4 ms·

I love these. A couple of years earlier I was writing games in HyperCard, of a similar quality. I found the disks recently, but have no idea how to play them. I

I love these. A couple of years earlier I was writing games in HyperCard, of a similar quality. I found the disks recently, but have no idea how to play them. I don't believe those old Mac floppies will even play in any standard disk drive.

sansnomme 7y ago
Use the Mac emulator online. Or just send it to the Archive.org folks and have them load and share it for you.
trm42 7y ago
I used an noname USB floppy disk to read HD floppies. I believe they are quite standard stuff but I guess the 400K and 800K DD floppies are different story. Both Linux and current Mac OS X can read HFS formatted floppies and CDs nice and dandy. Of course using some version of Mac OS is better than using Linux as it handle's HFS resource forks without problems and you get the file associations based on forks. With Linux you need to figure out file types and then add some file type endings. This is fine for cross platform stuff like images and text documents but Mac only stuff like Hypercard files is hard as then you probably need to add missing resource type data with ResEdit with old or emulated Mac. There might be a way to to map file endings to resource types with Mac's File Exchange or so but it was so long ago I'm not sure if I remember the Control Panel's name used for this correctly.
- ascorbic 7y ago
  Unfortunately I'm pretty sure these are the older Mac disks that aren't compatible with regular floppy drives
kalleboo 7y ago
The disks will work in a standard drive if they are 1.4MB HD disks, but the 400/800KB DD disks only worked in Mac drives
- onefuncman 7y ago
  I went through a brief period where I ran out of disks and reformatted all my disks with compressed filesystems to eke out another 300kb of usable disk. Later I went back and tried out a wide variety of compression tools, I preferred .ARJ but I couldn't tell you why today...
  - ksaj 7y ago
    You might recall then, that in those days the compressor just "guessed" at how big the uncompressed drive space should be. You could set it to anything that had sufficiently few digits. This allowed you to put in absurdly large numbers. I had a 9.5Mb floppy drive when I first realized the number was arbitrary, but expected to be reasonably accurate given "typical use" (which was code for "not encrypted and not already compressed"). Of course when you used higher than realistic numbers, you'd just eventually hit the last compressed cluster and then your system puked while the software tried to figure out why it can't write the next sector.
madaxe_again 7y ago
Ah, man - I also recently dug up the disks for the first non-trivial game I wrote, aged 11 or so - but they were all sadly damaged by decades of sitting in a damp barn. It started as a galaga style evade-the-enemy ships side-scroller, then turned into a lunar lander type affair, which then metamorphosed into a wizball style pickup/power up romp across an alien planet, where you had to get your astronauts to the base before you ran out of air. I vaguely recall it had something to do with “Only You Can Save Mankind”. Deluxe Paint III, AMOS, three floppies, scored it myself, went mad with AMOS speech synthesis, and when I was finally done with my masterwork, watching my kid sister enthusiastically play it for hours on end was awesome. Then my parents sold my Amiga at a yard sale, and the disks just gathered mould and rust from then on. You know, I don’t know if I’ve put that much passion into anything since.
- philpem 7y ago
  Thing is, those disks can probably be recovered. Remove the disc 'biscuit' from the plastic shell or jacket and wash it in warm soapy water. Rinse it and dry it out. If that doesn't get them clean, try isopropanol. Then transplant the disc into a new shell or jacket. Use a good drive (Teac counts), clean the heads first, and read the disc in one shot -- you may well only get one try. Ideally use a Discferret, Catweasel or similar flux-level reader. This assumes they're not Wabash or some similarly junky brand. For those, you'll need a sacrifice to the data gods and a whole heap of luck... not to mention a box of foam swabs and isopropanol to clean the disk drive up afterwards... If you see bits of magnetic material flaking off the disc, don't even waste your time trying it. It's toast and will just end up fouling the heads on the drive. In theory hard-drive-style non-contact reading is possible, but I'm not aware of anyone who's actually done it.
betamaxthetape 7y ago
Maintainer of the HyperCard stacks collection on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks), here. If you're able to make a disk image, you can use the uploader site at http://hypercardonline.tk/ http://hypercardonline.tk/ to upload stacks to the archive. If you need help reading the disks in the first place, contact me (hypercardonline@gmail.com) and I can see if I can help.
- ascorbic 7y ago
  That's awesome, thanks. I'll have a look when I'm next at my mum's house. They've probably got all kinds of rubbish on them, but should definitely have some of my HyperCard creations

sansnomme 7y ago

Use the Mac emulator online. Or just send it to the Archive.org folks and have them load and share it for you.

