I have a Macintosh Performa 630 running OS 8.1. My desktop is running Gentoo Linux. I have noticed that many pieces of software come packaged in some format with extension .sit_.bin. Try as I might, however, I have not been able to unpack these files on an actual mac or on my desktop.
What is the best way of unpacking these, preferably on the Mac itself?
Stuffit on the Mac.
.bin is a binhex format. A very old format for converting binary files to hexadecimal and back again.
I only ever used it to receive files by email (long before attachments were ever possible in email). You'd request a file and it would come in a number of emails, with the email content being a part of the binhex file. It was all perfectly safe for whatever tools you would use to connect up the bits and decode (un-binhex) it.
There may even be a Linux command to do this for you, but Stuffit for Mac does it for you too (check the preferences in Stuffit if it doesn't appear to be doing it).
.sit is a stuffit format. Converts classic Mac resource and data forks into a flat file, and back again. Use Stuffit Expander to get file into a usable Mac file. There are some key releases of Stuffit, that had their own compression algorithms. Backwards compatibility exists, but forwards compatibility is not guaranteed. ie. Stuffit v7 can open Stuffit v5.5 files, Stuffit v4 files and Stuffit v1.5.1 files. But Stuffit v4 may not be able to decompress Stuffit v5.5 files or Stuffit v7 files.
Use the latest version of Stuffit for your Mac OS. Practically every version ever made for Mac OS9 and before is on this site.
I'll try to get 5.5 - I found 4.0.1 on a disc that came with the mac. Thanks!
Right, I've managed to extract stuffit 5.5 for mac using the official stuffit 5.2 for Linux. However, the file is some form of image file - but WHAT form of image file, I have no idea. The extension is "img", and file hasn't heard of them.
They are all too big to fit on a floppy - so what do I do with them?
.img is the file extension used by Mac OS Disk Copy v6.3 for disc images (floppy and CD / DVD).
How did you plan to get the software onto your Performa anyway ? If the two are connected by Ethernet, you could try FTP or HTTP from the Performa, connecting to the Linux box.
I've set up an AppleShare server on my desktop via netatalk, and it works beautifully.
I've just managed to install Disk Copy 6.3.3, but it doesn't recognise the file (the file in question is StuffItExpander(5.5).img downloaded from this very site)
Mmm, downloaded the same one (in the 26MB archive). It works fine for me.
Perhaps it's been damaged when you've decompressed it on the Stuffit version for Linux.
Hmm... I managed to get it working with a different version. Thanks anyway for all the help!
