Mactober Saturday

[intric8]

Yesterday was a pretty fun retro-Mac day. I needed to move a file over to my A-Max machine for a video project I've been working on for a long time. My A-Max setup is running System 6.0.8 and the program I needed to run could only works on an earlier machine like that. If you try and run it on 7+ it'll just lock up the computer or throw the glorious Bomb alert.

And that A-Max system - which runs off the hard drive - really and truly prefers new software to be loaded via floppy disk. Thankfully I use an original Apple floppy drive with electronic eject, which is awesome.

Usually what this means is I follow a process like so:

• Go to macintoshgarden.org and find the software I want. They have almost everything. If they don't, macintoshrepository.org is a good fallback.
• Fire up Basilisk II on my modern Mac and put the downloaded files onto a blank disk IF the download isn't a pre-packaged IMG or DSK file ready to go via my floppy emu on my Quadra 700. (Following?) Even if I do download one of those image files, sometimes I need to move disk contents over to a blank floppy disk image in order for them to work on the Quadra. It seems to depend on whoever made the image and on what machine/OS.
• Once I have the file(s) on a new floppy disk image on a micro SD card, I move that over to the Quadra and load it up via the floppy emu.
• Finally I copy those files to a real physical floppy disk, which I then carry over to my A-Max and load from there.

Sometimes I'll move over a SIT file to the Quadra and unpack it on that machine before copying. It's all a bit of trial and error sometimes.

Phew! Good times.

Yesterday was different, though. I fired up Basilisk II and kept getting the same dang error over and over whenever I tried to attach a blank floppy disk image.

This machine is an M1 Max running Sonoma (14.0).

Baffled, I started to do what we always do at a time like this: Google. And I found a thread about this exact same issue, reported back on August 1.

I created an account on that site and asked if there had been any updates, but in the meantime wondered what to do. My emulation system was down for the count until further notice. However, I never got rid of my 2015 fan-blowing Macbook Pro which has been soft-lock capped to Monterey. And it works beautifully still. So I charged it and used Basilisk on that machine instead.

After completing my process outlined above, I finally got the software running on my A-Max machine.

Kind of funny when the extra screen real estate of the Amiga monitor shows up from time to time in Macintosh-land.

After that, I spent the rest of the day trying to make adjustments to various cameras to generate the least distortion possible while filming this screen. I'm still not done but I'm not giving up! I used to use a really cool app that made everything smooth as butter, but they changed to a subscription service months ago and I couldn't flip them the finger fast enough. Getting close to a "good enough" process.

[intric8]

Update:

The issues with Basilisk and Sonoma is a known issue and is being worked on. However according to Ronald P. Regensburg, there is a temporary fix to help get around the problem. He explains how here.

However, I think I'll just use my older machine running Monterrey in the meantime.