Mac OS 9 Toolbox

This is a collection of various useful tidbits I've collected to make using an old Mac OS 9 machine a bit easier.

Connecting from Mac OS 9 to a modern machine for file sharing

This uses Netatalk and Docker, via the servercontainers/netatalk image, to allow for connecting via AFP from the Chooser inside Mac OS 9 to your modern machine of choice.

cd into the netatalk directory in this repository
Create a file called .env with the following contents: SHARED_DIR=/absolute/path/to/a/directory/to/share
Start up the container with docker-compose up
On the Mac OS 9 machine, go into the Chooser and click "Server IP address" then put in the IP or hostname of your machine running the Netatalk image

Permission issues

I've found permissions to be a bit of a pain with this unfortunately. Reading just works, but writing has some horrendous intersection of the host machine, Docker running on the host machine, and Netatalk that I haven't been able to satisfactorily untangle. In my case where the host machine is macOS and I'm running Docker for Mac, running this command to set the extended attributes for the Docker ownership of the shared directory worked well enough:

xattr -w com.docker.grpcfuse.ownership '{"UID":65534,"GID":65534}' /path/to/the/shared/directory

The UID and GID there are the user and group IDs of the nobody user that you connect to Netatalk with as a guest. This seems to require a docker-compose down && docker-compose up to take effect if it's already running.

Browsing the internet with an old web browser

This uses Webone, via Docker and the u306060/webone image, to act as a proxy to allow old machines to talk to modern HTTPS websites.

cd into the webone directory in this repository
Start up the container with docker-compose up
Open up your browser of choice on the old computer and find the proxy settings in its preferences
Set the proxy address to the IP address or hostname of the machine running the Docker container, and set the port to 8080

When entering URLs in the browser itself, make sure you use http:// and not https://.

Converting Mac OS 9's PICT format screenshots

Install ImageMagick (under macOS, use Homebrew and install it with brew install imagemagick), then use the convert utility.

Screenshots are saved without any file extensions, so you'll need to either manually add .pict to the end of the filename, or add the pict: prefix to the file to tell ImageMagick what the specific intput file type is:

convert pict:"Picture 1" "Picture 1.png"

Fun things

Macstodon — A Mastodon client for Mac OS 9 and earlier
Escape Velocity: Override — A space combat/trading game. Needs a serial number which can be generated using ARRT