retro-computing.com Mac OS Archives Fully Populated!

Two posts ago I introduced retro-computing.com, a new software repository and blog covering the full gamut of retro-computing, from the 6502 to Pentium IV, as the site header says.

At the time of my original post, retro-computing.com had just launched and had limited content. At this point however, all of the Macintosh-related software archives have been fully populated and are available for your download usage. The archives are:

• Macintosh System 6: 68K titles that are known to run successfully under System 6
• Mac OS 68K: System 7 through Mac OS 8.1 software titles that are 68K compatible
• Mac OS PPC: System 7.1 through Mac OS 9.x software titles that are PPC compatible

Pictured below is screen shot of the start of the Mac OS 68K archive:

Still to come is an archive dedicated to Mac OS 9.x specific titles, and another dedicated to the Apple IIGS. I will post again as those repositories are also populated.

For those of you who may also enjoy the PC side of retro-computing as well, you will also find multiple PC-related repositories fully populated and available for download:

• MS-DOS: PC titles that run under MS-DOS, IBM PC-DOS and FreeDOS
• Windows 3.0/286: PC titles specific to Windows 3.0 on a 286 (Real and Standard mode only – no 386 Enhanced mode)
• Windows 3.1: PC titles specific to Windows 3.1 and WFWG 3.11, all Enhanced mode programs

There are also multiple PC-related blog posts at this time; no Macintosh or Apple IIGS ones yet, but that it simply a matter of time.

I encourage you to browse over to http://www.retro-computing.com and check out the software archives and blog posts!

Enjoy!

You Need WriteNow, Right Now!

One of the long forgotten gems of the Macintosh world is the excellent and compact word processor, WriteNow. In the September 1993 edition, Macworld awarded WriteNow its World Class Award for the Word Processor category, edging out all other contenders, including Microsoft Word 5!

The Wikipedia entry for WriteNow summarizes the tale of this product perfectly:

“WriteNow was one of the two original word processor applications developed for the launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, and was the primary word processor for computers manufactured by NeXT. WriteNow was purchased from T/Maker by WordStar in 1993, but shortly after that, WordStar was purchased by The Learning Company, who ended sales. It remains fondly remembered to this day, for a combination of powerful features, excellent performance, and small system requirements.”

The Wikipedia entry continues at a later time, extolling the outstanding performance and GUI strengths of WriteNow:

“WriteNow represented what many saw as an ideal Macintosh application. It had a simple, intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), no copy protection, and it worked in practically every revision of the Macintosh operating system, including in the Mac 68k emulator on PowerPC Macs and in Mac OS Classic mode under Mac OS X. Its biggest claim to fame, however, was its speed. It was written in assembly language (Motorola 680×0) by a group of developers who had a reputation for producing extremely efficient code. The user interface was unusual in that while the typical word processor had a ruler embedded in the main document window, WriteNow used a separate, fixed window that could be sent into the background, freeing screen space on the compact Mac’s small nine inch screen.”

All of this sounds compelling enough by itself, but you need WriteNow, right now, because in addition to its outstanding performance, small size and clean, easy to use GUI, WriteNow sports one last killer feature: it can read and write Microsoft Word files, as well as WordPerfect files, in addition to its own “native” format.

I tested WriteNow on two machines, a Quadra 840AV, where WriteNow ran native on the machine’s 40 MHz 68040 processor, and on a Power Macintosh 7300/200, where it ran under emulation on the beefy 200 MHz PowerPC 604e. I am happy to report that performance was snappy and responsive in both cases.

It is interesting to compare file sizes as well. Using a specific test document with 51,494 characters, organized as 9661 words and 1026 lines, the file size for the MS Word .doc format of this file was 66,334 bytes. The WriteNow native format for the same document was 92,251 bytes, actually larger than the MS-Word format. This came as a bit of a surprise, but I guess WriteNow can’t be faster AND smaller!

Pick up a copy of WriteNow and try it out. It remains a valuable word processor to this very day – lean, fast and light on resources… isn’t that what good software is supposed to be all about?

You can get WriteNow from the ever helpful Macintosh Garden, at http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/writenow

When Drag Won’t Drop

After installing Mac OS 9.1 on my Power Macintosh 7300/200, I transferred several folders of photos over from my day-to-day working Mac to the 7300. Of course, when I attempted to double click one and view it, I got the all too usual complaint that the file could not be opened because the program that had created it could not be found.

The answer to this will be obvious to skilled practitioners of the Mac OS art – the type and creator code for each of the files needs to be set. Per my previous posts on bulk changing of type and creator codes, I turned to my trusty friend in these circumstances, BunchTyper. I was more than just a little surprised when BunchTyper refused to cooperate with me on this occasion. No amount of effort could induce BunchTyper to accept an image file that was dropped onto it. Thinking that there might be a Mac OS 9 compatibility issue, I tried the same with DropAttribute. Same result. Drag would not drop.

I poked around further, wondering if this was a general bug in Mac OS 9.1, but found to my relief that JPEGView would accept drag and drop files, and do the right thing with them. Well, almost… the image files that I could not drag and drop onto BunchTyper were also not accepted by JPEGView.

Further testing revealed a very uneven landscape. Some programs would accept drag and drop and others (most of them, to be honest) would not. Some, like JPEGView, would accept some files for drag and drop but not other files. What was going on? What do you do when drag won’t drop? An awful lot of programs that were designed to be activated in this way suddenly become useless expanses of disk space instead of valuable additions to the arsenal.

The answer occurred to me today. I tried it out and it worked. Drag and Drop is now once more fully functional. Thank goodness for that. I was afraid that this was some sort of systemic issue with Mac OS 9.1. Like all things, the answer is obvious once you hear it, although this one definitely reaches back in time. I resolved this particular problem by rebuilding the Desktop File for my hard drive. The Desktop File is a mysterious, shadowy database that Mac OS maintains in the root of each hard drive, listing all the files on the hard drive, their icons and other metadata about them.

Hoping that perhaps something about Drag and Drop might be impacted by incorrect information in the Desktop File, I tried rebuilding the file. This can be done by holding down the Command and Option keys while you reboot. Eventually Mac OS will greet you with a question about whether you really want to rebuild the desktop file.

