay Posted May 25 Author Report Share Posted May 25 I’ve used this approach in the past too, and you’re right for a couple of quick files it works well. For larger files I used SCSI2SD but am also experimenting with a LocalTalk bridge - was aiming to keep my archives on my Synology NAS, which is great to access from Mac OS X machines, but not classic systems. For that I have a G4 Power Mac or my trusty Pismo PowerBook acting as my Classic & Mac OS X “bridge” (i.e. firing up Classic environment as needed). Also experimenting with a Farallon EtherTalk bridge, which I’ve had some success with but really need to get my versions of AppleTalk and Mac OS X (file sharing) sorted... Looking into the Raspberry Pi AppleShare server now too Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Scott Baret Posted May 30 Report Share Posted May 30 Nice work with this! I have a Keyspan serial adapter sitting around...wonder what it would take to get an ImageWriter II going on Catalina? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
jjclay Posted May 31 Author Report Share Posted May 31 Now that would be cool (and is a potential fresh batch of colour ribbons an incentive?) My boys think “laser printers” when they want to print. Would be great to show them how it used to be done (with lots of noise and time!)...I have an old ImageWriter II on my “get it working” project list I’ll have to take a look at. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
cheesestraws Posted June 1 Report Share Posted June 1 On 5/30/2020 at 5:49 PM, Scott Baret said: wonder what it would take to get an ImageWriter II going on Catalina? There used to be ImageWriter drivers in GhostScript. You might still be able to get them to work: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58348378/ghostscript-how-to-include-the-apple-imagewriter-drivers-it-used-to-include links to a notarised build of an old GhostScript that contains those drivers. Or if you only want to print text then it will just do ASCII printing IIRC. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
NJRoadfan Posted July 21 Report Share Posted July 21 Those ghostscript drivers for the ImageWriter were very basic. No color support or anything fancy. Just black and white. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
uridium Posted October 14 Report Share Posted October 14 LaserJet 4000N printer with correct EPS font downloading and conversion and spooling working with the printer's hard drive module. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
MrFahrenheit Posted October 14 Report Share Posted October 14 It’s not Mac related but I was working on connecting my commodore 1541 disk drive from 1987 to my 2019 windows 10 PC. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
LaPorta Posted October 15 Report Share Posted October 15 Weirdest I’ve done: hooked a Classic to a SCSI to FireWire converter, turned on the Classic. Connected the FW to an iMac. Fired up the iMac. The Classic’s internal HD mounted on the iMac. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
karrots Posted October 15 Report Share Posted October 15 How did you not have multiple access problems with the FS? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
LaPorta Posted October 17 Report Share Posted October 17 Who knows. It worked for reasons I will never understand. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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