Question with opening files in emulated Mac OS 7.5.3
Posted: Thu Jul 28, 2011 7:28 pm
Hi everyone!
I work for my college's newspaper and we recently discovered some old floppies from 1992-2000 that contain backed up files of past issues. I am trying to open the files and convert them into .pdf, but I have had some trouble. I bought a copy of MacDrive in order to read some of the disks (some are double density and MacDrive does not recognize these, but I can worry about that later)
Most of the files I transferred either have no extension or a .pm4 extension. pm4 is used in Aldus (now Adobe) PageMaker 4 software, which is more than 15 years old. I looked around it it appears that you can open these files in Adobe PageMaker 7 Free Trial edition. I tried to open it in Windows 7, and there were errors. I checked forums and found the program does not work on Vista or 7. So I tried running it on virtual XP through Windows 7. The program opened, but it said when I tried to open the file that it couldn't do cross-platform and old-new version conversion at the same time. Currently there is no tool to convert pm4 files to anything newer (it does exist for 5.0+ though) So I decided to try opening the files on Mac OSX. Turns out that the program uses Rosetta, and I just upgraded to Lion. So I used a family member's laptop running snow leopard, and discover that the program only runs in classic mac osx, something dropped a few versions before that.
I then went to my Windows 7 PC and installed Basilisk II (with much help from this website's forums and tutorials (THANK YOU!)) And got Mac 7.5.3 running. I even found an old copy of Aldus PageMaker 4.2 and was able to successfully install it. I moved a few of the pm4 files over and a few of the ones with no file extension and tried to open them, but when I click the saved files it says it does not recognize the file extension. "The document "news 8-28-93.pm4" could not be opened, because the application program that created it could not be found. Could not find a translation extension with appropriate translators." When I tried to open it via PageMaker, it does not appear as an open-able file, and there is no option to just open any file.
I am feeling a bit stuck here. Is there a way to make 7.5.3 open a program with a certain file? Is there something I may be doing wrong that I could fix?
Any help is appreciated, thanks!
I work for my college's newspaper and we recently discovered some old floppies from 1992-2000 that contain backed up files of past issues. I am trying to open the files and convert them into .pdf, but I have had some trouble. I bought a copy of MacDrive in order to read some of the disks (some are double density and MacDrive does not recognize these, but I can worry about that later)
Most of the files I transferred either have no extension or a .pm4 extension. pm4 is used in Aldus (now Adobe) PageMaker 4 software, which is more than 15 years old. I looked around it it appears that you can open these files in Adobe PageMaker 7 Free Trial edition. I tried to open it in Windows 7, and there were errors. I checked forums and found the program does not work on Vista or 7. So I tried running it on virtual XP through Windows 7. The program opened, but it said when I tried to open the file that it couldn't do cross-platform and old-new version conversion at the same time. Currently there is no tool to convert pm4 files to anything newer (it does exist for 5.0+ though) So I decided to try opening the files on Mac OSX. Turns out that the program uses Rosetta, and I just upgraded to Lion. So I used a family member's laptop running snow leopard, and discover that the program only runs in classic mac osx, something dropped a few versions before that.
I then went to my Windows 7 PC and installed Basilisk II (with much help from this website's forums and tutorials (THANK YOU!)) And got Mac 7.5.3 running. I even found an old copy of Aldus PageMaker 4.2 and was able to successfully install it. I moved a few of the pm4 files over and a few of the ones with no file extension and tried to open them, but when I click the saved files it says it does not recognize the file extension. "The document "news 8-28-93.pm4" could not be opened, because the application program that created it could not be found. Could not find a translation extension with appropriate translators." When I tried to open it via PageMaker, it does not appear as an open-able file, and there is no option to just open any file.
I am feeling a bit stuck here. Is there a way to make 7.5.3 open a program with a certain file? Is there something I may be doing wrong that I could fix?
Any help is appreciated, thanks!