Agree to do so, and off it goes. Shortly thereafter (a minute or so on my machine) it completes and the boot also completes normally.

With the rebuild of the Desktop File safely behind me, I retried drag and drop. Success! All the programs that wouldn’t accept drag and drop properly prior to the rebuild now behaved as their designers intended.

So, when Drag won’t Drop, rebuild your desktop!

Networking Your Classic Macintosh with Windows, Part 3 – Using NetPresenz and Fetch

This is the third in our series concerning how to network your vintage Macintosh with its Windows peers of the day. The first two posts in this series covered accomplishing this with two fairly well known tools for this purpose, Thursby Software’s Dave, and Connectix’s DoubleTalk. Both of these use the SMB protocol to achieve networking. Today’s post attacks the networking problem from a totally different direction – the FTP protocol – using a much lesser known application, NetPresenz.

“NetPresenz?” you are thinking to yourself… What the heck is NetPresenz? Names like Fetch and Transmit pop unbidden into your mind when you think of vintage Macs and FTP, and this is not without reason. Both are excellent and well known FTP clients, each providing a means for getting files TO your vintage Mac via FTP, from an FTP site. However, what if you want to share files FROM your Mac via FTP? For that, you need a Macintosh FTP server, a job beyond the limited means of FTP client applications like Fetch and Transmit.

Sharing Files from a Macintosh to a PC via NetPresenz FTP Server

This is where NetPresenz comes in. NetPresenz is a wonderful freeware package that delivers an FTP Server, a Web Server AND a Gopher server (if you haven’t heard of Gopher before, you can think of it as an early predecessor to HTTP). With NetPresenz and Fetch installed, you can both make your files available to others via FTP, and you can access files that others are making available to you, also via FTP.

First things first, as always. You can acquire a copy of NetPresenz 4.1 from http://files.stairways.com/other/index.html. At this location you will also find an excellent and very readable user’s manual for NetPresenz, which I would encourage you to at least browse before starting the application for the first time.

A note of key importance highlighted by this manual is to make sure that File Sharing is on before you run NetPresenz. It was not on my Mac (I used a Power Macintosh 7300/200, running Mac OS 9.1), and so I enabled it via the File Sharing Control Panel:

Every FTP server needs some files to share and so I created a top level folder on my Mac’s main hard drive which I called simply “FTP Site”. I enabled sharing on it and copied a few small test files into it, so that I would recognize them if/when I was later able to successfully access the folder from FTP. With this essential setup done, I was ready to dive into NetPresenz itself.

When you unpack the NetPresenz archive, you get an install folder that looks like this:

Installation is simplicity itself. Merely move this folder into your Mac’s Applications folder and you are done. Next, to setup NetPresenz, you start, obviously enough, with the NetPresenz Setup application. When you double click this application, you are greeted with the NetPresenz splash screen and then the NetPresenz setup GUI:

Since the objective of this particular blog post is to setup an FTP Server, I clicked the FTP Setup button, and was led through a simple and obvious series of GUIs related to FTP setup. Most things didn’t have to be changed.

BTW, NetPresenz 4.1 is now officially free from its vendor, Stairways Shareware, and so I was amused when I clicked the “I Paid” button at the bottom of the FTP Setup window, and NetPresenz obligingly said “Thank You” through my Mac’s speakers!

Back at the main NetPresenz Setup GUI, I now clicked the FTP Users button and pointed it at the “FTP Site” folder I had established before starting. Finally, I allowed anonymous FTP access to it.

That was it! Back at the Install folder, I now double clicked the NetPresenz application itself, and was greeted by its incredibly minimalistic log window as my sole indication that NetPresenz was now serving FTP out onto the HappyMacs network.

Now that the server was running, I needed an FTP client to test it with. For this, I looked no further than my trusty Power Mac G5 Quad running Mac OS X 10.4.11 Tiger, since almost every web browser these days supports FTP “right out of the box”. Noting that my NetPresenz Macintosh’s local IP address was 192.168.0.9, I typed ftp://192.168.0.9 into the address bar of my browser (TenFourFox G5, of course!) and was greeted with the below:

That was easy! It worked the first time, no muss, no fuss. Through the browser presented FTP page, I was able to download files from the NetPresenz Macintosh, but could not upload: uploading requires a more complete client than a web browser provides. To test uploading therefore, I turned to another trusted Mac OS X standby of mine, CyberDuck. Using CyberDuck on my Power Mac G5 Quad I was able to both upload and download files via the NetPresenz server running on my vintage Macintosh.

Now of course this series of posts is about networking your vintage Mac with its vintage PC peers of the day, and so I went to my favorite vintage PC, a 200 MHz Pentium Pro machine running Windows NT 4.0, and fired up another old friend of mine, WS_FTP32, my favorite Windows FTP client from that period. I pointed it at 192.168.0.9 via its site setup dialog:

I then double clicked the site name I had just setup and sure enough, once more, with no muss, no fuss, I was presented the below:

Once again it had worked first time! Once again I was able to upload and download files to and from the Mac with ease.

One nice behavior of NetPresenz that is observable from WS_FTP32 but that cannot not be seen from TenFourFox is the login greeting message. NetPresenz allows you to set per user login greeting messages, so that when a particular user logs in, they are greeted with a customized message. The ability to customize the login message was typical of FTP servers of the day, but it is still a nice refinement. In NetPresenz you can also set per folder greeting messages, such that when a user navigates into any given folder, they get a folder-specific greeting message, but I did not bother with that additional setup. In the meantime, if you look at the last two lines of the above WS_FTP32 screen, you will see the greeting message I had established for user “anonymous” (“Welcome to the 7300/200 FTP Site! Enjoy Your Stay.”).

With that, file sharing FROM the Macintosh TO the PC, via an FTP server running on the Macintosh, was fully up and running.

