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Mac emulator for Ataris?


_ThEcRoW

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Hello, i have been reading about emulators that allowed to run mac os in the atari computers. I heard a lot about spectre gcr, but can't find it out. Are there any other emulator who worked like shapeshifter on the amiga?. I heard also, that spectre gcr was cracked and could work without dongle.

Any clues?

Thanks in advance!!!

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Spectre needs hardware.

This is connected to the cartridge port and also contains a cable for the floppy-port.

With this, it's 100% compatible and can read the floppy's as well.

But it does need the Apple OS-Roms. (Or Eproms with this :-)

 

There's a software only emulator as well. But that will not read Apple-disks. (I don't remember the name)

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I had one, it was really cool, hardest part was getting a copy of the mac system roms. Worth it if you can find one.

 

There's another one called Magic Hat, but the Spectre GCR was infinately cooler because (and please correct me if I am wrong, it's been a LONG TIME) you could just put mac formatted disks in your ST drive with the Spectre, but you could not with the magic hat (you had to convert the mac format to something the st could read). Macs used to use CLV (constant linear velocity) type drives (drive speed changed depending on what track you were reading), whereas everyone else used CAV (Constant angular velocity) (drive speed stayed the same), but that's Jobs for ya, always had to do something different.

 

(Again, don't jump down my throat if I'm wrong, it's been a while since I owned the spectre)

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I had one, it was really cool, hardest part was getting a copy of the mac system roms. Worth it if you can find one.

 

There's another one called Magic Hat, but the Spectre GCR was infinately cooler because (and please correct me if I am wrong, it's been a LONG TIME) you could just put mac formatted disks in your ST drive with the Spectre, but you could not with the magic hat (you had to convert the mac format to something the st could read). Macs used to use CLV (constant linear velocity) type drives (drive speed changed depending on what track you were reading), whereas everyone else used CAV (Constant angular velocity) (drive speed stayed the same), but that's Jobs for ya, always had to do something different.

 

(Again, don't jump down my throat if I'm wrong, it's been a while since I owned the spectre)

 

 

This is correct, but the Atari drive had to be an external one as it connected to the back of the Spectre cartridge. If the ST has an internal drive, it remains used by the Atari while the external connected to the Spectre would read/write MAC disks.

 

There were also 2 different carts. The Spectre 128 and the newer Spectre GCR. The other was Magic Sac and was made by the same person. It was the first.

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This is correct, but the Atari drive had to be an external one as it connected to the back of the Spectre cartridge. If the ST has an internal drive, it remains used by the Atari while the external connected to the Spectre would read/write MAC disks.

 

I believe you're mistaken on this point, Guitarman. The Spectre manual says it works with the internal drive. It came with an ST floppy cable, that you'd plug from the cartridge to the external (drive B) port on the back of the 1040/MegaST (etc) and it could control the internal drive through that. At least that's what the manual says.....

 

click to enlarge

post-16281-0-55224200-1353039581_thumb.jpg

 

I have a Spectre GCR I bought from Ebay a year or 2 ago and never tried it, because I never seem to have the time. But I know I'll be happy to, one day. I wish I could speak from experience, but the manual seems to allude to it working with the internal drive.

 

I think a real problem is trying to write Mac 800K floppy images, downloaded to the internet. I think I read that the PC drive won't do it, then I thought I read a conflicting story. Or, I could be confusing this with the 400K older disks.

 

Does anybody know how to write 800K (or 400K) Mac floppy images to real disks?

 

 

edit: it sort of looks like I copied Guitarman's "avatar" (or whatever the little image is called) when I post right after him. apologies!

Edited by wood_jl
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I believe you're mistaken on this point, Guitarman. The Spectre manual says it works with the internal drive. It came with an ST floppy cable, that you'd plug from the cartridge to the external (drive B) port on the back of the 1040/MegaST (etc) and it could control the internal drive through that. At least that's what the manual says.....

 

My bad. You are correct. The cable loops into the external floppy port on the ST.

 

I have all 3 emulators (Magic Sac, Spectre128, SpectreGCR). I can't remember if I got them from eBay or from someone here on AtariAge. I thing it may be the latter. I still haven't had a chance to play with them yet.

 

Oh....and good taste on the avatar!!! LOL

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Finding 800k System disks is the biggest problem. Since Apple went the 1.44 route very quickly almost no one used the 800k discs anymore. It also is impossible from what I could find to get a Mac disc written or transferred to the ST-Mac.

