Yo compacters everywhere, Fine progress is being made in my pursuit to (sort of) replicate an out-of-the-box iMac experience on a Classic II. My 7.6.1 trial horse is being pushed pretty hard with enhancements to achieve this iMac look and feel on a small screen, dirt slow, black and white compact Classic II. Slowly it is coming along one odd piece of software at a time. All of our current issues are what we are coming to call "our tenuous niche". The Classic II is a slow, small screen, 1 bit Mac further crippled with a 16 bit data bus. It is a product of the System 7.1 era where color was already all the rage and 24 bit addressing was becoming history. To reach forward, we are running a powerful MacOS 7.6.1 which does far more with many applications from the 24 bit memory addressing era than does System 7.1. But not all of them. The Memory control panel of MacOS 7.6.1 does not give you the option of 24 bit addressing. Instead, 7.6.1 just handles it rather than having you switch back and forth between them. Many 1 bit (black and white) applications seem to do okay. Some ancient softwares will not run without that switch no matter what Herculean code is in 7.6.1. Thus our tenuous niche is one of finding versions of our training applications that will run on a crippled Classic II running a powerful 7.6.1 with a 128k era 1 bit screen.
AppleWorks 5 does it well looking very much like AppleWorks 6 & 7. Word 5.1 does it looking enough like Word '98 (sans Bob) to be useful. The ancient Klondike of Mike Casteel does it. And an incredible array of add on enhancements can be brought into 7.6.1 to really impress some iMac users. We have found our Hangman 3.0 made just for our tenuous niche and it works well. Also found were original 800k install floppies for Shanghai II (not Shanghai v 2.0). On them were both the "small" and "large" tile sets enabling this one installer to be used from a Plus thru a G-whiz running MacOS 9.2. This is long legs. Our tenuous niche is not without loss which I am determined to fill. Our greeting card making application has been The Print Shop by Broderbund. It is an ancient 24 bit program that will not function in 7.6.1's 32 bit environment on a Classic II AT ALL. And its replacement, The Print Shop Deluxe will not function without color and VGA. So, we are shopping our archives of liberated softwares for a card application that will work in 32 bit on small screen black and white. We are finding versions of other popular applications that will work in our tenuous 32-bit small screen black & white environment so maybe we will find a card making application that will too. I can run a couple of different eras of Kid Pix in our tenuous niche. So surely there is a card application that will work here. Hey, I can even run Graphic Converter 6.3.2 here handling almost every eMail attachment graphic encountered. Black and white renditions of all sorts of Kodak moments sent from Microsloth's Oddlook Distress are managed albeit a tad slow. Surely with all of this graphics handling power, we are going to find a card application for our seniors to have fun with. And, yes, when that card application is found, we will move this project into beta testing by our teaching staff of three. Also, we will be looking to touch up a feature or two with a few system level text changes and key commands courtesy of ResEdit. If anyone has an idea of a card application for our tenuous niche, I just gotta go find and try it. Bill -- Compact Macs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/>. Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Compact Macs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/compact.shtml> The FAQ: <http://macfaq.org/> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/compact.macs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