Sharing Files from a PC to a Macintosh via the Fetch FTP Client

What about the other direction – sharing files FROM a PC TO a Mac using FTP? Once again, an FTP server is needed, but this time it is a Windows-based FTP Server that is needed. Those of you who are intimately familiar with Windows NT 4.0 will recall that even the Workstation version (the version I have running on my 200 MHz Pentium Pro machine) can run an FTP server as part of its Peer Web Services. The Peer Web Services are not installed by default and so you will need your Windows NT 4.0 Workstation install CD to proceed. If you choose to take this route (I did not) Microsoft helpfully provides the following instructions on how to install and enable the native FTP server:

Why didn’t I go this way? The quick answer is security. I have read one too many articles to the effect that the Windows NT 4.0 FTP Server is riddled with security holes – a nightmare waiting to happen. All by itself, that is reason enough to look elsewhere, but I was also worried about readers who didn’t have Windows NT 4.0, but rather had Windows 95 (or worse, Windows for Workgroups 3.11) – I wanted a solution for them as well.

With this in mind, I went hunting for a generic Windows FTP Server that could be installed on at least Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. After going down many a blind alley, I finally came upon acFTP, an open source FTP Server whose only stated requirement is Win32. This made it perfect for both Windows 95 AND Windows NT 4.0 (…and it might even work on Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with Win32s installed… who knows! I didn’t try this – if you do, let me know how it went!). You can pick up a copy of acFTP at http://sourceforge.net/projects/acftp/.

I won’t go into the Windows NT 4.0 installation and setup of acFTP – this blog is about Macs and not PCs after all! However, it was straightforward and direct, and the FTP server was up and running with almost no effort.

I wonder whether the author of acFTP was inspired by NetPresenz, or perhaps visa-versa? acFTP sports the same incredibly minimalistic style of user interface that NetPresenz employs, providing only a log window as evidence that it is running. If possible, acFTP is even more minimalistic than NetPresenz – configuration is accomplished solely through text based configuration files, without even the GUIs that NetPresenz provides. acFTP may be minimalistic, but it was effective, and it successfully served FTP out onto the HappyMacs network.

All I needed now was a Macintosh-based FTP client.

For this, I picked Fetch. Fetch was my “go to” FTP client “back in the day” when I was lucky enough to have a Macintosh on my desk as my day-to-day computer at work. Without question, this made Fetch my first choice. As I mentioned earlier however, Transmit is another very popular choice of FTP client for Mac OS Classic, if you wish to try something different. You can get both Fetch and Transmit from the Macintosh Garden at http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/fetch-212 and http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/transmit-17, respectively.

As was the case with NetPresenz, installation of Fetch is a doddle – just copy the Fetch folder to your Mac’s Applications folder and run the application. Pretty darn simple!

I did check Fetch’s preferences, but I didn’t feel that anything needed changing, and so I left them as they were:

I logged in using anonymous FTP:

Fetch happily connected, and rewarded me with the following screen:

As you can see from the above, I pointed Fetch at something a little more beefy than the simple test files I had set up for NetPresenz testing. I established a folder full of programs, screen shots and wallpaper images, and then proceeded to both download (Get File) and upload (Put File) files to/from this folder using Fetch. Both directions worked flawlessly.

With that, sharing files FROM a PC TO a Macintosh over FTP was also now fully up and running.

Closing Thoughts

We have seen that you can set up your vintage Mac to be either an FTP Server, via NetPresenz, or an FTP Client, via Fetch (or any one of a number of other excellent Macintosh FTP clients, as you wish). With your Mac set up as an FTP Server, you can share files directly with vintage PCs with your Mac providing the common ground. If your Mac is set up as an FTP client, you can share files directly with vintage PCs running an FTP server such as acFTP with the PC acting as the common ground. Of course, you can also do all of this indirectly, using as a middleman any FTP server that is visible to both the Mac and the PC.

That’s it for this installment of the networking series. In the next installment, we will look at sharing files from your Mac to a PC (and to almost anything else that supports HTTP) using a clever and almost completely forgotten gem that Apple debuted in Mac OS 8. Until then, happy FTP’ing!

Network Your Classic Macintosh with Windows, Part 2: Using DoubleTalk

In the first post of our series on networking your classic Macintosh with Windows, we examined the use of Thursby Software’s Dave, and found it more than equal to the task. In this post, we will look at use of Connectix DoubleTalk, the other classic solution in this space. If you haven’t read Part 1 of this series, it might be useful to go back and check out at least the initial paragraphs, as they lay out some background details that will make what follows a lot more understandable.

Alright, let’s network with DoubleTalk! It is important to know that DoubleTalk is more limited than Dave – it only provides an SMB client. This means that a DoubleTalk-equipped Mac can read and write files to and from a Windows machine, but a Windows machine cannot even see a DoubleTalk equipped Mac on the network, much less read and write files to and from it. BTW, you can download a copy of DoubleTalk from the always valuable Macintosh Garden, at http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/connectix-doubletalk.

DoubleTalk may only provide a one way Mac -> PC connection, but even a one way connection is quite valuable, and I am pleased to report that DoubleTalk does a very good job at providing it, at least after a little jiggling to get around the “blank list of shares” problem.

Installing and Configuring DoubleTalk

Installation and configuration was simple and fast, and finding Windows machines on the network was as seamless as selecting the AppleShare DoubleTalk Workgroup zone in Chooser. The available PCs obligingly showed up in the right hand pane, ready to be mounted and used.

At this point however, the “empty list of shares” problem raised it head, as it did with Dave in Part 1 of this series. When I selected the PC of interest (Dualpro200), DoubleTalk presented me with a blank list of available shares, leaving me with nothing to connect to. I could “see” the PC of interest, but could not connect to any shares on it.

As we saw in Part 1 of this series, this problem was easily resolved at the PC end of the link, by reducing the share name length of the PC’s shared folder to 12 characters or less. However, the workaround to the “empty list of shares” problem is instructive, and so we carry on as if we had not solved the problem in this manner.

Unlike Dave, there is no Add Share button in DoubleTalk, and thus it would appear that you are stuck. Happily, this is not the case. The copy of DoubleTalk that I downloaded from the Macintosh Garden included both Version 1.0 of DoubleTalk and a Version 1.1 updater. I had installed both and so was running Version 1.1. Consulting the documentation that came with Version 1.1 (excellent, by the way), I discovered that Version 1.1 added support for something called the DoubleTalk Mounter, a capability that is functionally identical to Dave’s Add Shares button.

