Power Mac 8100

My teacher has a power mac 8100, and he said we could blow it up if we were able to run two programs he had on it on a current computer. The files are "!BUFFON'.SNE" and "!BIRTHDA.YGE." I put them on a floppy from the mac and put them on my windows computer (that can emulate mac), yet they are both 0 bytes of information. Is this a formatting problem, or are the programs so old that their size isn't even computed by todays standards. How can I run these programs on a current computer? Thanks.

Hi there,

by a current computer..do you mean an Intel Mac running OS X ?

If so...then to run OS 9 on it you can either get SheepShaver or install Windows on it via Bootcamp etc then when in windows install PearPC which inturn will allow you to run OS 9...

regards

Ric

The size of 0 bytes probably means that all data resides in the resource fork, a special part of the file that isn't copied correctly when the file is accessed by other systems (I'm even unsure as to whether Mac OS X handles them correctly any more). The solution to transfer it through a windows/mac os x/linux/whatever system is to use some resource-aware archiving program (I think there's a program called ZipIt which should work, as does stuffit, but older stuffit files might not work very well together with current versions of the program).

What you need to do to run the programs on modern computers is, as Ric suggested, emulate the older system in some way, either through PearPC on windows, or through SheepShaver on Mac OS X. Other solutions also exist if the programs work on even earlier machines (680x0 and 68LC0x0 - i.e. before PowerPC even), such as Basilisk II.

Steps:
1. archive the files on the original machine
2. copy the archive through the modern machine to the emulated system using whatever means available (burned CD, floppy, network transfer...) (do NOT unpack during this, as the resource fork(s) will most surely get lost)
3. unpack inside the emulated mac and run
... that should work

If you need help in any of the steps, ask again, and someone's bound to reply.