Macintosh Plus Setup

[meauxdal]

I have download the mac pack and copied it to my sd card. The Macplus core starts up fine and boots to the OS (which seems to be system 7.5). I eventually found dark castle on the supplementary disk in the system 6 folder. So I assume this only works with system 6 (it crashes when I ran it). How do I boot into system 6?

You could use the System Picker as is referenced in the readme on the MacPack drive
You could boot directly into the Supplement or HD20SC drives (both boot to a flavor of 6)
You could install the 5-6-7 INIT and restart and then select your desired bootup drive
You could boot into System 6.0.5 via floppy disk
You could boot directly into Dark Castle via floppy disk

[Fuzzball]

Thanks. Sorry been a very very long time since I used a Macintosh at college. Still trying to remember how to use it. I hadn't spotted the readme on the MacPack drive.

Edit: Having said that, when I double click on the readme icon on the MacPack drive I get a dialog saying "Sorry, a system error occurred. unimplemented trap" with a bomb icon and just a restart button. Perhaps my knowledge of Mac is too rusty

[meauxdal]

Thanks. Sorry been a very very long time since I used a Macintosh at college. Still trying to remember how to use it. I hadn't spotted the readme on the MacPack drive.

Edit: Having said that, when I double click on the readme icon on the MacPack drive I get a dialog saying "Sorry, a system error occurred. unimplemented trap" with a bomb icon and just a restart button. Perhaps my knowledge of Mac is too rusty

No worries! The readme just has a few notes on the pack including a brief bit about how to use the System Picker. All of the information in the readme file on the drive can also be found in the readme that comes in the MacPack .zip file, which itself links to the Google Doc with even more info.

Macs can be weird with text files and "file associations". It may just need you to open TeachText/SimpleText once so it knows to try using that for the file. I'll try and make sure the correct Preferences file is in place for the next release so the ReadMe will automatically open in some compatible application. I probably got overzealous in deleting prefs files before the last release.

As a more robust solution, try checking in MacPack:Utilities:Text/PDF:BBEdit for a pair of text editors which can read pretty much any of the text files on the drive. In System 7 you can drag the text file onto the BBEdit icon to open it. In the next image I'll have an alias on the desktop to make this easier.

Regarding System Picker, the way it works is it will scan for any bootable System drives and let you select which one you'd like to boot into. During this process it will "unbless" (make non-bootable) every other System folder it finds. As such, I strongly recommend not using System Picker if you have multiple drives mounted, as running it will unbless the bootable Systems on any additional drives, rendering them non-bootable until re-blessed.

Should this happen, blessing a system folder in classic Mac OS is generally just a matter of double-clicking to open the System folder you wish to bless for the drive, then double-clicking the System suitcase. If it worked, the containing folder should now show a Mac icon to indicate the drive is blessed / bootable.

More info: https://metalbabble.wordpress.com/2020/ ... this-mess/

[Fuzzball]

Thanks. Sorry been a very very long time since I used a Macintosh at college. Still trying to remember how to use it. I hadn't spotted the readme on the MacPack drive.

Edit: Having said that, when I double click on the readme icon on the MacPack drive I get a dialog saying "Sorry, a system error occurred. unimplemented trap" with a bomb icon and just a restart button. Perhaps my knowledge of Mac is too rusty

No worries! The readme just has a few notes about how to use the System Picker. All of the information in the readme file on the drive can also be found in the readme that comes in the MacPack .zip file, which itself links to the Google Doc with even more info.

Macs can be weird with text files and "file associations". It may just need you to open SimpleText once so I knows to try using that for the file.

As a more robust solution, try checking in MacPack:Utilities:Text/PDF:BBEdit for a pair of text editors which can read pretty much any of the text files on the drive. In System 7 you can drag the text file onto the BBEdit icon to open it. In the next image I'll have an alias on the desktop to make this easier.

Regarding System Picker, the way it works is it will scan for any bootable System drives and let you select which one you'd like to boot into. During this process it will "unbless" (make non-bootable) every other System folder it finds. As such, I strongly recommend not using System Picker if you have multiple drives mounted, as running it will unbless the bootable Systems on any additional drives, rendering them non-bootable until re-blessed.

Should this happen, blessing a system folder in classic Mac OS is generally just a matter of double-clicking to open the System folder on a drive with no other blessed folders. The containing folder should then show a Mac icon to indicate the drive is blessed / bootable.

I already tried system picker probably with multiple drives mounted. I'll work out how to get it back to how it was. Dark Castle actually doesn't run with System 6 booted as it says there isn't enough memory (I tried setting to 4Mb ram but same thing). I do vaguely remember having that issue in the computer room at college all those years ago. I'll get there.

I don't remember Macs being as complicated as this but that's probably because we spent most of the time just playing Dark Castle on them when we were supposed to be working

[meauxdal]

A lot of the older games really want to be booted off of a floppy disk and have various conniptions otherwise.

Dark Castle I think might want Finder rather than MultiFinder (the default for System 6). Might want to use the Special > Set Startup... to switch to Finder and see if that gets you going.

Most games on the image require nothing other than double-clicking on the executable, and the ones which require more work are most often placed on the Supplement drive to indicate potential challenges in getting them running. There are over 1150 games just on the main drive now, so testing is a rolling process and some issues are unfortunately unavoidable.

[meauxdal]

New version of the MacPack is out. Major improvements, upgrade recommended.

• Many new floppy disks (300+ titles, 500+ disks), with vastly improved organization

• Many new games (1,200+ games across 2 drives), removal of some duplicates, naming clean-up, more versions of existing games

• Many new utilities, with vastly improved organization, including extensive use of aliases

• Many new applications, including additional versions of existing apps, with improved organization

• De-duplication of games across boot.vhd and Supplement.vhd

• Comprehensive, searchable file indexes for each drive in the Index folder on the root of boot.vhd

Same URL as before - search "MacPack for FPGA" on an archive organization website.

[breiztiger]

thank you for your work on this pack !!!