Classic 8×8-pixel B&W Mac patterns

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Summary

TL;DR: I made a website for the original classic Mac patterns I was working on something and thought it would be fun to use one of the classic Mac black-and-white patterns in the project. I'm talking about the original 8×8-pixel ones that were in the original Control Panel for setting the desktop background and in MacPaint as fill patterns. Screenshots via to Marcin's awesome interactive history I figured there'd must be clean, pixel-perfect GIFs or PNGs of them somewhere on the web. And perhaps there are, but after poking around a bit, I ran out of energy for that, but by then had a head of steam for extracting the patterns en masse from the original source, somehow. Then I could produce whatever format I needed for them. There are 38 patterns, introduced in the original System 1.0 in the 1984 debut of the Macintosh. They were unchanged in later versions, so I decided to get them from a System 6 disk, since that's a little easier with access to utility programs. Preparation Extraction process Start System 6 (drag the ROM onto the Mini vMac icon, then drag the System 6 disk onto the window when you see the flashing floppy disk). Mount the ExportFl and sitPack disks by dragging their files and dropping on the classic Mac desktop. In emulation Double-click sitPack to launch the program. Command-O to open, then navigate to the startup disk by clicking "Drive". Scroll to find "System Folder" and double-click on it. Scroll to the bottom, select "System" and click "Open". Save the output file as "System.sit" in the top-level of the startup disk. Quit sitPack back to the Finder. Start the ExportFl program. Command-O or pick "Open" from the "File" menu. Find the "System.sit" created in the last step and click "Open". A regular file save dialog will appear on the modern Mac, pick a location and save the file. On the modern Mac Drag the "System.sit" file onto The Unarchiver, or open the file from within it. This will produce a file called "System" (with no extension). Run DeR...

First seen: 2025-09-04 21:03

Last seen: 2025-09-05 04:06