 

I got the System discs and thought I was able to transfer them to my Mac partition however no version of Stuffit/etc could recognize the file. I think the program provided to transfer files from ST->Mac didnt work correctly with .SIT files

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I found this site, when Googling......

 

http://www.rescuemyclassicmac.com/

 

 

For $10, he'll send you a system disc, and $10/ea for a couple other discs. Sounds a bit expensive, but I guess you can't expect someone (who has other things to do) to do this kind of thing, for FREE.

 

 

After extensive (sort-of) Googling, I have come to the conclusion that the 800K (and 400K) Mac disks are a REAL PROBLEM in the modern world. They use constant linear velocity - rather than constant angular velocity like every other drive in the world - so the drive motor is variable speed. This helped to stuff more bits on the disc in 1985, but it really sucks in the modern world.

 

The Kryoflux USB floppy thing, from the best of my limited search, is able to read and image these discs to PC but I can find no reference to doing the opposite: WRITE the disc images to actual floppy, which is the thing we want to do to play with our Mac emulators. I don't know why this doesn't come up. I mean, even if we were "real" Mac enthusiasts with Mac Plus (etc) we'd want to be able to do this, with the Kryoflux.

 

But this brings up a related question: Even if we ARE real Mac Plus enthusiasts, and we DO have a real Mac Plus with a real 800K drive in it, how would you write the disc images to real floppy, using your real Mac and real 800K floppy? You download the disc images to your PC or modern Mac. Now what? The solution I'm imagining is a serial cable from the modern computer to the Mac Plus, and then some special software the runs on each machine. I don't know that this exists, but if there is any interest in the classic Mac Plus, wouldn't you think that something like this should, since there's really no other way (unless the Kryoflux will really write, which we don't know)?

 

I suppose if the Mac Plus had a hard drive, then you wouldn't need special PC (or modern Mac) software, as you could just download (over serial cable or whatever) the entire disc image to the Mac Plus hard drive, and then use some floppy-writing software to read the image off the hard drive and write the floppy. This is imaginary stuff, of course. Without a hard drive, of course, the 512K Mac Plus can't juggle 800K.

 

At this point, we're talking about having a Mac Plus with hard drive, and [imaginary] proprietary software that runs on the old computer and the new. This is pretty heavy stuff, for Atari users who just want to play with Mac emulators. The Kryoflux itself isn't exactly cheap, but you can see (if you read about it) that it will work with your other retrocomputers, so that's of additional value for you. But the question remains: Will it write 800K Mac Plus floppies?

Edited by wood_jl
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I did manage to get a working system 6 folder over to the ST using PC disks using the transformer utility on the Spectre disk. I had extract the files from the Mac disk image I downloaded on a modern Mac one by one iirc. Then copy them onto a zip file so there was no stripping out of any info, which I transferred across to the ST. I then extracted them and transferred them across. However it was so slow it was painful and required a lot of reconstruction on the Atari end. I also found that some of the keys were wrongly mapped on the ST, including the space key, which I didn't manage to solve. In the end it prompted me to buy several Macs. Speaking from this I found buying a Plus was a bad choice as it can't handle PC disks so interchange with the ST is difficult (and networking with modern computers is a lot of hassle, not to mention it is the slowest floppy system I've ever used). In the end the Macs with a generally low reputation amongst Mac users (the Performas spring to mind, cheap and cheerful), were the cheapest and easiest option to get things switched across. They can read PC cds and write PC disks. So you can download stuff on the PC and transfer it to the Performa. Then write the disks for the ST on the Performa. Alternatively and probably much more easy IMO is you can use the old Mac to set up a Mac hard drive which Spectre can easily read.

Basically if you want to use a Mac to write the disks you need a pre Mac OS X Mac, I'd anything from a 68030 with Mac OS 7 to a Power PC with OS 8/9. My personal favourites are the Mac 8600/9600, which are massive heavy beasts, but has all the connections to cross the bridge between an old Mac and a new one. It is also the most powerful machine to still use a floppy I think, as it was released just before the iMac and the death of the floppy disk. However if you just want something to write for an ST, go for the cheapest early 90s Mac you can find. As long as it has CD and floppy you can't go wrong!

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I thank that Aladin can read/write Macs 800K CLV (constant linear velocity).

 

I could try when I get home...

 

 

 

:) which one is better?

