"James P. Gray" <jp at u.washington.edu> writes:
>Does anyone know of a good and preferably cheap program which allows
>an IBM type machine running under the DOS/Windows environment to read
>Mac formatted floppies?
>Thanks,
It depends. Modern floppies, no problem. Very old macs used weird
variable-speed drives, which could get more data on the disk, but
you'll never get a PC to read them. So, if your Mac disk is formatted
720k or 1,44Mb, no problem. If it's an old 400 or 800k variety you're
out of luck (but then modern macs can't read those either).
I know of a demo version of a Mac emulator for DOS, which runs for
10 minutes or so if it's unregistered. Would that serve your
purposes? I have a very old message about it from an OS/2 newsgroup,
which is quoted below. (I just checked and the files are still there)
--- cut here ---
Anybody wanting to run Mac applications under OS/2 should check out the
"Executor" package (for DOS, currently). I tried it today under 2.11 and
am fairly impressed.
> WHAT EXECUTOR IS
>> Executor is a Macintosh (Macintosh is a registered trademark of Apple
> Computer, Inc.) emulator for the PC. Executor can read and write
> Macintosh formatted HD (1.4 Mb) floppies as well as run Macintosh programs.
> A 386 or better with 4 Mb RAM, a VGA monitor and a mouse is needed to
> run Executor.
>
Basically Executor gives you a Mono mac, able to read Mac floppies, running
at the speed of a 33MHz '030 on a 486DX2 66MHz PC.
I've been playing MacRisk all afternoon on my 486DX 33 and couldn't tell
it wasn't a real Mac.
> USE WITH OS/2
>> Executor/DOS 1.1 works with OS/2 2.1, but not with OS/2 2.0, sorry.
>
It works fine under 2.11 if you let it think it has lots of DPMI memory
(I gave mine 16Mb) and set the HARDWARE TIMER to on.
> GOALS
>> We hope to release Executor/X-Windows for a variety of processors in the
> first quarter of 1994, and to release Executor 2.0 for DOS, Windows,
> OS/2, NEXTSTEP and X-Windows during the second quarter of 1994. We also
> anticipate supporting Windows NT, but have not yet worked it into our
> timeline.
>So, If you want to speed up the OS/2 native version contact this guy...
> Clifford T. Matthews ctm at ardi.com> Founder +1 505 766 9115 Phone
> ARDI +1 505 247 1899 FAX
>
Executor can be found at Oakland University 141.210.10.117 under
the pub/msdos/emulator directory. I think its 2.8Mb. It is demo that
runs for 10 minutes, then kicks out. It seemed a bit pokey on the 486DX33
here at school, but I didn't fiddle with it very much. It only supports black
and white and has no sound. It is still a pretty impressive software
engineering feat though. The working version a can be ordered for $99.
