de-archiving old Max
I have some patchers from the early 90's I'd like to update. Is there a working methodology?
most of them should work out of the box.
caution has to be taken when it comes to quicktime, serial, cd, and in max 3 times there were also a lot of widespread third party externals used.
if you find many things missing, create a bunch of empty patch object with those names, so that you can at least browse how things were connected.
on windows, rename all max binaries and max text files to *.mxb. after you assigned one of them to max, the rest will open by doubleclick.
thanks for your reply.. to get these off of an older scsi drive, I had to copy them to a dos formatted disk, then read them into my laptop with a usb floppydrive (all on Mac OS). I tried using both .mxb and .mxf extensions, and get one of the following responses when trying to open:
AIRMASTERC.mxb: can't read old format files
AIRMASTERC.mxf: error -1 making directory
AIR_PLAYE0.mxb: can't read old format files
AIR_PLAYE0.mxb: read failed error 0
PITCH1.mxb: can't read old format files
PITCH1.mxb: read failed error 0
AIR_PLAYE0.txt: read failed
AIR_PLAYE0.txt: can't open, error 0
AIR_PLAYE0.pat: can't read old format files
AIR_PLAYE0.pat: read failed error 0
AIR_PLAYE0.pat: can't read old format files
AIRMASTERC.mxf: error -1 making directory
opening one of the files in text has this header:
0000 0001 0000 057f 0000 1404 0303 0a03
0301 0101 010a 0303 0101 0101 030a 0303
0101 0101 030a 0303 0101 0101 030a 0303
0101 0101 030a 0303 0101 0101 0101 0101
and closes with:
5f5f 5f5f 5f5f 5f5f 5f5f 5f5f 5f5f 5f5f
5f5f 5f5f 5f5f 0066 6173 7465 6e00 636f
6e6e 6563 7400 706f 7000
maybe that'll clue somebody into the specific format?
if files are plain max patches ( no collectives) and intact,
(survived SCSI ->DOS -> MacOS)
max 8 should read them.
don't try to change fie extensions, definitely not to mxf.
if you don't know what they are.
header example you posted is not max patch.
it could be preset file.
Max patches from that time look like this, text or bin format.
Maybe you could upload few files zipped.
I still have max 2.5, 3.5 etc...
if .txt and .pat also fail, there must be an issue with the files, like they are maybe compiled externals or collectives... but we will see.
thx, will try to port them to this newer mach on a mac formatted disk, so far it can't seem to read them, hence the dos method, which i think may be messing with the files in transit. If I can get them to copy over, will zip the set. I don't think any were collectives, just a set of patchers, one patcher to act as a master controller for them, and some tables..
zip is not compatible either. use FAT32 formatted stick for troublefree interchange.