Available from DoubleTalk’s control strip module, the Mounter pops up a dialog that allows you to directly type in the names of shares that you want to mount. These are the same share names discussed in Part 1 of this series, in the “blank list of shares” portion of the Dave description.

There is one caveat. The names have to be entered as fully qualified network names, including both the computer name and the share name on that computer, together as a single path name. The computer name is the name you assigned to the PC in its Network Control Panel, preceded by two back slashes, and the share name is the same share name mentioned above. Putting this together, for the PC named Dualpro200, and the share on that computer named DP200-SMB, the fully qualified path name would be “\\Dualpro200\DP200-SMB”.

Just as with Dave, one by one I entered the share names of interest into the DoubleTalk Mounter:

and DoubleTalk took them all.

Networking with DoubleTalk: Mac to PC

Once the above was taken care of, mounting PC shares was a simple and seamless exercise with Chooser, identical in operation to Mac OS based server connections.
Reading and writing files on the Windows machine was an intuitive exercise in drag and drop and was identical to doing the same with Mac files and folders. All in all, DoubleTalk provides a very simple and usable experience that achieved the desired result of trading files between a Classic Mac and a Windows machine, if only in one direction. Mac to PC networking via DoubleTalk was up and running!

Networking with DoubleTalk – Summary

With Mac to PC networking fully up and running, I can now summarize the recipe for success with DoubleTalk:

• On the PC side, make sure that you have one or more shared folders, and take note of the “Share Name” name you assign to each. Keep the filename of each shared folder to 12 characters or less.
• Still on the PC side, if you CANNOT keep the share names to 12 characters or less (perhaps the machine is not under your control), compensate for this on the Macintosh side. On the Macintosh side, when you use Chooser to select the PC, if you are greeted with a blank list of available shares, use DoubleTalk’s Mounter to manually add the shares whose names you took note of in the last step.

  If you have to use Mounter to add your shares, you will have to repeat this step each time unfortunately. Unlike Dave, DoubleTalk does not remember the names between sessions.

• That’s it! Apply the above and you should be happily networking between a Macintosh running DoubleTalk and a PC running Windows NT 4.0.

Closing Thoughts

That’s it! This completes our roundup of “classic” solutions to the Mac-Windows file sharing need. In Part 1 of this series, we have looked at Thursby’s Dave and in this post, Part 2 of the series, we have looked at Connectix’s DoubleTalk. This author recommends Thursby’s Dave for people wishing to network their classic Mac with a Windows machine, but as we have seen above, Connectix DoubleTalk does a very able job as well, albeit in one direction only.

In the next post in this series, we will look at using a Mac OS Classic FTP server to enable Windows (and Linux as well!) to access files on a Mac, complemented by a Mac OS Classic FTP client to enable the same in reverse. Until then, Happy Networking with EITHER Dave or DoubleTalk!

Network Your Classic Mac with Windows – Part 1: Using Dave

Here at the Happy Macs Lab, we have a unique issue. In the lab, you will find vintage Power Macintosh models, running everything from Mac OS 7.5.3 up through Mac OS 9.1, a maxed out Power Mac G4 Cube running all of Mac OS 9.2.2, Mac OS X Tiger and Mac OS X Leopard, Power Mac G5s running Mac OS X Tiger and Mac OS X Leopard, multiple older PCs running various versions of Linux and even a sampling of older Windows machines, running Windows NT 4.0, Windows 95, Windows 98SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000 and finally Windows XP. It is quite the “tower of babel” from a computing perspective, and getting all these machines to talk to each other is a real challenge.

Happily, there are multiple solutions that achieve the desired result, and this blog post is the first of a series where we will look at the best of them, one by one. Some of the solutions are point-to-point, connecting just one OS to one other OS (such as Mac OS to Windows), and some are all encompassing, connecting everything to everything.

In this first post of the series, we will look at the first of two “traditional” point-to-point solutions for connecting Mac OS Classic and Windows, Thursby Software’s Dave. In the second post of this series, we will examine the other classic solution to this problem, Connectix’s DoubleTalk.

Throughout this series of networking posts, “Mac OS Classic” is used to imply Mac OS 9.x and lower, and specifically excludes all versions of Mac OS X. Similarly, throughout this series of posts, “Windows” implies Windows NT 4.0 and higher. For the purposes of this series, I used two principal Macs, a Power Macintosh 7500/100, upgraded with a NewerTech 366 MHz G3, and running Mac OS 8.6, and a fairly stock Power Macintosh 7300/200 running Mac OS 9.1. I used a 200 MHz dual CPU Pentium Pro PC running Windows NT 4.0 as the Windows representative in this networking duet.

Windows, Networking and SMB

OK, lets get going. A little background is in order first. Windows communicates with the networked world using the Server Management Block (SMB) protocol, renamed CIFS (Common Internet File System) in later versions of Windows. Pretty much all versions of Windows since Windows NT 3.x have incorporated both an SMB server and an SMB client, meaning that the OS can both read and write other SMB-based machines and can itself be read and written by those same other machines. I have seen, but not yet been able to confirm, that even the creaky Windows for Workgroups 3.11 included an SMB capability.

Since Windows speaks SMB, if a Mac wants to engage in file sharing with a Windows platform, it needs to speak SMB as well. Functionally speaking, this means that it needs to implement an SMB server and /or an SMB client. The two well-regarded third party applications mentioned above, Thursby Software’s Dave and Connectix’s DoubleTalk, do just this.

Thursby’s Dave seems to be the preferred solution in this space, although both garner a recommendation on Apple’s website.

Dave is preferred because it implements both an SMB server and an SMB client, while DoubleTalk only implements and SMB client. Having both an SMB server and an SMB client, a Dave-equipped Mac can seamlessly read and write files to and from a Windows machine and that Windows machine can seamlessly read and write files to and from the Mac.

Installing and Configuring Dave

I tested Dave and can attest that this is all true. I loaded Dave onto my Power Macintosh 7500, running Mac OS 8.6, and took it for a spin. The above mentioned 200 MHz Pentium Pro PC, running Windows NT 4.0, acted as its Windows counterpart in this testing.

