Mac-on-a-Stick: The (More or Less) Official Guide

You’ve probably seen a Mac and Mac OS before. But have you seen what came before that? Well, here’s your chance. You can make your own “Mac Plus,” and make it run off of your USB drive.

Mac-on-a-stick is a good way to experience those old days of the Mac, and to run classic games and applications (maybe better than the programs nowadays). Creating a Mac-on-a-stick can take a bit of time, but with a bit of patience, you can have your very own virtual Mac Plus with whatever (space and memory permitting) stuff you want on it.

Note: Throughout this tutorial, there will be several notes, helping to point you in the right direction.
Lazy Man’s Shortcut: I will provide some of the files needed at each major step just in case you really don’t want to go thorough and do everything, or when you’re really stuck.
Q: What are all of those Q&A things I see?
A: These are some answers to questions that you might have if you’ve done your homework. It will tell you why we’re not doing things the perhaps “easier” way.

I recommend reading this tutorial once through so you (at least try to) understand everything, and then follow the instructions.

First thing: this is a Windows tutorial, and all things in this tutorial are explained with Windows XP Home Edition SP2. It shouldn’t be too different for other Windows operating systems.

• Mini vMac (http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?groupname=minivmac&filename=minivmac-3.0.4-wx86.bin.zip)
• Mac Plus ROM
• HFVExplorer (ftp://ftp.uni-freiburg.de/pub/pc/msdos/diskutil/mac/hfvexplorer131.zip)

For system 7.0.1:

• A System 7.0.1 boot disk (see why in the tutorial, Section 4, Catch-22) (http://www.mediafire.com/?7jktnnymyxm)
• System 7.0.1 floppy disk set (http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/Older_System/System_7.0.x/System_7.0.1.smi.bin)
• A blank hard drive file (minimum 10 MB, 20 MB recommended; see tutorial, Section 3, To create a disk)

For system 7.5.3

• A System 7.0.1 boot disk (http://www.mediafire.com/?7jktnnymyxm)
• The 19 parts of the System 7.5.3 CD (http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/Older_System/System_7.5_Version_7.5.3/; download all files, and read the Readme if you want)
• A blank hard drive file (minimum 20 MB, recommended 50 MB)
• Another blank disk file that is 44.2 MB large for storing your install CD

• A spare disk (recommended, but not absolutely necessary; try 30 MB)
• Disk Copy (http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/Utilities/Disk_Copy/Disk_Copy_6.3.3.smi.bin)
• Mac programs (discussed later in the tutorial, Section 6)

First, you’ll need a place to put you Mac on. I recommend a space on your hard drive, on the Desktop in a folder called Mini vMac or Mac-on-a-Stick. (If you’re asking why you’re doing this on your HD and not your USB drive, it’s because the HD is faster, and it won’t use too many write cycles on your USB drive.)\

Because I hate digging through a whole bunch of folders on my computer, I’ll use a Windows utility “subst” to virtually mount my Mac-on-a-stick directory on to a drive. To do this, go to Start → Run (or <Windows>-<R> on your keyboard). In the Run window, under “Open:,” enter (without the quotation marks) “subst X:”, where X is the drive you want to mount the folder on. Drag the folder in the “Open:” field, and click OK. Now you can use the drive that you’ve assigned (in my case it was M:\) to directly access your Mac’s folder. This will come in handy when you use HFVExplorer.

Next, download Mini vMac, and extract “Mini vMac.exe” into your Mac’s drive.
Note: From now on, your Mac-on-a-Stick drive will be called “drive.”
You will then need a Mac Plus’ ROM. Check around Mini vMac’s website and get their ROM downloading tool. Use the tool on your Mac Plus and copy the resulting ROM onto your Mac-on-a-stick drive. Name it vMac.rom so that Mini vMac can find it.

DISCLAIMER: You can get a Mac Plus ROM off the Internet, but doing that is not legal. Do it yourself and don’t ask me for or where you can find a ROM. I will not get involved with you and I won’t have any liabilities about it.

