• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Need help deciding what Mac I need to get to cover certain era

T

thegenerallee86

Experienced Member
Joined
Feb 1, 2021
Messages
143
I'l m looking for a good mac that will cover everything from the end of Mac classics to the end of the G Imacs and Power macs when they started to use intel's but don't want one with an Intel though.

P.S. I want one that can still burn floppies that can be read by the Mac Classic and Classic II.
 
I have a Performa 6200cd which I occasionally use for this purpose. It has IDE which makes it much easier to use modern hard drives/storage devices for transfer. Also Ethernet for moving things around as well.
 
bitfixer said:
I have a Performa 6200cd which I occasionally use for this purpose. It has IDE which makes it much easier to use modern hard drives/storage devices for transfer. Also Ethernet for moving things around as well.
Click to expand...

I like it but was thinking of something like a power mac g3 or g4? Can you get internal Floppy drives for them though?
 
the end of Mac classics
Click to expand...
That's a pretty vague point of reference.

Classic as in "looks like a compact mac"?
Classic as in runs a 68K CPU?
Classic as in before they started to use colored cases?

Get a Power Macintosh 7600/8600/9600 and call it good. I won't even recommend the beige Power Macintosh G3 and the molar mac because both are even more expensive due to rarity. There is nothing beyond the blue and white Power Macintosh G3 that will do what you want with floppies without additional hardware/software. Apple didn't even ship a floppy drive by that point. That's Renaissance Steve Jobs era where he was looking to kill off whatever remained of Apple's old 80's and 90's ecosystem before the new millennium.

Edited: Also if you don't want to use those machines because you can't run the last version of the MacOS, you don't want that either. Starting with system 8 Apple began to significantly scale back floppy support for the older 400k and 800k formats.
 
Last edited:
NeXT said:
That's a pretty vague point of reference.

Classic as in "looks like a compact mac"?
Classic as in runs a 68K CPU?
Classic as in before they started to use colored cases?

Get a Power Macintosh 7600/8600/9600 and call it good. I won't even recommend the beige Power Macintosh G3 and the molar mac because both are even more expensive due to rarity. There is nothing beyond the blue and white Power Macintosh G3 that will do what you want with floppies without additional hardware/software. Apple didn't even ship a floppy drive by that point. That's Renaissance Steve Jobs era where he was looking to kill off whatever remained of Apple's old 80's and 90's ecosystem before the new millennium.

Edited: Also if you don't want to use those machines because you can't run the last version of the MacOS, you don't want that either. Starting with system 8 Apple began to significantly scale back floppy support for the older 400k and 800k formats.
Click to expand...

My 2 Mac Classics have the 1.4Mb drives in them. I think I will be going with the G3 Power macs then.
 
Well I found a G4 Power Macintosh that was in pretty good condition and came with restore software and I decided on that because it was such a good deal, I know it'll take some extra software and hardware but think it would be perfect. All I want is to write to 1.44MB floppies that my classics can read.
 
With a USB floppy, it should be able to write Mac 1.44MB floppies, but won't be able to do the 400k/800K GCR of the oldest Macs. My Mac SE has an 800K drive, so getting software onto it is a challenge. I can usually convert diskcopy 4.2 images to kryoflux raw and then write them with that, but the resulting floppy doesn't ALWAYS work, sometimes there is a lot a playing with different options and drives to get a successful floppy.

I think the best solution would be to setup a machine that has ethernet and Appletalk/Phonenet and just copy the files to a real vintage mac and write the floppy there. Of course that doesn't always work with copy protected stuff too. Of course if you have a machine that's old enough to support ethernet and apple talk, it probably already has a floppy drive that would support 800K.

So many hurdles with Mac floppies :)
 
I don't plan on Buying a Mac SE 512 I just like the Classic and Classic II Macs the ones I have are pretty nice and I have the ram maxed out on them and new logic boards in them as well. They still have the original HDDs in them and I have SCSI2SD adapters ready for when they do die.
 
thegenerallee86 said:
Well I found a G4 Power Macintosh that was in pretty good condition and came with restore software and I decided on that because it was such a good deal, I know it'll take some extra software and hardware but think it would be perfect. All I want is to write to 1.44MB floppies that my classics can read.
Click to expand...

You'll need a USB floppy drive. Apple did make them, but their compatibility with old system software wasn't the best.

thegenerallee86 said:
I don't plan on Buying a Mac SE 512
Click to expand...

Good, because such a machine doesn't exist lol. There was a SE, SE FDHD and SE/30, with the SE/30 being the fastest and most expandable. It's a far better machine than either the Classic or Classic II. The SE/30 was expandable up to 128 MB of RAM and had a full 32 bit bus, unlike the crippled Classic II which could only have 10 MB of RAM and had a 16 bit bus, which further crippled performance.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
You'll need a USB floppy drive. Apple did make them, but their compatibility with old system software wasn't the best.



Good, because such a machine doesn't exist lol. There was a SE, SE FDHD and SE/30, with the SE/30 being the fastest and most expandable. It's a far better machine than either the Classic or Classic II. The SE/30 was expandable up to 128 MB of RAM and had a full 32 bit bus, unlike the crippled Classic II which could only have 10 MB of RAM and had a 16 bit bus, which further crippled performance.
Click to expand...

Yeah luckily I found a place that sells them online and I mean anything older then the Classic or Classic II.
 
thegenerallee86 said:
Yeah luckily I found a place that sells them online and I mean anything older then the Classic or Classic II.
Click to expand...

You want the USB floppy drive to be compatible with 400/800k disks? That's not going to happen. Apple killed off support for said formats back in Mac OS 8, long before the G4 ever came about. I think there is a way to read 800k disks, but not write to them. 400k both read and write is definitely not supported.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
You want the USB floppy drive to be compatible with 400/800k disks? That's not going to happen. Apple killed off support for said formats back in Mac OS 8, long before the G4 ever came about. I think there is a way to read 800k disks, but not write to them. 400k both read and write is definitely not supported.
Click to expand...

No Just the 1.44MB floppies for the Classic and Classic II
 
If your classic mac has 1.44MB drives, you do not even need a bridge machine. Modern mac/MacOS could write raw 1.44M disk images even with USB drives, I did so before, you can refer to this tutorial and directly write the raw images into USB flopy. And to create such images, you can use minivmac and drag files into black 1.4MB image.

If you want to directly write to the USB disk, without first filling them into a black image, you can install a OSX 10.5.8 virtual machine, the host software could let the VM access USB-floppy and I can directly format the 1.4MB floppy to HFS and drag things onto that. It reads perfects on the target vintage mac. I do have a mac mini G4 as bridge machine, but I don't even bother take it out...
 
Thank You! Got My imation USB Superdisk floppy drive today and will be getting my Powermac G4 delivered tomorrow along with the Apple Studio Display and the adapter so I can plug it into the G4 cause it doesn't have the proprietary Display port only the VGA and DVI
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top