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 !!!

[clarkkent]

Is there a way to convert the .vhd image of the MacPack for using it on SheepShaver an MacOS?

[meauxdal]

Is there a way to convert the .vhd image of the MacPack for using it on SheepShaver an MacOS?

It will simply work with Sheepshaver (and Basilisk II, and the Mini vMac fork with SCSI drive support, etc.), no conversion necessary. Just add the .vhd to the volume list in Sheepshaver. You might need to use the Old World ROM if you're booting from it (have not tested if this is necessary), or you can boot from another drive and load it as a secondary drive.

[clarkkent]

Solved. No idea why, it's suddenly working...

[meauxdal]

I've added so much to the MacPack this year that the "1,000 games" thing is really underselling it at this point. There's probably closer to 1200 games now, plus hundreds of utilities and applications. I'll try to get a real count at some point.

New version looms. Was hoping to get it out this month, we'll see.

[dakidski]

Amazing Meux, thank you so very much!

[meauxdal]

Had to peel off the Mac work I'd been doing. The new release is basically done content-wise, I just have not had any time at all to actually test it. In particular, I want to make sure that every game on the main drive works without needing to switch OS, but I just haven't been able to put aside enough hours to get through it.

Maybe I can release it as a beta on the Archive.org page? If anyone has any interest in helping test, we can probably make this happen.

[akator]

Maybe I can release it as a beta on the Archive.org page? If anyone has any interest in helping test, we can probably make this happen.

I would love to help but my MiSTer is disassembled while I'm printing and wiring a new case. Chances are I won't be finished with that project for at least a month, but if you're still looking for testers in September I should be able.

[dakidski]

Maybe I can release it as a beta on the Archive.org page? If anyone has any interest in helping test, we can probably make this happen.

Thats an idea!

Edit . Latest MacPack confirmed working on MiST.

[meauxdal]

Alright, there's a new MacPack. It's really just the one from June that I never got around to testing.

[HerrBerzerk]

Does anybody know how to get the correct screen resolution on a VGA-CRT-Monitor? I guess it should be 512x342 or maybe doubled to 1024x684?

At the moment the picture looks like the core is doubling every 10 or so horizontal line. Would this be fixed with a mode line?

Thanks

[akeley]

Try this

Code: Select all

[macplus]
forced_scandoubler=0
vga_scaler=1
video_mode=1
video_mode=1152,64,128,256,864,1,3,32,108000

I got it from @mapf, so all credit to him.

[meauxdal]

Try this

Code: Select all

[macplus]
forced_scandoubler=0
vga_scaler=1
video_mode=1
video_mode=1152,64,128,256,864,1,3,32,108000

I got it from @mapf, so all credit to him.

Confused by this excerpt. Both of those video_modes can't be active, one of them is going to be superseding the other. video_mode=1 is 1024x768.

Here is a video mode for 2x horizontal + 2x vertical resolution:

video_mode=1024,48,104,152,684,1,3,20,56410

I've not tested personally as I don't have a VGA CRT, but it may be useful.

Edit: What you might be running into is that the MacPlus CRT was not 4:3. If you try to display it fullscreen on a CRT, you may get a vertically stretched picture. The DAR for the MacPlus is closer to 3:2 (it's 256:171) than 4:3. Maybe video_mode=1 helps in that regard by giving you some extra black bars at the top and bottom so the aspect ratio is correct.

I don't really know much about how the image gets displayed on a VGA CRT through the vga_scaler, so I might be way off there, but these things may be relevant to your issue.

Edit 2:

Maybe this might work:

Code: Select all

[macplus]
forced_scandoubler=0
vga_scaler=1
video_mode=1
vscale_mode=1

That should keep the vertical resolution correctly scaled to 684 pixels within the 1024x768 output. I would've thought it'd already be trying to do that to keep the aspect ratio correct, but maybe not...

[akeley]

I was given the previous one by @mapf's, his old config, with the caveat that it was a bit messy so I can't say whether it works 100%.

This one definitely should, it's from my VGA config (also helped by mapf IIRC):

Code: Select all

[macplus]
forced_scandoubler=1
vscale_mode=1
vga_scaler=0 
vsync_adjust=2
video_mode=1280,110,40,220,720,5,5,20,74250

My VGA CRT setup is all over the place at the moment so I can't test it, but I do remember it was working ok, and scaling was also ok. Whether it was totally correct AR I can't say though. I did try to investigate it but it was long ago and I don't remember the details.

EDIT: https://www.misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?p=24027#p24027

[jordi]

I had in my original Mac 1984 (128KB) a Disk of a kind of floorplan software (long story).

MacPac does not have any of them right?
It looked like this one
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/108 ... ome-design

I also had Multiplan, but that's a primigeneus EXCEL.

MICROSOFT BASIC also was very popular, and I had the books.

[meauxdal]

It has Excel, Basic, and Multiplan installed or available via disks. I'm not sure what software you're referring to, so I can't directly answer your question. The linked software is not included currently.

[dakidski]

Alright, there's a new MacPack. It's really just the one from June that I never got around to testing.

Thank you, I (sadly) don't have time to test the RC until the future. But thanks for your work!