The “image” synthetic NuBus card for NuBus Macs got some major enhancements in MAME 0.162. In particular, along with some special software, you can now use them to transfer files in an FTP-like fashion (except much faster) between the system you’re running MAME on and the emulated Mac’s hard disks.
First up, get the “Mac Tools” zipped CHD right here and unzip it to get mactools.chd. It includes Stuffit Expander, Compacter Pro, DiskCopy, and other handy Mac tools.
Secondly, boot up an emulated NuBus Mac with the “image” card configured into a free slot and the second HDD set to mactools.chd. Turning the RAM amount up a little helps too. For the IIci, “mame maciici -ramsize 32M -hard1 [your choice] -hard2 mactools.chd -nbe image” would be a good command line, or you can use QMC2 and slot everything in appropriately.
When you boot up, you’ll see a folder called filecard. Running the program inside of it gives an FTP-like command line interface, which accepts the following commands:
cd - change current directory on host system
pwd - print current directory on host system
ls - list contents of current directory on host system
get - transfers a file from the host system into the emulated Mac
put - transfers a file from the emulated Mac to the host system
Note that the Mac’s current directory is always the folder the filecard program is in.
Source for filecard is included in case someone wants to make a friendlier version. Please contact me at messdrivers at gmail dot com if you do so 🙂
Finally, 0.162 may crash when the ‘ls’ command is used, especially on Linux; this has been fixed in current github source.