trm42 7y ago

I used an noname USB floppy disk to read HD floppies. I believe they are quite standard stuff but I guess the 400K and 800K DD floppies are different story. Both Linux and current Mac OS X can read HFS formatted floppies and CDs nice and dandy. Of course using some version of Mac OS is better than using Linux as it handle's HFS resource forks without problems and you get the file associations based on forks. With Linux you need to figure out file types and then add some file type endings. This is fine for cross platform stuff like images and text documents but Mac only stuff like Hypercard files is hard as then you probably need to add missing resource type data with ResEdit with old or emulated Mac. There might be a way to to map file endings to resource types with Mac's File Exchange or so but it was so long ago I'm not sure if I remember the Control Panel's name used for this correctly.

ascorbic 7y ago
Unfortunately I'm pretty sure these are the older Mac disks that aren't compatible with regular floppy drives

kalleboo 7y ago

The disks will work in a standard drive if they are 1.4MB HD disks, but the 400/800KB DD disks only worked in Mac drives

onefuncman 7y ago
I went through a brief period where I ran out of disks and reformatted all my disks with compressed filesystems to eke out another 300kb of usable disk. Later I went back and tried out a wide variety of compression tools, I preferred .ARJ but I couldn't tell you why today...
- ksaj 7y ago
  You might recall then, that in those days the compressor just "guessed" at how big the uncompressed drive space should be. You could set it to anything that had sufficiently few digits. This allowed you to put in absurdly large numbers. I had a 9.5Mb floppy drive when I first realized the number was arbitrary, but expected to be reasonably accurate given "typical use" (which was code for "not encrypted and not already compressed"). Of course when you used higher than realistic numbers, you'd just eventually hit the last compressed cluster and then your system puked while the software tried to figure out why it can't write the next sector.

madaxe_again 7y ago

Ah, man - I also recently dug up the disks for the first non-trivial game I wrote, aged 11 or so - but they were all sadly damaged by decades of sitting in a damp barn. It started as a galaga style evade-the-enemy ships side-scroller, then turned into a lunar lander type affair, which then metamorphosed into a wizball style pickup/power up romp across an alien planet, where you had to get your astronauts to the base before you ran out of air. I vaguely recall it had something to do with “Only You Can Save Mankind”. Deluxe Paint III, AMOS, three floppies, scored it myself, went mad with AMOS speech synthesis, and when I was finally done with my masterwork, watching my kid sister enthusiastically play it for hours on end was awesome. Then my parents sold my Amiga at a yard sale, and the disks just gathered mould and rust from then on. You know, I don’t know if I’ve put that much passion into anything since.

philpem 7y ago
Thing is, those disks can probably be recovered. Remove the disc 'biscuit' from the plastic shell or jacket and wash it in warm soapy water. Rinse it and dry it out. If that doesn't get them clean, try isopropanol. Then transplant the disc into a new shell or jacket. Use a good drive (Teac counts), clean the heads first, and read the disc in one shot -- you may well only get one try. Ideally use a Discferret, Catweasel or similar flux-level reader. This assumes they're not Wabash or some similarly junky brand. For those, you'll need a sacrifice to the data gods and a whole heap of luck... not to mention a box of foam swabs and isopropanol to clean the disk drive up afterwards... If you see bits of magnetic material flaking off the disc, don't even waste your time trying it. It's toast and will just end up fouling the heads on the drive. In theory hard-drive-style non-contact reading is possible, but I'm not aware of anyone who's actually done it.

betamaxthetape 7y ago

Maintainer of the HyperCard stacks collection on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks), here. If you're able to make a disk image, you can use the uploader site at http://hypercardonline.tk/ http://hypercardonline.tk/ to upload stacks to the archive. If you need help reading the disks in the first place, contact me (hypercardonline@gmail.com) and I can see if I can help.

ascorbic 7y ago
That's awesome, thanks. I'll have a look when I'm next at my mum's house. They've probably got all kinds of rubbish on them, but should definitely have some of my HyperCard creations