The next step is to download HFVExplorer. Extract it into a folder called “HFVExplorer” on your drive.
Before you get the operating system, it is important to know how to use HFVExplorer, as it is the only main software you can use to interface with your Mac’s disks. This program is used a heavy load in this tutorial.

HFVExplorer is for creating and modifying your Mac-on-a-stick’s disks. Because the internal structure of the disk is of HFV+, you cannot directly mount the disks in Windows. Also, there’s the matter of forks: in the old Macs, there are data forks and resource forks. A program cannot run normally with either forks missing. That’s why you need HFVExplorer. It will read and write Mac disks, and allow you to import/export to popular downloadable Mac file formats (MacBin, .bin; BinHex, .hqx) without having to install special software on your Mac.

Q: Why aren’t we using ExportFl/ImportFl?
A: The problem with ImportFl and ExportFl is that they only work with the data forks of files. Also, they do not automatically unpack MacBinary files, as HFVExplorer does. It’s a sort of an all-in-one program for handling Mac disks.

To open HFVExplorer, open your HFVExplorer folder and execute “HFVExplorer.exe.” Once it opens, you’ll see the following screen:

Creating a disk is pretty simple. Click on the “New” button on the toolbar (the first one; it looks like a brand new piece of paper with a corner folded). You’ll be presented with a dialog box. In the “Volume name:” field, enter the name you want to appear on the disk label. This will appear under the disk’s icon in Finder. Then, select or type a volume size. For System 7.0.1, I recommend 20 MB. For System 7.5.3, I recommend 50 MB. You’ll also need a disk that is 44.2 MB for storing your System 7.5.3 installation CD. Lastly, there’s the volume file path. This is where you want your image will go. Type in your drive’s path, and then the name plus a “.dsk” ending into the field. Or, you could browse (click on the “»” button) to the location that you want the disk to be at, and enter the file name on the “File name:” field. For example, my drive is at M:\, and I want to use System 7.0.1, so I would type “M:\System701.dsk” into the volume file path field. To finish, click the OK button and wait a while for the file to be created. It is recommended that you also create an appropriately sized “spare” drive to load files on that either would be too big for your main Mac disk, or for things that are unrelated/unused from your Mac. Once you create a disk, the disk will automatically be mounted on to HFVExplorer. Here is a list of some file sizes and their explanation:

Lazy Man’s Shortcut: The Mini vMac site features premade blank disk images that you can use. Just download and unzip the archive, and then unzip and copy the blank disk under your Mac-on-a-Stick drive. http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/minivmac/blanks-0.2.0.zip?download

Now that you have created a Mac disk, you can import files to it. You haven’t downloaded any files to import, however, just to get you prepared, I’ll show you how to import a System 7.0.1 Self Mounting Image.

Open up HFVExplorer. Open up the Mac disk that you want to copy the file on to by using the Open button on the toolbar (the rest of opening is easy… Just do what you usually do). Then, use the tree on the left and browse to your downloaded MacBin or BinHex file.
Note: It’s good practice to save your downloaded file on your drive instead of on some other places.

Select the file that you want to copy into your Mac disk and click on the Copy button on the toolbar. Then, navigate to the top of your tree and select the Mac disk you have open. Click Paste on the toolbar. At this time, you’ll see a dialog box. You can just select OK and let HFVExplorer do the work (if you selected multiple files, you can click on OK to All). The file(s) will appear as if you were looking at them from a Mac. If for some specific reasons that HFVExplorer will not properly import the file(s), you can specifically select the file type you want it to import from from the drop-down list. Of course, it could just be your download that’s corrupted. If so, clear your browser’s cache (don’t ask me how to do it) and re-download the file. Note that some BinHex files that you download could be missing their headers, and will not be imported. If you get a message like that, it’s usually pointless to try to download the file again, as most likely it still doesn’t have a header.

Exporting files are like the inverse of importing files. Select the file you want to copy from your Mac disk and click Copy. Browse with the tree to where you want to save the file and click Paste. You’ll see a similar dialog box as importing. Click OK/OK to All to finish. The resulting file will be most of the time a MacBinary file. You can then do whatever you’d like with the file.

