Preparing files or discs are critical to the preservation of software here on the Macintosh Repository's archive and elsewhere for that matter. This article, although not exhaustive, should provide members with the knowledge necessary to gain a foothold of the terminology, a brief background and some possible steps to prepare loose files and physical discs for upload. EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: DO NOT ZIP OR MOVE AN OLD MAC...

Ok, where are the buttons and what do they look like?   1. Command Button (⌘): The Command button, denoted by the ⌘ symbol, is a key that is unique to Apple keyboards. It is typically located on either side of the spacebar, next to the Control button. The Command button is widely used for keyboard shortcuts in Macintosh systems. 2. Option Button (⌥): The Option button, also known as the Alt button, is represented by the ⌥...

In addition to a power button, some Macintosh models have one or two other buttons: a reset button and often an interrupt, or programmer's, button. The former is typically used to recover from crashes that leave the system unresponsive, while the latter is for debugging and applying firmware updates. Where they appear on your computer, or even if they do, depends on which model you have. For more information, see the following...

Het voorbereiden van bestanden of programmatuur op diskettes en schijven is essentieel voor het behoud van software voor hier in het archief van de Macintosh Repository en/of elders. Dit artikel, hoewel niet uitputtend, zou leden de kennis moeten geven die nodig is om voet aan de grond te krijgen met de terminologie, een korte achtergrond en enkele mogelijke stappen om losse bestanden en fysieke schijven voor te bereiden voor het...

PowerPC Macs such as G3's and G4's can boot off of USB sticks, even if this functionality has been buried so deep in technical details that almost nobody knew about it until nobody used G3's anymore.  If you're a collector or hobbyist and got a G3 or G4 and would like to install Mac OS 8, 9 or Mac OS X on it but that the CD/DVD drive is broken, here's a complete guide that will prove to be useful to you.  It will...

800KB floppy drives were only manufactured by Apple until the late 90's and cannot be emulated or faked at all because they slowed down the floppy drive motor physically to cram in more bytes in each track (compared to the regular lesser 720KB PC floppy disk drive at the time).  1980's to late 1990's Macs equipped with an Apple floppy disk drive that still works are getting quite rare. Some users want to back up 800KB...

You're the proud owner of a retro PPC Mac model and you'd like to initialize/reset it to factory defaults but you lost the original install/restore disks? MR to the rescue! Follow this universal method that fits any PowerPC Mac model.   1) Identify what PowerPC Mac model you got. 1a) If it still can boot into classic Mac OS (8 or 9) then navigate to the Mac's hard drive, then "Applications" folder, then launch...

How to manually install Classic Environment using a Mac OS 9.2.2 System Folder I suggest that you grab the first download "Generic Classic Environment for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger" here because it fits most needs, but feel free to try another Mac OS 9.2.2 System Folder if you want.  Download it on your Mac OS X 10.4 (or earlier) computer and expand the .sit archive.  Then drag the resulting System Folder to the Mac's hard...

This tutorial only applies to old Macs that have a regular 1.4MB floppy disk drive, NOT a 800KB or 400KB floppy drive.  800KB/400KB floppy drives were uniquely manufactured by Apple and cannot be emulated using a generic PC floppy drive at all, because they have special firmware in their boards that can pack more DATA per track than regular PC drives could, at the time.  Moreover, please note that even if you have a Mac floppy drive...

One of the problems retro Mac enthusiasts face nowadays is figuring out how to mount old/random disk images in order to access the game or app in it. First of all, you have to know that there were at least a dozen disk image formats back then (although only a handful of them were widely used) and fortunately for you, there is a very nice disk image mounting tool for classic Mac called Virtual DVD-ROM/CD Utility that mounts just about all of them...

This tutorial is meant for people who did not use older Macs back in the 90's who are struggling to open (or "load") old Mac files into their emulator (or even a real Mac, doesn't matter) and it's split in paragraphs that depict a specific file type/extension, so please skip to the paragraph that talks about the kind of file you're trying to open to discover how to do it.   .sit Stuffit archives Stuffit...

[WIP, coming soon] Hi.  Altough this guide has nothing to do with retro Mac technology per se, it could still prove to be useful to you, wheter you use an old Mac or a new one or even Windows.  It has nothing to do with what brand of computer you use, what type of storage media you use or even how old the storage media is.  DATA recovery applies to everyone and failing hard drives, especially new ones, are often caused solely...

OK, so you got yourself FloppyEmu or a similar disk emulator for your old Mac and it works great, except not with all the files.  Why? Because FloppyEmu and such disk emulators are... disk emulators.  They expect you to feed them a disk image, not just random loose files. So just how can you wrap loose Mac files inside a disk image for use with FloppyEmu? Here's a full tutorial: 1) Grab a copy of this Disk image wrap tutorial...

This article is about what to do when : I got this Mac and the previous owner didn't or add me as new admin user or gave his/her/its/their password. So I can't open the [LOCK] in the configuration panels. I forgot my password for this Mac I just want to have a sparkling new clear desktop and adding a new admin account and want to keep the old user account. (which can be deleted later..) And Bonus: I get to see that...

Adaptec SCSI fix  Several users have reported issues with Adaptec SCSI cards after updating to Mac OS X 10.4, including an inability to recognize SCSI devices, problems starting up or shutting down with the card installed, and more. A workaround, successful for many users, involves removing the following files from the /System/Library/Extensions folder: Adaptec 290X-2930.kext Adaptec 29160x.kext Adaptec 39160x.kext but...

IMPORTANT: NEVER UNPACK OR MOVE FILES FROM CLASSIC MACOS OUTSIDE OF CLASSIC MACOS. Because non-MacOS operating systems and filesystems only have data forks, doing so will discard the resource forks and corrupt your files. (It's similar to how copying your Linux files to a FAT-formatted USB stick will throw away their permission bits, but more catastrophic.) While things like Netatalk are capable of storing resource forks on non-Macintosh...

  This howto article assumes you know how to unzip a .zip file and do basic Windows tasks like create folders.  I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium, but this howto should work fine on Win 8 and Win 10. Download the 2015-02-26 build of Basilisk II (BasiliskII--2015-02-26----68k-color-emulator-with-floppy-support.zip) from Macintosh Repository (MR). Create a new folder on your Windows hard drive called...

Here's a full tutorial on how to install Mac OS 9.2.2 under UTM on your modern Intel or Apple Silicon Mac with file sharing (through FTP) so that you can send/receive files between your host OS (e.g. macOS Sequoia) and Mac OS 9.2.2 that resides inside of UTM. Step -1: You need a FTP server to make use of this tutorial.  On a modern Intel or Apple Silicon Mac, I highly recommend the simple frontend made by Leszek Szary which you...

Using a Compact Flash (CF) to IDE (ATA) Adapter in an IDE-Based Macintosh... First and foremost, thanks to the mostly anonymous forum posts which guided me to the correct setup. This article will cover what you need, where to get it, how to do it, and where to go from there! The Background Understanding what type of Macintosh this guide covers is key to your sucess. THIS IS NOT INTENDED FOR SCSI or SATA (extremely...