I have a couple of old saved classic applications on my mac (which is running mac os x lion and is HFS+ formatted) and i am trying to transfer those applications to macos 7 emulator which is their native environment. I am having some weird issues though... for example, zip files created on the macos x finder give an error when expanded using the old version of stuffit expander for macos 7. Zip files created with Stuffit 2011 expand successfully on the old mac, but the output, rather than being an application with a resource fork is two text documents. Perhaps I should encode the macos classic application using macbin or hex and then compress it and transfer it - but I don't know of any software available on macos lion that provides macbinary encoding.

All this has made me feel that old, macos classic files, are better left stored in .sit format when they are to be saved on a new, HFS+ formatted hard drive - or there is a high risk of trouble later on. Would appreciate any comments/suggestions! Thanks.

The MacOSX zip format can only be expanded again in MacOSX with preservation of specific Mac attributes. It can be expanded on other platforms (including MacOS), but then the Mac attributes are lost.

I have not used Stuffit for years. Although still upgraded to newer versions, it is hardly used anymore in the Mac world. The .sitx format will certainly not be compatible with System 7, but also the newer .sit versions will not be compatible with Stuffit versions that run in System 7. Maybe Stuffit 11 has some backward compatibility mode that enables compressing in, for instance, Stuffit 5 format, I do not know.

Which Mac emulator are you running on which host system? Did you archive the files in MacOSX in the Finder and/or with Stuffit 11? Then you should expand them in MacOSX to begin with, not in MacOS, and then again archive them in a format that can be read in System 7. Classic Mac files survive intact in MacOSX on HFS+ volumes. If you are running the emulator in MacOSX, transferring the files may be even easier.

Thanks for the response and the useful information. I am using basillisk with OS 7.5.1, mini vmac with OS 7.0, and the emulator of vmware with macos 10.5. It looks like i had an older version of basillisk that did not transfer files properly from my existing HFS+ drive to the emulated drive - applications looked like documents. I updated basillisk and this problem is solved. The emulator of vmware running 10.5 also has some trouble - the type/creator settings get lost when transferring documents from macOS 10.7.



By the way, I was trying to convert some old macwrite pro files to a current format. I was able to do this but it was a pain - had to open the files with ClarisWorks 4 and resave them, then reopen them with AppleWorks 6 and resave them, and finally open them with Apple Pages and save them. If anyone knows a better way, would be happy to hear it.

Are you running BasiliskII and Mini vMac in 10.5 in vmware with 10.5 in 10.7 ? Why is that? The latest BasiliskII (and BasiliskIIGUI) and Mini vMac run fine in 10.7.
BasiliskII: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7361
Mini vMac: http://minivmac.sourceforge.net/doc/download.html

That is the only way I know. You will loose some of the original lay-out, though.