Now before we go any further, there is a pink elephant in the room that we should all acknowledge. Astonishingly, not only is Thursby still a going commercial concern, Dave is still an active product at Thursby, and they want a staggering $119 for a current license for it! This will no doubt stop many folks from experimenting with it further.

Of course, the Dave software, and license numbers for it, are available from multiple “abandonware” sites, but none of the licenses I could find this way worked – all were rejected by Dave as “expired”. Thursby has protected their product well. Already having a valid Dave 4.0 license, I was able to proceed, but those of you not in this happy position will need to either pony up a big $119 to Thursby, or make your peace with trolling the web in search of non-expired licenses. I did this yesterday as a test, and successfully unearthed multiple apparently valid licenses. A little bit of persistence may serve you well in this area.

In an effort to save would be users of Dave from having to pay the hefty $119 fee for what is fundamentally an obsolete product, I queried Thursby’s email support, asking if they would be willing to provide a free license, given the lack of remaining commercial trade in Mac OS 9.x and below. The answer back was a firm “no”, followed by an admonition that Dave should not be considered abandonware. The response concluded with a request to know where I had downloaded Dave from! Realizing that this line of inquiry was not likely to result in a free Dave license, I abandoned it and moved on.

I will leave the licensing issue in your capable hands. Moving on, I can report that Dave is an excellent product. It was simple to install and configure, easy to use, and 100% effective at doing what it said it would do.

Installation and setup was a snap.

Dave’s setup runs you through a few simple questions, the most complex of which may be its query for your workgroup name. If you don’t know the answer, just type in “WORKGROUP”, which is what most PCs default it to. Confirm this by visiting the Network control panel of the PC you are trying to connect to, and change the name on the PC side or the Mac side, if need be. Once the installation is done, you will need to restart your Mac and then you are ready to network with your PC friends.

Networking with Dave: Mac to PC

Networking with Dave from a Mac to a PC is quite intuitive, in a very Mac OS Classic sort of way – you go through Chooser, just like you would for the native form of Mac networking. In Chooser, you will now be greeted by a new connection type in the left hand pane, Dave Client.

When you click this, there will be a disconcerting pause, during which you will wonder whether Dave is working at all, and then the right hand pane will suddenly populate, hopefully showing you the PCs you want to share files with (and anything else on your network that has an SMB server – in my case, this included two Power Mac G5s and my current main Mac, a 2012 27” iMac).

Double click the entry for the PC of interest (in this case it was DualPro200 – so named because it is a dual CPU Pentium Pro 200 MHz) and you will get the expected password prompt. Enter the correct user name and password (this is the user name and password from the PC, or just select Guest instead) and Chooser will pop up a dialog showing the “shares” on the selected PC that are available for you to choose from (a “share” is SMB-speak for an available, shared folder).

You may just run into some trouble here – I did. Initially, the share list was blank! There is not a lot of latitude to share files when the list of possible sharing targets is empty! Happily, Dave provides an “Add Share” button below the list, and I took advantage of this to add the shared folders on the PC to the dialog.

This point requires a brief moment of explanation. When you share a folder in Windows NT 4.0, you give it a “Share Name”. This name should show up in the list of available shares that Dave presents you, but in my case, it did not. The share name did show up in the list of available shares when I connected to the PC from either of my Power Mac G5s, but did not from my older Power Macintosh 7300 or 7500 machines. The reason for this will be explained in a postscript at the end of this post.

For now, I was presented with a blank list of shares, but had the potential of adding shares through the Dave “Add Share” dialog. Back at the Pentium Pro PC, I went to Control Panels -> Server, and clicked the Shares button. This presented me with the following list of the available shares:

As you can see there were a LOT of shares there, but most ended with the “$” sign, indicating that they were administrative shares, automatically created by and internal to Windows NT, and not generally advertised for external connection (although they can be connected to if you wish).

I took note of three shares of interest, C$, D$ and DP200SharedFolder, which corresponded to C:\, D:\ and the folder I was actually trying to share, DP200SharedFolder. One by one, using Dave’s Add Share button, I added these to the list, and they worked. When I double clicked any one of them, Dave promptly mounted the appropriate share on the Windows NT machine and at that point, I could drag and drop, read files, create folders, and in general, do all the things I could do with any local file folder.

I must apologize for the loss of continuity in the screen shot above. The share name mounted on the desktop is different from what is described – I no longer have the original screen shot.

Setting aside the cause of the blank list of shares for a moment, Dave’s Add Share dialog allowed me to work around a potentially show stopping issue and arrive at networking success, at least in the Macintosh to PC direction. What about the other direction, PC to Macintosh?

Networking with Dave: PC to Mac

This was not such a happy story initially. The Power Macintosh 7500 simply did not show up at all in the Network Neighborhood of the PC, nor could I see it in the Network selection of the two G5s I have on the network (both running 10.4.11 Tiger). Guessing that Dave’s SMB server was not enabled, I went hunting for a Dave Control Panel on the Macintosh. Nope, no such thing. There WAS a NetBIOS control panel with Dave labeling in it, so I hunted around in there, but there were no obvious selections to enable or disable visibility of the SMB Server.

My next stop was the Dave installation in the Macintosh’s Applications folder. There was a single file there, a program named, appropriately enough, Dave. Following this obvious lead, I launched the program, selected Dave Sharing and was greeted with what amounts to a Dave control panel.

Of course I immediately noticed that File Sharing was off, which would imply that the Dave SMB Server was not running. I enabled this and then checked to see if Dave was sharing any folders. The list at the top of the window was empty suggesting that it was not. Using Finder, I dropped my AppleTalk shared folder, “PowerMac7300SharedFolder” into the list. It “took” and thereafter, Dave showed that it was sharing this folder. It did warn me that shares with names over 12 characters long might not share properly, but I ignored that for the moment.

Again I must offer my apologies for the discontinuity in the image above – the file share name is slightly different from what I have described – I seem to have misplaced the original screenshot.

