Ahead by a Century
Mar. 14th, 2026 08:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAs “MARCHintosh” has continued I suppose I’ve been thinking more about the actual antique hardware I set up than doing things with it. One item discovered via mere emulation before the month began did at least provoke an idea, though. Going through a giant disk image of selected software, I happened on a “2020Patch” extension. After a while, I started to think about how the Control Panel only offers two digits for setting the year. Emulators appear to draw their clock setting from the host system such that I never look at files I’ve made in them and realise there’s something off about their date stamps, but that would of course be different with my SE/30. Once I’d examined some recent date stamps on it I realised they’d indeed wound up back in the early years of the twentieth century.
I selected the patch suitable for System 6 (which turned out to be an actual “patch program” rather than an extension file) and managed to get it on to my old computer using a “Floppy Emu,” but a warning I’d found when first looking up information about the extension turned out to apply in my case too and the program just reported an error. I tried a different control panel, but it didn’t seem to work either. Before I could shrug this off I did manage to remember an older thought. I’d mounted the “SCSI2SD” that replaced the SE/30’s burnt-out hard drive so that I could remove its SD card without having to risk opening the case and supposed this would let me switch between Systems 6 and 7, but I’d never got to the point of setting up another SD card. Part of that involved the SE/30 only having four megabytes of memory in it; I have to admit I’d been worried the old all-plastic SIMM holders would break at my attempt to put in more RAM modules. Whether the old complaints about System 7 needing more resources than the apparently perfectly adequate System 6 has something to do with how every so often I sit out a macOS version is a question.
This time, though, I did start looking up instructions for the SCSI2SD. I eventually came across a site offering an assortment of disk images to download. Testing them in MAME, from the names of the images I supposed I’d resorted to one of them the first time around. After concluding I could get by with System 7.1 but noticing some generic icons in the image, I decided to install from scratch on to an “empty disk” still formatted in the right way. The perhaps excessive cleverness of continuing to work in MAME with floppy disk images didn’t quite work out, so I tried something else suggested on the site and used the Basilisk II emulator and the “Legacy Recovery CD” image. That worked all right. “Etching” the image to an SD card I’d had for some time but never opened, I swapped the cards and powered the SE/30 up with just a bit of hope.
As it turned out the computer booted up, but I was struck by System 7.1 reporting it was using more memory on the actual hardware than it had in MAME. I tried to push that thought out of my head and started loading bits and pieces via Floppy Emu. A problem that’s been bedevilling me of late, disk images not winding up “contiguous” on the Floppy Emu SD card, kept me from loading the 2020Patch, but I did manage to load the other control panel. This time it worked, letting me type in four digits for the year and shift the date into the twenty-first century.
A last thought did occur to me. Knowing the date and time update while the computer’s turned off (so long as the clock battery still provides power; I put in a new one while getting the SE/30 fixed up), I wanted to see about swapping SD cards and downgrading my system. Once I was back in System 6, I saved a file and saw it was still dated in our current century. Whether this will require system swaps every time the somewhat inaccurate clock has to be reset is a question that might wait until MARCHintosh is past.
I selected the patch suitable for System 6 (which turned out to be an actual “patch program” rather than an extension file) and managed to get it on to my old computer using a “Floppy Emu,” but a warning I’d found when first looking up information about the extension turned out to apply in my case too and the program just reported an error. I tried a different control panel, but it didn’t seem to work either. Before I could shrug this off I did manage to remember an older thought. I’d mounted the “SCSI2SD” that replaced the SE/30’s burnt-out hard drive so that I could remove its SD card without having to risk opening the case and supposed this would let me switch between Systems 6 and 7, but I’d never got to the point of setting up another SD card. Part of that involved the SE/30 only having four megabytes of memory in it; I have to admit I’d been worried the old all-plastic SIMM holders would break at my attempt to put in more RAM modules. Whether the old complaints about System 7 needing more resources than the apparently perfectly adequate System 6 has something to do with how every so often I sit out a macOS version is a question.
This time, though, I did start looking up instructions for the SCSI2SD. I eventually came across a site offering an assortment of disk images to download. Testing them in MAME, from the names of the images I supposed I’d resorted to one of them the first time around. After concluding I could get by with System 7.1 but noticing some generic icons in the image, I decided to install from scratch on to an “empty disk” still formatted in the right way. The perhaps excessive cleverness of continuing to work in MAME with floppy disk images didn’t quite work out, so I tried something else suggested on the site and used the Basilisk II emulator and the “Legacy Recovery CD” image. That worked all right. “Etching” the image to an SD card I’d had for some time but never opened, I swapped the cards and powered the SE/30 up with just a bit of hope.
As it turned out the computer booted up, but I was struck by System 7.1 reporting it was using more memory on the actual hardware than it had in MAME. I tried to push that thought out of my head and started loading bits and pieces via Floppy Emu. A problem that’s been bedevilling me of late, disk images not winding up “contiguous” on the Floppy Emu SD card, kept me from loading the 2020Patch, but I did manage to load the other control panel. This time it worked, letting me type in four digits for the year and shift the date into the twenty-first century.
A last thought did occur to me. Knowing the date and time update while the computer’s turned off (so long as the clock battery still provides power; I put in a new one while getting the SE/30 fixed up), I wanted to see about swapping SD cards and downgrading my system. Once I was back in System 6, I saved a file and saw it was still dated in our current century. Whether this will require system swaps every time the somewhat inaccurate clock has to be reset is a question that might wait until MARCHintosh is past.