 

Aladin can't read Mac floppies, which is probably the reason Spectre became more popular and Aladin was discontinued. So the answer to last question is Spectre, though both are better than a Mac Plus! ;)

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I make one correction to my above statement - without using any old Mac to transfer :)

 

In that case I would say, although I could be mistaken, without a system floppy disk it is a chicken and egg situation. :) There may be a small chance of using an old version of Stuffit PC, de-compacting each file onto PC floppy then transferring them one at a time over to the ST and then Spectre.

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This all still raises the question:

 

(1) How were the Mac 800K (and 400K) CLV disks made into images, to begin with? What hardware and software? I presume this was done on a "real" classic Mac with a hard drive, and then ported over a serial cable to a modern computer, at some time in the past, right? As pointed out earlier, the Kryoflux appears to read the Mac disks to images, but this came much later. Still unknown (looking doubtful): Will Kryoflux WRITE the 800K images to real floppy? Can not find reference to that on the web.

 

(2) Do REAL [classic] Mac users write the images back to floppy, or is it only software emulators on the PC (or modern Mac) that everybody uses the disk images with? Forgetting the ST and what we want to do. Pretend we had REAL classic Macs, and we wanted to use the images. Presume we have working 800K floppy drives in our real Macs. How are we going to use our Macs and real 800K floppy drives to write the disk images to real floppies that we can use on our real Macs?

 

Otherwise, the use of real classic Macs (and, by extension, our emulating STs) are confined to copying real 800K floppies with real floppy drives, and the huge gamut of disk image software that can be downloaded is of no use to us. We must have real floppies mailed to us (or procured somehow), and the gap between old and new computers is never bridged. I have a hard time believing this, but it's looking more like it. I'm guessing that there must be comparatively (relative to other classic computers) little interest in Mac Plus (etc.) or the [real] Mac users would have solved this problem.

 

Boy, aren't you glad it's not like the with the ST? IBM disk compatibility seemed like a nice thing with the ST at first, only shortly-thereafter to have the 720K capacity exceeded by the Mac's 800K drives, and the Amiga's 880K drives. But in the end (NOW), the ST's IBM disk capacity is like a gift from the retrocomputing gods! Long live the ST! (because of this!)

Edited by wood_jl
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With a real Mac classic I would assume you could do some sort of 'Serial' transfer - Appletalk network?? Also mentioned was some older Macs that have the Superdrives which can read/write the 1.44k disks and also the old 800/400k ones.

 

Anyhow, the ST Mac emulation can't use any of that.

Edited by Goochman
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This all still raises the question:

 

(1) How were the Mac 800K (and 400K) CLV disks made into images, to begin with? What hardware and software? I presume this was done on a "real" classic Mac with a hard drive, and then ported over a serial cable to a modern computer, at some time in the past, right? As pointed out earlier, the Kryoflux appears to read the Mac disks to images, but this came much later. Still unknown (looking doubtful): Will Kryoflux WRITE the 800K images to real floppy? Can not find reference to that on the web.

 

(2) Do REAL [classic] Mac users write the images back to floppy, or is it only software emulators on the PC (or modern Mac) that everybody uses the disk images with? Forgetting the ST and what we want to do. Pretend we had REAL classic Macs, and we wanted to use the images. Presume we have working 800K floppy drives in our real Macs. How are we going to use our Macs and real 800K floppy drives to write the disk images to real floppies that we can use on our real Macs?

 

Otherwise, the use of real classic Macs (and, by extension, our emulating STs) are confined to copying real 800K floppies with real floppy drives, and the huge gamut of disk image software that can be downloaded is of no use to us. We must have real floppies mailed to us (or procured somehow), and the gap between old and new computers is never bridged. I have a hard time believing this, but it's looking more like it. I'm guessing that there must be comparatively (relative to other classic computers) little interest in Mac Plus (etc.) or the [real] Mac users would have solved this problem.

 

Boy, aren't you glad it's not like the with the ST? IBM disk compatibility seemed like a nice thing with the ST at first, only shortly-thereafter to have the 720K capacity exceeded by the Mac's 800K drives, and the Amiga's 880K drives. But in the end (NOW), the ST's IBM disk capacity is like a gift from the retrocomputing gods! Long live the ST! (because of this!)

