How to use Disk Jockey for emulation on macOS

Retro computing is very popular these days and one aspect of vintage computing is managing the various disk and file formats that one has to deal with when using these machines.

You can use Disk Jockey to create disk images for a variety of retro computers. You can also examine the contents of existing disk image files on your Mac or Windows computer for foreign file systems.

Using Disk Jockey, you can also create image files for many of today’s modern emulators. Basilisk IIMini vMac, SP2SD device For Apple II and WinUAE Amiga emulator.

Disk Jockey also has support for BlueSCSI and PiSCSI SCSI drive replacement devices, Floppy Emu device From Big Mess ‘o Wires.

Disk Jockey allows you to create disk image files for the following computers and formats:

1. Macintosh HFS, HFS+, MFS, Disk Copy 4.2, .iso and Toast pictures
2. BlueSCSI, PiSCSI, RaSCSI
3. Basilisk and Mini vMac
4. Apple II DOS 3.3 and ProDOS images
5. Apple II SP2SD SD card reader devices
6. Atari ST TOS .ST and .MAS formats and ST Pi emulators
7. Commodore Amiga ADF floppy and HDF WinUAE images
8. Commodore Amiga partitions using HDInstTools and Workbench
9. AKAI Sample disk images

Before the Mac came out in 1984, there were two other major companies competing in the 1980s computer space: Atari and Commodore. Apple sold a computer called the Apple II in the early 1980s.

The Apple II was designed more for business users and is considered the machine that started the personal computer revolution. However, gaming on the Apple II quickly became widespread and became a large market.

The Apple II used two disk image formats for 5.25-inch floppy disks: DOS 3.3 and ProDOS.

Atari had a line of personal home computers, starting with the Atari 400 and 800, the XL series, and the Atari ST, the first Atari home computer with a graphical user interface.

Commodore was a Canadian company that started as a calculator company and also entered the personal computer field with the VIC-20, Commodore 64, and Amiga.

The Amiga was considered one of the best computers of the era due to its features, but it was soon eclipsed by the Macintosh. Commodore stopped producing the Amiga in 1992 – a full eight years after the first Mac was released in January 1984.

Before the Mac, Apple released the Apple III, which was considered a commercial failure:

Apple III

Like the first Macs, the Amiga was based on the Motorola 68000 family of CPUs. These machines each used their own disk and file formats and were largely incompatible with each other.

Today, there are many ways to read and write these disk formats on modern computers and then reuse the images on older machines or in modern emulators that emulate the original hardware.

The original Mac used a file system called: Macintosh File System (MFS) was somewhat similar to existing Mac file systems, but it did not support folders. Everything was kept at a single level in the file system.

MFS is derived from the operating system used in the Apple Lisa, the predecessor of the Mac.

When the Mac Plus was released in 1986, Apple also released the Hierarchical File System. High fat milkIn the late 1990s, an extended version of HFS called HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) was released, allowing larger volume sizes and more files.

Many older pre-2000 Macs use HFS+, and you can still format disks as HFS+ in macOS’s Disk Utility app today.

Many of today’s Mac emulators, such as Basilisk II, Sheep Shearingand Mini vMac uses one or more of these formats. Mini vMac is an emulator that emulates the original Mac OS version that came with the Mac Plus (called System 6.0.8):

Mac Plus

The original Macs and some late Apple IIGS computers used a disk bus standard called .NET. SCSI (Small Computer System Interface). Today, devices like BlueSCSI, PiSCSI, and RaSCSI allow you to replace your original Mac’s SCSI disk with a modern SD card-based solution that’s smaller and faster.

The original Mac OS had a component in its operating system SCSI Manager 4.3 Implemented most of the SCSI device commands in Mac OS 8.5 through 9.x.

You can purchase some SCSI replacement devices from Durand’s. online web store at onegeekarmy.eu

Disk Jockey can also perform a number of other drive modification/conversion operations, such as:

1. Convert Basilisk II image files to BlueSCSI, PiSCSI or RaSCSI
2. Replace old Mac OS LIDO SCSI drivers with a classic driver for better performance
3. Copy or extract drive partitions between devices
4. Extract files and folders from disk images to your Mac
5. Generate JSON descriptions of your disk images

Lido 7.x It was a hard drive formatting application for Mac OS 9 from Surf City Software and was similar to other disk formatters. FWB’s Hard Drive ToolkitAnubis, Disk Tools, and others. Using Lido or other disk formatters, you can format hard drives, floppy disks, and removable media in the same way you use Apple’s Disk Utility today.

Durand understands simple design and Disk Jockey offers a single utility window for disk operations. To install Disk Jockey on your Mac, download it here: diskjokey.onegeekarmy.eu

If you’re running an older version of macOS X or macOS, from Tiger 10.4 to 10.12 Sierra, and you only want to create images for Basilisk II, Sheepshaver, FloppyEmu, or BlueSCSI, use the Disk Jockey 1999 version of the application. Disk Jockey 1999 even supports older PowerPC Macs running 10.4 Tiger, which were built for PowerPC processors.

Disk Jockey for early Mac OS X 1999.

Motorola PowerPC was the original CPU architecture used in Macs in the mid to late 1990s before Apple switched to Intel x86 CPUs.

Once you’ve downloaded Disk Jockey, simply double-click it in Finder to launch it. You’ll see the main window appear:

Disk Jockey’s main window.

To create a disk image, first click on the computer type in the tab bar at the top. When you do this, the user interface changes for that machine type.

For all supported computer types, the user interface provides settings for disk name, capacity, and file system type.

Under Macintosh tab, there are additional options you can choose from a drop-down menu for pre-configured disks for classic Macs from the 1980s and early ’90s.

Older removable media like the iOmega Zip 100 and Imation SuperDisk drives are also supported, although most of them used standard HFS+ partitions back in the day.

Under the second compartment Macintosh In the tab in Disk Jockey, you can set which backup drive device you want to use the disk image for or which emulator you want to use it with. You can even set the SCSI device ID number.

Each device on a SCSI bus has a number ranging from 0 to 7.

There is also one more Advanced Options tab where you can select which disk driver to use. In some older SCSI devices, the Mac OS disk drive was stored on the device itself, not in the operating system.

This allowed device drivers to be replaced and kept with the device as it was moved between computers.

After you have made all the settings as you wish, Create Image button. A standard Mac save page will appear, where you can choose a name and location to save the new disk image file.

On the far right side of the Disk Jockey toolbar is a button called: Disk-O-MaticWhen you click this button, the disk image analyzer window opens.

If you drop a disk image into a window or open it using a window Open button, and Disk-O-Matic will show you the contents of the image. This is a quick and cool way to see disk image formats on your Mac without having to use them on real hardware or in an emulator.

Disk-O-Matic displays the Partition Map type, information about the installed SCSI driver for the disk, and volume formats.

The Disk-O-Matic window in Disk Jockey.

If the device also contains an ATAPI drive, its details are also shown. ATAPI is a packaged version of ATA, used mostly for optical drives such as CD//DVD-ROM and Blu-Ray.

In some cases, a special Apple “patch” driver may be loaded onto the disc. This is because Apple’s original disc drivers contain some proprietary features that third-party drivers cannot replicate.

Durand has done a fantastic job with Disk Jockey, and it’s simple and easy to use. In this age of bloatware and feature overload, it’s a welcome throwback to the early days of Mac software – but for modern Macs.

If you’re interested in retro computing, Disk Jockey is great. There’s also a very concise and easy to read book aid document On the Disk Jockey website.