Special: When you’re exporting the resulting files from the System 7.0.1 disk set, export them as “Raw copy, data fork,” because the files are actual Mac disk files, and you don’t want to have it in a MacBinary because you’ll want to be able to directly use it.

Note: Before you can use your disks with Mini vMac, you must unmount it from HFVExplorer. To unmount, close the program. Do note that there is an Unmount command in the File menu. However, that doesn’t seem to work on Mac disks.

That’s pretty much all to basically interacting with Mac HFV+ disks. The next step is to get your OS and install it on to your newly created disks.

In this section, you will be installing your System software on to your Mac-on-a-Stick. You will need the OS of your choice (System 7.0.1 or System 7.5.3).
Q: Why isn’t the OS called Mac OS?
A: That’s because all systems previous to some release in version 7 was called System.

First, download my System 7.0.1 boot disk. Then, use the link of the System you want and download all the files needed to create a usable image. For System 7.0.1, it’s just one file. For System 7.5.3, it’s 19 files. Save all of those into your drive. I recommend that you put the System 7.5.3 parts in a folder, so to make your drive less cluttered. Open up HFVExplorer, and copy your System image(s) on to your Spare disk. Also make sure that you have a HD available for your Mac. See Section 3 above if you haven’t created the HD. Close HFVExplorer. Now, it’s finally time to start Mini vMac. Insert the System 7.0.1 boot disk into Mini vMac.

If Mini vMac is not running, just drag and drop a bootable disk on to the file’s icon. If you’ve already started Mini vMac, but is looking at a disk with a flashing question mark, drag and drop a bootable disk into the vMac window. Once you’ve booted, just drag and drop disks into the window and their icons will appear on your Mac’s desktop.

Catch-22: If you have downloaded earlier boot disks from the site shown on the original Mac-on-a-Stick page, and tried to use the System disk images, you’ve probably gotten a surprise. A message will tell you that the image requires System 7.0.1 or higher to mount. So now you’re probably stuck in a pretty hard place. That’s why I’m providing a System 7.0.1 boot disk so that you can boot it and use it to mount the System disk set.

Insert your spare disk. Double click on its icon to display its contents. It is recommended that you put your Mac on All Out speed mode to speed up verification. Do this by pressing <Ctrl>-<S>, and while holding <Ctrl> press <A> and then release <Ctrl>.

Double click “System 7.0.1.smi”. Read and agree to the license. Wait while the program mounts and verifies the disk image. When you’re finished, restore your system speed back to normal so that to not take up all of your CPU cycles by following the above instructions, instead of pressing <A> press <3>. Close your Spare disk’s window, and open up the newly created “7.0.1 (1440k.images)” icon on your desktop. See that all of the files end in “.image”? Because System 7.0.1 came on a set of six floppies, the files that you are looking at are the six floppy images. Press <Alt>-<A> (translated to <Command>-<A> into the Mac) and drag the selected images into your spare disk. This will copy the disk images to your Spare disk. Close the window and drag its icon to the trash. Do the same to your Spare drive.

Note: In case you find it weird “trashing” your disks, in fact you didn’t do anything but unmounted and removed their icon from the desktop. As described by Apple, to eject a disk and remove the icon from the desktop, drag its icon to the trash. So you’re throwing away the icon, not trashing your disk.

From the Special menu, select either Restart or Shut Down. (Note that you have to keep on holding the button and then releasing it when you get to the item that you want to use. Now minimize the Mini vMac window. Create a folder named something like “System 7.0.1 Install” and open up HFVExplorer. Open up you Spare disk. Select the disk images that you have just copied and click Cut from the toolbar. Browse to your newly made Install directory and paste it as Raw copy, data fork (see Special in Section 3 for more detail). Make sure you only paste the data fork, or else you’re going to end up with MacBinary files that you can’t boot with. Close HFVExplorer.
Lazy Man’s Shortcut: I have a set of ready-made System 7.0.1 disk set in case that you couldn’t figure out how to export them. http://www.mediafire.com/?2g4j1m0fg3n

