Jul 8, 2026, 4:46 PMPSA: it appears to be impossible under current MacOS to read any older bootable CD/DVD-ROM. It is because these are HFS and MacOS doesn't read HFS anymore.
So I can't read my Starmax system CD.
Also you can't read the Quake 3 Arena disc because it's HFS I guess.
You can image them and maybe there's a standalone program for MacOS linux that can read them. David Shayer, help me!
@stebo I never understood why support for read-only HFS was removed (and for that matter MFS when it was removed from classic MacOS). The executable code is small and they could have stuck it in a kext that was loaded when needed and unloaded when it wasn’t. It only took one engineer to port it over to MacOS X in the first place.
@stebo I just image the CD and then mount it in an emulator which is running a sufficiently old version of Mac OS to understand HFS. There are a few other solutions, such as Peter Hosey's impluse tool. https://github.com/boredzo/impluse-hfs
Jul 8, 2026, 7:31 PM@_the_cloud @stebo Somebody should publish an FSKit user-mode implementation of HFS (and MFS).
@alexr @_the_cloud @stebo That would require someone like me doing work. I’m out 😄