 

Once you get a working set-up with a system disk and have a couple of utils such as 'stuff it' things are fine. On one condition. You have a in-between Mac or a hard drive. I use a zip drive with the Mac Plus and then copy the files onto that on a later Mac or PC. Alternatively you can use serial as suggested. If you have another older Mac things become easy, but you really need that older Mac. But you are right, the Mac Plus is not really that well supported, although there are a few sites like Low End Mac and Mac Garden, hardware support is really limited. As far as I can tell there is no equivalent to Satandisk for the early Macs, although their somewhat creaking hard drive support would probably be overwhelmed by the speed anyway. To be useable you really need at least two disk drives or a hard drive with a Mac Plus (the Macs earlier than that were even more tricky), one floppy drive is completely unusable, the amount of disks swaps you have to do just to copy a disk is ridiculous.

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The Spectre GCR was the last thing that made me hang onto the ST just a bit longer and the only reason I did not get a C-Lab Falcon when one came up (since it does not working on Falcons).

 

The Spectre 128K would use the ST cartridge port, and then read disks with the standard ST floppy drive. There were programs that would convert Mac disks to Spectre format, or utilities that would allow you to read the disks. I used to have these posted on a website, then all the geocities domains went down. (does a little search)

 

Well... what do you know, my old site is there...

http://www.oocities.org/clu-da-bard/

 

The utilities download site:

http://www.oocities.org/clu-da-bard/spectreatari.html

 

What I tested and the results:

http://www.oocities.org/clu-da-bard/spectrelist.html

 

Anyway, that was cool.

 

The Spectre GCR was great in that you could connect disks right up to the Atari emulator itself, which allowed for more direct control of the drives.

 

Trying to remember, was the Atari ST drives 800K only?

 

No matter. Once you get the Spectre 128K or GCR going, work to get a SCSI driving working it and then you are set. :)

 

Man, an ST as a Mac, was again just amazing. Dave Small's work on that emulator and how it allowed an ST to run FASTER than the actual Macs, and also brought about the first Mac laptops BEFORE there were Mac laptops is a great part of Mac history I think.

 

Yeh no kid, Small had the Spectre running on a STacy and up till then there was only the Mac Portable (suitcase sized Mac with a lead acid battery... heavy sucker). So the STacy a Mac was really popular there for a bit.

 

Hey good luck on the Spectre. I have gotten rid of all ST's in my house, but I STILL have a Spectre 128K here just because they were so much fun.

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  • 2 weeks later...

If you have a real classic mac, and no software, then yes you have to have media mailed to you from someone with a running classic mac. There is no way to bootstrap from bare metal to a working OS without a mac system disk. Once you have such a setup, you can work with disk images relatively easily. I use Disk Copy 4.2 to dump disk images to real floppies on my SE/30.

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Whoa!, lot of replies. Is aladin working on floppies, or it needs hd?. I think that can sort out the disk writing as i have a catweasel card, that i use for Amiga disks, and the utility can handle atari and mac disks as well, so i think that getting the system disks onto floppy won't be a problem.

Will it run straight from floppy?. I have a 4mb ste.

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Hello all, I just picked up a Specre GCR in a Atari Lot I picked up. it was/is a very large lot, majority of the weight is floppys, and a rough guess is more than 1000 3.5s. Hardware included

 

Atari 124 and 1224 monitors,

Atari laser printer was pretty heavy too,

1040 stf, with box and styro

520 st,

2 external 3.5 floppy drives,

2 syquest 44mb drives with media,

happy computers Discovery cart (option 2, not sure what that means yet) .

monitor switch,

some kind of plug in auto fire joystick adapter,

lots of cables

indus gt 5.25 drive

rana systems 5.25 drive

 

On the Spectre GCR, I have several boxes of floppys that hav spectre written on the box , so after reading this I assume they are mac software?

 

what does a Spectre GCR unit sell for? I cannot find one on ebay past or present?

 

Thanks

 

Robert

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Yeah, I agree - once you've got an intermediate mac, writing system disks is easy. In my experience, once I had one of the older external floppy drives, it was no problem. I think at one point, I was even writing disks for my Apple IIGS from one of my PowerPCs using the previously mentioned drive, then using the same floppy drive to boot the GS! (I think that was the intermediate mac, at least - It could've been a number of different ones, I suppose (Trying to remember when I stopped using my Quadra))

 

That's one of the great things I always liked about the older Apple computers - if you amassed enough old stuff, there was ALWAYS some way to get a file from point A to point B or create what you needed with what you had. Great stuff for a kid with no money to start on back in the 90's! :)

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