Dan Martin wrote:
I have a Mac plus and a number of accessories for it, including a printer and 2 external hard drives.
I have one as well. It's still useful for playing old games. A number of companies have released their games free to download on the web. The key is finding it.
The printer and the hard drives will be difficult to use on anything but an Apple// or Mac of the same era.
The Mac video display will usually not come on, though sometimes it will if left to run for a few minutes - I understand this is a common and easily fixed problem for those who knew the Mac, but I really don't have the room or use for it any more.
Others have addressed the issue. I will confirm I had the same work done by a friend who may or may not be in Winnipeg anymore. It works.
I do have some sensitive information on the external drives. Is there a reliable way to guarantee the info is erased without destroying the drives?
With old drives you could fill up the drive with a large file then reformat a number of times. I think the number was between 10 and 13. If you want the info backed up, I did at one point have a minimal security rating from the federal and provincial governments (it lapsed).
The ideal solution for me, if such a thing exists, would be to run an emulator in a modern machine (Mac, PC or Linux running on Intel), that would be able to access the old drives through hardware that connects the old attachments to USB. Emulators may be available, but I don't know about the hardware.
There *is* a 68K Mac emulator available for Linux you can download. The people I talked with say it works. Again, they use it mostly for the old games so YMMV.
I also have a Commodore 64 with external hardware that I would like to emulate.
There is quite a bit of development in the Commodore 64/128 world these days. So much so it is crossing over into the Apple// world. You my want to take a gander at the appropriate newsgroups for a couple of weeks. Additionally I suspect there is a C128 emulator available for download as well. I mean if they can do the 68K Mac and Apple// then they can certainly do the C64.
I also have a crowbar and a sledge hammer, but a more elegant approach is preferred.
If nothing else the Mac can be used as a fish tank. Several people have discussed how they did it... Might be fun to scrap the insides, replace the monitor part with something new, and have a Soecris machine running the 68K emulator...
-Dan
Dan Martin GP Hospital Practitioner Computer Scientist ummar143@shaw.ca (204) 831-1746 answering machine always on
Later Mike