Back at the Windows NT machine, success. The Power Macintosh 7500 now showed up in the Network Neighborhood. I double clicked the icon, full of confidence that I had solved the problem, and was greeted with … a blank window. The PC could see the Macintosh, but the Macintosh didn’t appear to be sharing anything. I checked this with both of the G5s, and Tiger pretty much agreed – there was nothing being shared. Tiger’s rather obscure way of indicating this to me was to tell me that it could not open the alias because the original item could not be found. Somewhat of a misleading error indication, but I got the message. Something was still definitely wrong at the Macintosh end.

I went back to the Dave application and removed the current folder I was sharing, suspecting that either you could not share a folder over both AppleTalk and SMB, and/or perhaps the file name really DID have to be 12 characters or less. I created a new folder called “PMAC7500-SMB” (EXACTLY 12 characters) and dropped it into the Dave “Shares” list. I specifically did not share this folder through the usual Mac OS way of doing this – it was only shared via Dave’s SMB server.

This did the trick. The Network Neighborhood window that I got when I doubled clicked the icon for the Power Macintosh 7500 now presented one accessible folder, PMAC7500-SMB. This folder could be opened, read, written to… it was fully accessible. Success! PC to Macintosh networking was now up and running as well.

Networking with Dave – Summary

With both Mac to PC and PC to Mac networking up and running, I can now summarize the recipe for success with Dave:

• On the Macintosh side, make sure you have a unique share folder for Dave, and make sure that the name of that folder is less than 12 characters. Do not share this folder via the normal Mac OS Sharing mechanism. Share it only via Dave.
• On the PC side, make sure that you have one or more shared folders, and take note of the “Share As” name you assign to each. Like the Macintosh side, keep the filename of each shared folder to 12 characters or less as well.
• Still on the PC side, if you CANNOT keep the share names to 12 characters or less (perhaps the machine is not under your control), compensate for this on the Macintosh side. On that side, when you use Chooser to select the PC, if you are greeted with a blank list of available shares, use Dave’s Add Share button to manually add the shares whose names you took note of in the last step. You will only have to do this once. Dave remembers the names.
• That’s it! Apply the above and you should be happily networking in both directions between a Macintosh running Dave and a PC running Windows NT 4.0.

Closing Thoughts

A final note on Dave. Dave will very considerately interrupt the Macintosh shutdown sequence to warn you if it is hosting any connected users, giving you a chance to warn them before their favorite Mac suddenly disappears from cyberspace. As I said above, Thursby has done a very nice job.

That’s it for this post. In our next post on networking, we will look at doing the same sort of thing using the other classic application in this space, Connectix DoubleTalk. Until then, happy networking with Dave!

The Promised Postscript on The Empty Share List Problem

p.s.> A postscript to this story. As outlined above, the “empty list of shares” problem is easily resolved. Reasoning that since Dave warned that Macintosh share names over 12 characters might not share correctly, I concluded that perhaps share names on the Windows NT side should ALSO be 12 characters or less. I went back to the Windows NT 4.0 machine and checked the length of the share name for the folder I was trying to share. Sure enough, it was MUCH longer than 12 characters. When I shortened it to 12 characters (8 characters actually, in this case), it showed up instantly in the Chooser selections of both Mac OS Classic machines. So, one final word to the wise – all share names should be 12 characters or less.

And as if that is not enough, Windows NT 4.0 gently reminds you that if you want the share to be visible to DOS and Windows 3.x class machines, its’ name needs to be 8 characters or less! Just so you know…. 🙂

DragonOne – A GREAT Software Resource for Vintage Macs

As regular readers of this blog will know, not too long ago I acquired a Power Macintosh 7300/200 and loaded it up with Mac OS 9.1 and lots of my favorite applications. For an upcoming post pitting the performance of the 200 MHz PowerPC 604e powering the 7300/200 against a 200 MHz Pentium Pro equipped PC, I ran a number of benchmarking tests. Along the way, after measuring some scandalously slow performance numbers, I began to wonder seriously whether some of the programs I was using for testing were not PPC programs at all, but rather 68K programs running under emulation. This would readily explain their less than stellar times.

From a far, dusty corner of my mind, I recalled that once upon a time I had seen mention of an application called “I Love Native”, that promised to tell you whether a particular executable was 68K, PowerPC or a FAT binary. Reaching even farther into that dusty corner, I remembered that I had seen this utility mentioned at Frisky’s Mac OS freeware archive (http://www.cornstalker.com/freeware/archive.php).

I navigated over to that archive, quickly found I Love Native in the System Tools area, and clicked its URL. Regrettably, like most (if not all) of the URLs at Frisky’s, the I Love Native URL was simply a link to a long dead web site, no longer occupying bits in cyberspace.

Knowing the name of the utility I was looking for however, I was able to turn up a valid source for I Love Native after some creative Google’ing around. This was valuable enough of and by itself, but even more valuable, that source turned out to be the site of the original author, who had been, and still is, a prolific creator of shareware. Best of all, to this day that site maintains a Software Archives area, where all of their older “abandonware” products are still available for download. In short, a fine new resource for Mac OS software!

This new resource is DragonOne Shareware, at http://www.dragonone.com. Their software archive contains a moderately sized collection of incredibly useful utilities for Mac OS. Among the ones that I immediately downloaded were:

• I Love Native – Show you whether an application is 68k or PPC. Also, strip the 68K or the PowerPC portions out of a FAT binary to save disk space.
• 7tuner – Tune various finder and system parameters, Mac OS 7.x
• 8tuner – Tune various finder and system parameters, Mac OS 8.x
• 9tuner – Tune various finder and system parameters, Mac OS 9.x
• AppTab – Use a hot key combination to bring up an Application Tab. Switch between open apps or kill one or more apps, all without having to make the mouse trip up to Application Menu.
• ClickCopy – Finder-based Copy and Paste for files!
• EveryHour – A grandfather clock for your Mac!

I am really pleased to have stumbled upon DragonOne, and I want to thank the author (Jerry Du) for maintaining a web presence for the older utilities. Very, very few software authors bother to do this. Thank You Jerry!

