I recently got an urge to revisit old computer media from the late 90s and early 2000s.Windows x64 Mac OS X: Dolphin 4.0.2: 7 years, 10 months ago: Windows x64 Windows x86: Dolphin 4.0.1: 7 years, 11 months ago: Windows x64 Windows x86: Dolphin 4.0: 8 years ago: Windows x64 Windows x86 Mac OS X Ubuntu 13.04: Dolphin 3.5: 8 years, 9 months ago: Windows x64 Windows x86 Mac OS X: Dolphin 3.0: 10 years, 3 months ago: Windows x64. Emulates either a Mac Classic (which runs MacOS 0.x thru 7.5) or a Mac II series machine (which runs MacOS 7.x, 8.0 and 8.1), depending on the ROM being used Color video display CD quality sound outputWorking with Macintosh Floppy Disks in the New MillenniumEmulate Mac OS 9 With QEMU. Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel) Windows NT/2000/XP BeOS R4 (PowerPC and Intel) AmigaOS 3.x Some features of Basilisk II.Below are the most common scenarios: 400k and/or 800k Floppies with an External USB Floppy DriveAs is well documented, modern Macs from this millennium (and some before) no longer come with built-in floppy drives. This page attempts to address methods and workarounds for accessing data on Macintosh floppy disks (using Apple Macintosh and clone hardware) and moving the desired data to newer Mac systems.“Hey! I’ve got a floppy drive on my Mac, and it reads some floppies just fine, yet not others. As time passes and floppy disks become relics of computing’s past (especially in the Macintosh world), folks seem to be confronting more problems accessing information stored on this older format. To help you out, I’ve curated a list of the best iOS emulators.
9 Emulator On Mac OS X Ubuntu![]() They’ll likely also read 720k DS floppies. This is fact: With 1.4 MB HD floppies, Apple agreed that fixed-speed drive was what they would use.Bottom line: a generic fixed-speed external USB floppy drive will work with 1.4 MB HD floppies, yet (to the best of my knowledge, and i may be wrong) not Mac 800k or 400k floppies. It was a whole lot easier and more financially sane for Apple to go with the flow and use the same standards for 1.4 MB floppies as the Wintel world… economies of scale, dontcha know! This is all my conjecture, anyway. As the Wintel juggernaut began to steamroll them, Apple sought ways to cut costs. While there were many reasons for this, one was Apple’s penchant to innovate and improve upon the standards. The difference? The Mac OS version running the machine. They are two screenshots of the same floppy disk in the same drive of the same Mac, taken minutes apart. 400k Floppies and Mac OS 8.0 or LaterSo ya say ya gotta Mac with a built-in SuperDrive that is allegedly able to handle 400k, 800k, and 1.4 MB disks, and it does work with 800k DS and 1.4 MB HD disks, yet not with 400k SS disks? Well, you need more than the drive… you need the correct Mac software.Please look carefully at the two images just above this paragraph. (I don’t have/could not easily make a 360k floppy to test this theory.)Unless you can find an external USB drive that specifically claims to support Mac 800k disks (i really doubt you will find one that supports 400k), you will almost certainly need to find an older Mac with a built-in floppy drive to access your data on DS and SS disks. It had the illusion of folders, yet no actual directories. MFS — Macintosh File SystemYou’re suffering from the MFS Blues! MFS, the original Macintosh File System, was a flat-file structure used on Macintosh computers from Day 1 until the era of the 128k ROMs and the Mac Plus, which is to say circa 1986. The working, mounted disk Finder window—same disk, same conditions—was when the very same Mac was running OS 7.6.1. Clicking the Two-Sided button formatted the disk as 800k HFS. Apple needed to count on the user to make the correct choice (screenshot is from System 3 running on a Mac Plus):Clicking the One-Sided button formatted the disk as 400k MFS. Folks who used these tricks could create 400k HFS floppies for sure, and maybe 800k MFS floppies.)Thing is, on these early Mac OS versions which supported both MFS and HFS, there was no electro/mechanical way to detect DS from SS diskettes. (There are tricks to circumvent these defaults… tricks i have not used and therefore not memorized. Rumors circulated circa 1987 that due to lower demand for single-sided 400k diskettes, Sony merely ran the same production line for double-sided 800k and single-sided 400k, marking them differently and probably not QAing the second side for the ones being sold as single-sided. 400k SS disks formatted 800k HFS?!As well, floppy disks were expensive in the mid-late 1980s. Thus, while rare, it may not be terribly unusual within a specific floppy disk collection to find disks marked DS/DD with 400k capacity and MFS formatting. Sitting in front of their 512KE or newer Mac (with 128k or larger ROMs), they might very well want to format a double-sided diskette as single-sided, for use in their older Mac(s)—especially in the latter years of the 1980s and thereafter when SS/DD 3.5" floppies first became scarce then disappeared from the market. A person might have several Macs, one or more of them original 128k or 512k non-Enhanced “Fat Macs” (Fat=more RAM in this case) with the original 64k ROMs which only understood MFS format. From the Apple Installing Mac OS 8 Read Me: With Mac OS 8.0, Apple eliminated OS support for MFS format. System 7.5.0 through 7.5.5 allowed writing to as well as reading from MFS-formatted floppies, but did not allow erasing/formatting SS and DS disks as anything other than 800k double-sided HFS or ProDOS (Apple II format), or 720k DOS:The screenshot is from OS 9.1, yet other than cosmetic alterations, it’s the same dialog all the way back to System 7.5 (7.5.0).The upshot of all this is one cannot trust the marking on the diskette! Probably the single-side/double-side marking (when it even exists in the first place) will match reality, but don’t count on it!This is how things worked and remained pretty compatible from something like System 3 up through the end of Mac OS 7 (7.6.1). Which OSes supported what?Allowing (requiring) the user to select single- or double-sided when erasing (formatting) a floppy disk remained as shown above all the way through the end of System 7.1 (7.1 Update 3). A failure to format dialog would appear and the disk would be ejected, as in the case of defective diskettes attempting to be (re- or initially) formatted at any capacity. Older Sony single-sided disks and most single-sided disks from other manufacturers would behave as expected: they would fail to format as two-sided. ![]() Try inserting it again… and again… and again…. Any Floppy Format: 1.4 MB HD, 800k DS, 400k SS: Some Work, Some Don’t Defective Floppy Below i discuss some ways to handle this dilemma. Read, copy to newer media, recycle!This presents an interesting dilemma for folks with Beige G3 and later Macs with built-in floppy drives: These Macs originally shipped with OS 8.0 or later, and are therefore unlikely to run with OS 7.6.1 or earlier without some serious hacking! And anything earlier won’t run any OS X without a healthy dose of XPostFacto hackery. Backspace character for mac using javaThere used to exist some old custom floppy fixing programs. I’ve not been desperate enough to go beyond these for the very few floppies unable to be fixed by these two programs. I start with the latest version of Apple Disk First Aid my Mac will run (8.6.1 for Power PC Macs, 8.2 for 32-bit 680x0 Macs, 7.2.4 for 24-bit Macs), then move to AlSoft DiskWarrior 2.1.1 (end of the 2 series). Most of the usual repair utilities that can repair hard drives can also fix floppy disks.
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