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Anyone well versed in the old Mac OS?


E-Day

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  • Retromags Curator

I am hoping someone here is familiar with Mac OS from back in the day, specifically Mac OS 9. I picked up an old iMac G3 (in blue) this past weekend to play around with. More specifically, the Video Game History Foundation's Frank Cifaldi, aka TheRedEye on this site, put a zip file on Google Drive containing the QuarkXPress files and assets for a page of GamePro magazine that he got off the disks he grabbed from their office when they closed.

I could not open the files on legacy version of QuarkXPress for Windows and likewise I cannot get them open on the iMac either. They don't show up in the open dialog box in Quark 3.1, 4.1 or 5. No extension, added extension, nothing works. Now, I am very unfamiliar with Mac OS and how it works, so I am hoping someone here knows something that can help.

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  • 2 months later...

I used to very much be into the older Mac OS scene, even running "Macintosh Garden"(a site that hosted downloads of older Mac-based games) for a while. Do you happen to know what version, or around what version of Quark the files were originally created in? That program has always been pretty notorious when it comes to opening something that wasn't created on its exact version...

Back to it, though, one of the tricks that you can use in Mac OS 9 to open files is to simply drag them to the App's icon. Try that at some point and see if you, at least, get some sort of error message. Let me know...

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  • Retromags Curator

They were created on Quark 3.31 or 3.32. Since posting this Frank provided me with the ISOs for the one issue he got those files from. I couldn't open the initial ones because once they touch Windows they lose their file association in Mac. So the Mac just saw them as documents.

I am currently going through all the content pages and replacing all the missing fonts. After that I have to go back and put back the missing images and artwork. I'm going this in Illustrator on Windows; I exported the Quark files to EPS files on the iMac and brought them over to Windows.

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  • 2 months later...

That is so great that the incomplete/unreleased issue was preserved.

 

I have seen a few other examples -- In the early-1990s I worked at what is now the Nova Scotia Archives. We received the records of a recently defunct local magazine, which included the very last issue that had not been published. It  too was in some odd Mac format, but my colleagues were able to recover and print it. 

 

 

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  • Retromags Curator

It wasn't incomplete or unreleased. It's the August 1995 issue. Thankfully my stubbornness caused me to prevail and find all the missing fonts for the iMac, and to also find the Windows equivalent fonts. One font is not quite perfect, but unless you examined the printed page and the digital page side-by-side, you cannot tell there is a difference. 

Once I get through editing everything I scanned in January (7 issues left) I will concentrate on getting the digital pages finished. I'll then release it with a new scan of that issue. I'll probably include all the assets they used in the layout as well. It's fascinating to see that several of their screenshots were scans of ads or promo material.

On a side note, if anyone knows where I can find a high resolution version of the below image it would be most helpful since it's needed for the cover:

Tekken.jpg

There seems to be a hi res version in the files when I look at them on an iMac, buy once I move the EPS over to Windows it shrinks dramatically in size. I'll probably leave that problem for the end and then try using an ancient version of Illustrator or Photoshop to try to get a larger version. Or try with my Mac mini. But if someone has a better larger version of this image, it would save me a lot of hassle :)

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