So head on over to http://www.dragonone.com and browse through the [Downloads, Software Archives] area. I am certain you will find something of interest there.

Bringing this post back to where it began, and finishing out the story, what about I Love Native? It was perfect. It did exactly what I wanted, telling me directly whether the file I was curious about was a 68K or a PowerPC executable, and providing lots of additional details as well. It is the perfect tool for the job. Thanks DragonOne!

One last note. Friskys was not as far off the mark as I initially thought. Having stumbled upon DragonOne via the entirely different route described above, I went back to Frisky’s, just to see where their link pointed to. Much to my surprise, I found that it did in fact point to DragonOne after all! Clearly the organization of the site has changed over the years, and the folder path in the Frisky’s URL no longer matches the structure of the site today. As a result, following that URL results in an error page instead of the desired software download page.

This is unfortunate. In the absence of prior knowledge that I Love Native is a product of DragonOne, a user referred from Frisky’s would have no way to know that they were in fact at the right site, just the wrong folder path. Still, kudos to Frisky’s for at least getting their readers to the right site!

Getting After Dark to Run on Mac OS 9

To the great distress of many people, Mac OS 9 broke something with respect to the beloved and quirky After Dark 4.0 screen saver. It has been reported that the After Dark engine is incompatible with Mac OS 9, but for whatever reason, it simply will not work on Mac OS 9 equipped Macs. Happily, there is an answer to that, and this blog post addresses it.

There is a patched version of After Dark for OS 9 that can be downloaded from the Macintosh Garden site, at http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/after-dark-os-9. Someone going by the screen name of Daxeria produced this patched version, earning the acclaim and adulation of the entire Mac OS 9 using Macintosh community, I am sure. However, when you install it and restart, you may be a little disappointed. It has only the most basic of screen savers, After Dark’s initial starry night screen saver. Where, oh where are the beloved flying toasters, bad dogs and the rest of the crazy and lovable characters from After Dark 4.0??

Take heart. I have recently installed After Dark onto Mac OS 9.1, flying toasters and all, and this post provides a step by step “recipe” for repeating this feat.

First things first. To be successful, you will need to have a copy of After Dark 4.0, so lets start with this and get a copy. In my case, I had purchased a copy on eBay some time ago, and had it installed on a Mac OS 8.6 machine, so I was “good to go”. If you do not already have After Dark 4.0, you will need to acquire a copy. You can do this either by buying it on eBay as I did, or downloading it from http://www.macintoshgarden.org at this URL http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/after-dark-40.

Once you have After Dark 4.0, to install a full After Dark for Mac OS 9.x, do the following:

1/ Download After Dark for Mac OS 9 from the above URL.

2/ Install this version of After Dark by dropping the After Dark 9 control panel into your Control Panels folder, and the After Dark Files folder also into your Control Panel folder.

3/ Restart your Mac and make sure that you can access and run the newly installed After Dark screen saver. As mentioned above, it will have only a few boring screen savers available, but those screen savers are not the objective of this step anyway.

The key objective of this step is that a Mac OS 9 compatible version of the After Dark engine has now been installed, and all of the necessary folder structures and support files are now in the right places.

4/ From the After Dark 4.0 that you either have previously installed, or have just acquired from the above URL, open the After Dark Files folder. From there, copy over the After Dark 4.0 folder’s contents (this is where you will find your beloved flying toasters, and many, many more quirky and fun screen savers) to the same named folder in your Control Panels After Dark Files folder.

5/ Repeat this procedure for the After Dark Images folder – copy over the contents of the After Dark 4.0 folder’s After Dark Images folder to the same named folder in your Control Panel folder’s After Dark Files.

6/ Restart your Mac

Your After Dark 9 install should now provide access to all of the wild and wonderful screen savers you know and love from After Dark 4.0.

7/ Enjoy!

Booting a Linux CD on Your Old World PowerPC Mac

As a general rule, booting your Old World Mac from a CD is a simple matter. What is an “Old World Mac” you ask? Old World Macs are typically all Macs that preceded the beige G3 line. If your Mac is 68K based, it is an Old World Mac. If your PowerPC Mac has a numeric model number it is an Old World Mac. Starting with the beige G3s, Apple changed the onboard firmware to Open Firmware. Macs with Open Firmware are considered New World Macs. OK, now that we know what an Old World Mac is, let’s return to the topic of booting that Old World Mac from its CD drive. To do this you simply insert the CD and then restart your Mac while holding down the “c” key on the keyboard. The CD boots and all is well.

In theory, booting a Linux CD shouldn’t be that much different, but in practice it is. Old World Macs seem to lack the flexibility to boot non Apple media, for reasons I have not fully investigated. Hence, following the above prescription with a Linux CD won’t normally get you anywhere. With some frustration, you will watch Mac OS start to boot up, completely ignoring the CD that you wanted the Mac to actually boot from. This blog post is about how to overcome this annoying behavior and get a Linux CD up and running on your Old World Mac.

BTW, my efforts in this area have been focused on PowerPC based Macs. Although there are Linux installs available for 68K Macs, I tend to think that performance would be an issue on such lower power machines, and have not investigated this particular avenue. I have also been running Mac OS 9.x on the Macs I have been trying this with, and so cannot comment on whether the below works for earlier releases of Mac OS.

Honorable mention must be given to the good folks over at Linux MintPPC, who have actually delivered a truly bootable Linux CD. It is the only one I have found. Referring specifically to the following post in their forums (http://www.mintppc.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=839), I downloaded the MintPPC_9_Nano ISO mentioned, burned it to CD, and tried the “c” approach to boot my Power Macintosh 7300. Much to my delight, it worked. No muss, no fuss – the Linux installer booted up and started to run. Now as we have seen in an earlier post, the installer died later on, but at least the CD booted! MintPPC was the only Linux distro I found (and I tried a lot!) that provided a truly bootable Linux CD (at least for my Power Macintosh 7300). Kudos to “lubod” for a job well done.

As I alluded to in my last post, the answer to booting an Old World PPC Mac from a Linux CD lies in a venerable and wholly unsupported piece of Mac OS software called BootX. BootX is a Mac OS application, so you have to boot Mac OS first, and then boot Linux next. BootX has a system extension that will intercept the boot process as Mac OS comes up and redirect it to a Linux boot, but for this post, we will stick to the simplest approach: boot Mac OS and then run BootX to boot Linux.