Now, here’s the where the real installation begins. If you used Shut Down, click the Restart button. Open up Mini vMac and drag the disk image “Install 1.image” from your System 7.0.1 Install folder. And then, after the system has booted up from the installer, insert your Mac HD that you’ll be installing System 7.0.1 on. Click OK. You can use the Easy Install to install everything, but it would be pointless because you can’t connect printers or share files with the Mini vMac. So, instead, click the “Custom” button. Scroll down the list and select “System for Macintosh Plus”. I recommend that you put your Mac on All Out so that installation would go faster. Alternatively, you could run the Mac at 1x to experience real 7 MhZ Mac Plus performance. Remember to restore your speed to 3x when you’re finished installing. Click Install when you’re ready. During the installation, you’ll be asked to insert other disks from the disk set to install material on that disk. So, insert the disk indicated and installation will automatically continue. When you’re done, click Quit and Restart. Drag your Mac HD file into Mini vMac. Installation is now complete. You can delete everything off of your Spare disk and you can remove the System 7.0.1 disk image MacBinary file from your drive. However, it is recommended that you do not remove your setup disk set under your System 7.0.1 Install folder so that, in case you need it in the future, you can reinstall System 7.0.1 without having to redownload and reextract the disk images. To start your computer from now on, just insert your System 7.0.1 HD into Mini vMac.

Installing System 7.5.3 is similar to installing System 7.0.1. Insert the CD disk that you have made for the System 7.5.3 installer (if you didn’t make one, make a 44.4 MB image as described in Section 3, To create a disk). Put your Mac on All Out to speed up verifying. From your spare disk, double click “System 7.5.3 01of19.smi”. Read and agree to the license, and wait for the image to be mounted and verified. Close your spare drive and open up the newly created “Sys7.5 V7.5.3 CD Inst” icon that was created on your desktop. Press <Alt>-<A> and drag the files into your Install CD disk. Close that window and drag its icon into the Trash. Different from the System 7.0.1 install disks, this CD cannot be booted from, so you must keep the boot disk on. Drag your Spare disk into the Trash and insert your System 7.5.3 HD into Mini vMac. Open its icon on the desktop and double click on “Installer”. Click “Continue…” and click “Switch Disk” until the proper disk label for your System 7.5.3 HD comes up. Then, click “Install”. Note that you don’t need to switch disks as you need to in System 7.0.1. That’s because all of the files needed to complete the installation are on that single disk.
Lazy Man’s Shortcut: I have made a System 7.5.3 Install CD, in case you had trouble getting it made. http://www.mediafire.com/?69kixwmm0ux
Note: You could select Custom Install from the drop-down list, however, there are many more options available than there were in the System 7.0.1 installer, and not all of them works on a Mac Plus. That’s why I recommend you use Easy Install. It will install most of the stuff that your Mac can use, and you can run the installer later if you want to add anything.

Finish the installation by clicking Quit. Close the Installer disk’s window, and then drag the disk to the Trash. Do the same with your newly installed System 7.5.3 HD. Finally, select Special →Restart or Shut Down. Drag your Mac HD file into Mini vMac. Installation is now complete. Remember to restore your Mac’s speed back to 3x. You can delete all of the files on the Spare disk, and the set of 19 System 7.5.3 CD parts. However, it is recommended that you keep the System 7.5.3 Install CD so that you can add components or reinstall System 7.5.3, and my boot disk because if your System 7.5.3 won’t boot up, the only way to enter Setup is to use it through my boot disk, as the Install CD isn’t bootable. To start your computer from now on, just insert your System 7.5.3 HD into Mini vMac.

There is a testing utility for Mini vMac you can use to see if Mini vMac is completely operational. You can get it here: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/minivmac/testmnvm-0.1.0.zip?download.

Unzip it and move the disk image to your drive. Boot up your Mac and insert the disk. Open the disk and run the TestMnvM program. If it reports “Everything seems OK”, your Mini vMac program is operational. Eject the disk when you’re done.

