PhredSoft/ Mac

Welcome to the Mac section of PhredSoft. Over at the blog I've been sporadically writing about my project around the old game Asterax. I was generously given permission to write a modern port of the game including the use of the old game assets. This project is a labor of love and a way to preserve a piece of gaming history.

During my quest to modernize the game I worked to set up an environment where I could run the original game to test and debug it. I found that I needed to obtain an old mac to extract it's ROM so I could run an emulator. To do that you need to boot the old mac and also once you've booted the old mac you'll need to boot the emulator. This requires a boot disk of some sort.

I discovered that apple still provides a download of MacOS System 7.5.3 as well as a "Network Access Disk" for System 7.5. Looking at this network disk download we find that it is named "Network_Access_Disk_7.5.sea.bin". Investigation revealed that this is a BinHex 4 encoded file that contains a StuffIt Archive (pre version 5) that contains a compressed DiskCopy 4.2 image. Phew 😮‍💨

I cobbled together code that did a minimal amount of decoding and decompression to extract the raw disk image. This raw disk image can then be written to a floppy or used to directly boot in an emulator like Basilisk II. I compiled it to WASM so that you can upload that file and extract the disk image directly on this page below.

I can't vouch for it working on anything other than this one "Network Access Disk" file. I'm sure it has bugs and performance issues. I hope to improve it over time but here it is in it's current form.