First things first. Despite its unsupported status these days, you can still get BootX from a variety of sources. One of them is the above mentioned MintPPC CD, which includes a full copy of BootX, greatly simplifying things for folks taking that route. For those of you who don’t want to go to the bother of downloading and burning a CD just to get a copy of BootX, you can also get it online (as of this writing) at http://penguinppc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/BootX_1.2.2.sit. I got this link from an excellent page on the general topic at http://mac.linux.be/content/apple-oldworld-computers.

At the most abstract level, BootX is just a Mac OS application, so go ahead and install it. The documentation says to install it in the System Folder, but personally, I installed it at the root of my hard drive – I hate to put non-essential software into my System Folder. “Install”, in this case means to simply copy the BootX folder to the destination. That is all that is needed.

With BootX now installed, we must digress, ever so briefly, into the Linux boot process, so that you understand how to use BootX. I will make this as painless as possible – I promise! The world of Linux includes a variety of boot loaders, with weird and wonderful names like LiLo and GRUB and a few others to boot (pun intended!). All of these beasts get invoked from the host computer’s firmware when it starts up, and then go through a series of bootstrapping steps until the full bootloader itself is up and running.

The next major step in the Linux boot process (and this is where BootX will join that process) occurs when the bootloader invokes the Linux kernel (the core of the operating system) by loading it into RAM and passing control to it. Since nothing is yet known about the hardware configuration of the machine the kernel is running on, it is typically started with a RAM disk, so that it has an initial file system to work with until it can discover the location of the file system on the disk it is booting off of.

So, to really get Linux underway on your Old World Mac you need just three things: a Linux CD, a Linux kernel and an initial RAMdisk image. Happily, the kernel and the ramdisk image will be available on the CD you are trying to boot. Every Linux distribution provides these two items, since they are essential parts of the boot process. Hence, if you have a Linux CD you are interested in trying to boot, you are “good to go”. You will NORMALLY find the kernel and the ramdisk image in the /boot folder of the Linux CD you are trying to boot.

Conceptually, BootX’s operation is quite simple. Just point it at the appropriate Linux kernel and the associated ramdisk image and tell it to go. It loads both, passes control to the kernel, and Linux takes over your Mac. In reality, it really is almost that easy.

So, let’s try it! Find the Linux CD you want to boot. From a running copy of Mac OS, insert the CD and have a look at its contents. Find the /boot folder, or anything that has a Linux kernel and a ramdisk image, and copy those two files over to the Linux Kernels folder of the BootX folder you created when you installed BootX. A note of caution: some Linux distros support multiple architectures on the same CD. Debian is a good example of this. Make sure the kernel and ramdisk image you get are for the PowerPC architecture!

How will you recognize a Linux kernel and a ramdisk image? By general convention, Linux kernels are named something like “vmlinuz-2.6.8-ppc”, and the ramdisk image, properly referred to as an initial ram disk, or initrd, is usually named something very like “initrd-2.6.8-ppc.gz”. The important part of the above naming is the “vmlinuz” part and the “initrd” part. Find two files in the same folder with names like that, and you have found your kernel and your initial ramdisk image. Copy those over to your BootX installation and you are ready to go.

Running BootX is simplicity itself. Start it up, and you get the below GUI.

Point the Kernel drop down box to the kernel you have just copied over (it should be visible from the drop down box – anything in the Linux Kernels folder of the BootX install area shows up here). Click the Options button and you get this dialog:

Click the “Use specified RAM Disk” checkbox and use the Choose button to point to the initial RAM disk you copied over. Click the OK button to return to the main BootX dialog. For now, you can leave everything else blank. Simply click the Linux button and BootX will invoke the kernel you selected and you are off to Linux-land! Depending on your specific hardware and your degree of Linux savvy, you can start adding kernel arguments (stuff that is passed to the kernel as it is booted) and play with video driver settings too. All of that is beyond the scope of this particular post.

That’s it! You should be greeted with the usual Linux “text clatter” as it cranks through its start up process, and with any luck, everything may even work.

As we saw in my last post however, most of the Linux CDs out there don’t get along that well with older Macs, and so your mileage may vary. In my case, I can specifically recommend Ubuntu Breezy and MintPPC Linux 9, both of which fared reasonably well on my Power Macintosh 7300/200 with 256 MB of RAM.

I plan to install Linux on my Power Macintosh 7300/200 in the near future, but at present I am (im)patiently awaiting the arrival of a hard drive I ordered on eBay. When it arrives, I will add it to the machine, and install both Mac OS 9.1 and one of the above two Linux distributions. I will write a follow up post to fully document the Linux install process (vs. this post, which was simply about how to get the CD to even boot, so that you could get started!).

Until then, enjoy playing with Linux CDs on your Old World PowerMac!

Bulk Changing of Type and Creator Codes – Revisited

In a previous post (https://happymacs.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/change-typecreator-codes-for-folder-of-files/) I introduced readers to BunchTyper, a wonderful little utility that does bulk Type and Creator code changing on entire folders full of files at the same time. This is “just the ticket” when importing folders full of files from the less advanced PC file systems of the day.

At the time, BunchTyper was the only bulk Type/Creator changer that I had come across. In this post, I would like to introduce readers to DropAttribute, another utility that does exactly the same thing, and with speed and elegance. While I still default to BunchTyper, I am glad to have found DropAttribute, and I hope that it may be of some use to you too.

Using DropAttribute could not be simpler. Using Finder, navigate to the folder full of files that you are importing. Drag and drop that folder onto the DropAttribute program icon and the following dialog pops up:

Simply fill in the desired Type and Creator codes:

and click “Change”. That is it! DropAttribute quietly and quickly walks through the folder (and any subfolders, if you have selected this) and changes the Type/Creator codes of all files that are present. I tested this on my Quadra 840AV running Mac OS 8.1, and it worked like a champ.

DropAttribute can be found at Macintosh Garden at http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/dropattribute.