Hi all,
Just had a Mac Plus 1 MB fall into my lap,never really used a Mac much in the past but wanted to explore the possibilities with this one. A few questions:
1. It came with what I think is Mac OS 6.08. Is this the recommended OS to use? Looks like it can use up to 7.55 but wasn't sure if that new OS will slow things down.
2. I already have a FloppyEmu for my II/IIgs so it looks like it will work with this system as well if I change the firmware. Is there a good source to find software images online of game as apps, something like whatisthe2gs or 4am collection? Anything analagous to the Total Replay setup on the Apple II?
3, Any heat issues with these fanless machines? Should I invest in an external fan system?
Anything else I'm missing for now?
TIA
With only 1 MB of RAM you should stick with Mac OS 6. To go to OS 7, ideally you should have 4 MB, or 2 MB as a bare minimum.
My ESP32 SoftCard's Mac emulator has 3 MB of RAM and OS 7 uses up slightly over 1 MB:
English.jpg
Now to answer your seconds question: the best place to get Mac software is the Macintosh Repository: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/
I also highly recommend watching this video, which even though talks about installing stuff on a vMac, since you will be dealing with images downloaded from the Net, everything in it translates 1:1 to a real Mac: https://youtu.be/FhdGxH8lzGA?si=hlcpRR64sYs8VKMd
I am not sure if FloppyEmu works with 80 MB hard disk images, but I can share the one I made for my ESP32 SoftCard, which you are welcome to try. It has Mac OS 7.0.1 though: download!
Please note, a lot of great software availbale at Macintosh Repository is found only in StuffIt! format, and some is in "Toast" format (which IIR is really just an ISO, and you can rename it? I think?). I've sometimes found that I need to transfer compressed software into Basilisk running a newer Mac OS (with access to some of the newer versions of StuffIt!) to decompress or mount files or disk drive images, and then copy onto a disk image that can be placed onto the Floppy Emu. It can be quite a lot of work to get some things going.
Your best bet is probably to find existing, prepared HDD images to load onto FloppyEmu. Here's one, think it might be (a newer version) of the one I started with, not sure.
Good luck!
I also found this site useful for extracting some of those weird Mac formats: https://extract.me/