Old MacOS 9 Tools

Airport ALM

Airport ALM Screenshot

Airport State ALM is an Apple Location Manager Module. It will turn your AirPort card On or Off when you change location. I'm not totally sure why Apple didn't write this themselves. It turns the Airport card on and off using the Airport Scripting Application. This makes it a little slow (but faster than AppleTalk and TCP/IP !) but Apple (to my knowledge) have not released the details of the WirelessAPI library.

Once you have downloaded and decompressed the archive, simply drag the "Airport State" file on to the System Folder icon. A dialog will appear asking "This item needs to be stored in the Location Manager Modules folder in order to be available to the computer." Click on the OK button. After rebooting your machine the new module should be available in the Location Manager Control Panel.

Download:
airportalm_10.sit
HyperLogo Screenshot

HyperLogo is a limited implementation of the Logo programing language. It supports all of the basic commands (FD, BK, LT, RT) and several of the more complex commands, such as procudure creation and modification. Logo is the ideal language for children to understand the concepts behind computer programs and the basics of maths. It is also very useful for testing mathematical algorithms.

HyperLogo was written in HyperCard (Hence the name!). To use it you will need HyperCard Player or buy a full copy of HyperCard. HyperCard Player comes with most new Macintoshes and can be downloaded from Apple's WWW site.

Download:
hyperlogo_10.sit

MacMachBegone!

MacMachBegone's Icon

I used to reboot quite a bit between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. Every time Mac OS X starts up it recreates the 'mach' and 'mach.sym' files and they become visible next time you boot Mac OS 9. This is a very simple program which makes them (and a couple more) invisible so that they don't clutter up the hard disk. It is very fast (you hardly notice it launch) and has a very small file size.

The program makes the following files/folders invisible (if they exist):

MacMachBegone also looks for a file called '.hidden' in the root directory of each volume and makes any files/folders listed in there invisible as well.

Note that you could just make them invisible using a program like ResEdit or FileBuddy but it is a bit tedious to do every time you reboot from Mac OS X into Mac OS 9.

If you run MacMachBegone under Mac OS X's Classic compatibility mode then it will do nothing and exit without an error message. This is so that if you have it in your Startup Items on you Mac OS 9 partition it does not give you an error message if you run it in Classic.

MacMachBegone looks for the above files in the root folder of every local volume connected to your machine and makes them invisible. It does not delete them.

To run MacMachBegone, just double click on it! To hide the files every time you startup put it in the 'Startup Items' folder within your System Folder. If you would like to make them visible again (for reassurance that they still exist!), launch the program with the command key held down.

Download:
macmachbegone_106.sit

MacNetlogon

MacNetlogon Screenshot

MacNetlogon logs users on to a workstation Macintosh by trying to logon to an AppleShare volume using the username and password entered by the user. The MacNetlogon dialog box is presented to the user just after the computer finishes starting up but before the Finder loads. If the user successfully logs on, then the Finder is started. The user does not have to restart the computer to log off. A menu item is added to the 'Special' menu in the Finder, allowing the user to logoff and bring up the logon dialog box for someone else to logon. There is also a local administration username and password, so that administrators can access the machine even if the network in unavailable.

Download:
macnetlogon_06b.sit

Password Changer

Password Changer screenshot

Password Changer is a POPPASSD client for the Macintosh. POPPASSD is the protocol used by Eudora and other POP mail clients for changing passwords. It is not very secure - it does not encrypt passwords on the network but it does offer a good solution to people who want to use a different mailer with POPPASSD support in a controlled environment - for example a classroom. There are POPPASSD daemons available for most versions of UNIX including Linux.

Password Changer was written in PowerPlant - a C++ framework by Metrowerks. It connects to the server using MacTCP calls. The program first asks for the user's username and password (note that if the Macintosh's user name is a single word then it will put this into the user name field as a default) The program then asks for the user's new password, which must be typed in twice. If the two are not the same then the program aborts. Only after this stage the program attempts to make a network connection.

There is no user interface for configuring Password Changer. To set the server name you will have to use ResEdit, available from Apple's website to configure the default server. Edit the 'STR#' resource ID 600 and insert the name or IP address of your poppassd server. Note that the user cannot change the name of the server from within the program now.

Download:
passchanger_05.sit

Valid XHTML 1.1! Nicholas J Humfrey <njh@aelius.com>