System by itself isn’t all that useful. You’ll need some programs. Search for old Mac “Classic” software. They’ll usually come in MacBinary (.bin) or BinHex (.hqx). All you need to do to load them on to your Mac is to import them on to your Mac’s HD. After you import them, you usually have to extract or use a setup program to set it up on your Mac. Just double click on the file you imported and follow the instructions.

If you downloaded a file from Apple’s Older Software List, then the files will most likely (in the order of likeliness) come on Self Mounting Image (.smi), Disk Copy Image (.img), and Self Extracting Archive (.sea), all included in a MacBinary file. SMI and SEA files do not need any additional software to extract, but IMG does. You will need Disk Copy (see link in Section 2) to mount those files. Usually, you can just double click on the image (with Disk Copy installed), and Disk Copy will open and automatically mount the new image. To eject the image, just do it like any other disk: drag it to the Trash.

Congratulations! You now have your own virtual Mac Plus. Now, to make it Mac-on-a-Stick, you will need to place it on to your USB drive. First, open up Run, and type (without the quotation marks) “subst /D X:”, where X is your drive’s letter. Check to see if your drive is gone from My Computer. Now, place the whole directory where you have your Mac installed on to your USB drive, under your organization. Place appropriate links to your menu systems, as how you’d regularly do it. Note that you should put a command line parameter on where the Mac HD that you want to boot from is. Just follow it by your disk image’s location. Also, put a link to HFVExplorer, so you can access it easily. Add a directory called “Mac Programs”, and place everything that you’ve downloaded in this directory for safekeeping, in case that if you need to re-do your Mac HD, you have a backup to all of your programs. And now, you have a complete Mac-on-a-Stick, for work or for play, ready for you.
Lazy Man’s Shortcut: Here’s a copy of a ready-made image of System 7.0.1 and System 7.5.3, ready for you to use, in case that you were that lazy.
System 7.0.1: http://www.mediafire.com/?6nj00c0uyoy
System 7.5.3: http://www.mediafire.com/?cwyuodm9ccm

Here are some tips and hints for you so that you enjoy your Mac smoothly.

• Don’t install system updates unless you are having some bad problems. I found that system updates most of the time break Disk Copy. That’s usually not a good thing, as it could also mean that you can’t use SMI files.

• Get ClockFix (http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/minivmac/clockfix-1.0.0.zip?download). It keeps your Mac’s time current, even if it gets paused at some time.

• Change your Mac’s title. Tired of seeing “Mini vMac” all day? You can change the name of the Mini vMac program into something else, and Mini vMac will display it in the title bar. For example, if you change the program’s name to “Mac-on-a-Stick.exe”, the title bar will display “Mac-on-a-Stick”.

• Want your Mac to talk? Go get MacinTalk (http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/Speech/PlainTalk_1.5/; only the ones that have TTS marked in the file names), a Text-to-Speech engine for your Mac. The voices can only get so natural, so they still sound like a machine said it. However, it’s a great way of amusing family and friends. It can also read dialog boxes out to you (sorry, because the Speech control panel wouldn’t run under System 7.0.1, you cannot set it to speak out dialog boxes).

• Place all of your programs in a folder. As I said above, it’s a good idea to place the original MacBinary files in your Mac Programs folder, in case if you need to reinstall System, or if the site that you downloaded your programs from are taken down.

I thank the following people/companies for their excellence in providing all I needed to make a virtual Macintosh:

• Apple – Thank you for releasing your old software to everyone for free, so there still can be memories of the old Mac days.

• Mini vMac – You guys are great. Without you, it will never be possible to have a simple-to-use and small emulator for the Macintosh Plus.

• MediaFire – For hosting my files… without registration!

• Portable Apps – Thanks for mentioning the place that had instructions on how to build a Mac-on-a-Stick

• No Thick Manuals – For creating the original Mac-on-a-Stick tutorial.

• And lastly, you, for reading this document that I spent two evenings putting together, and for carrying on the Macintosh Classic tradition.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

© Copyright 2008 GMMan (Yukai Li) of GMWare. All rights reserved. You may only modify this document as allowed by the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.