Why, you may ask, is MacAddict reviewing a PC program? Because there is just no denying that Macs have to fit into the Windows world. Since the introduction of the 1.4MB SuperDrive on the Mac SE, Apple aficionados have been able to read PC disks, but insert a Mac-formatted floppy into a PC, and you get the Windows equivalent of “huh?”. Media4's MacDrive 98 adds seamless Mac disk awareness to Windows 95, 98, and NT PCs; Mac volumes show up everywhere you can access Windows disls, including the right-click pop-up menu of Windows Explorer and My Computer, and inside apphcations.
With MacDrive 98 installed, PCs can read and write to Mac-formatted 1.4MB floppies (except older 400K or 8OOK disks), as well as to Mac media attached to a SCSI card or parallel port. This includes Iomega Jaz and Zip disks, hard drives, and optical devices. On hybrid CD-R and CD-ROM media with both Mac and PC partitions, you can choose to see just the PC ffles, just the Mac files, or both. Version 3 adds support for both reading from and writing to HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) disks. And while MacDrive 98 also lets you format disks as single HFS or HFS+ partitions, it does not install a driver, so Mac users need a utility — such as FWB’s Hard Disk ToolKit — to mount such volumes (this isn’t necessary with floppies, fortunately).
MacDrive adds some useful features to help PCs deal with the files on Mac disks. By reading file types and creator codes, it knows which Windows programs to use to open Mac documents, and even assigns the correct Windows icons and three-character file name extensions. Conversely, when saving a Windows document to a Mac volume, MacDrive inserts the correct type and creator codes. You can edit this feature, called Extension Mapping, with the MacDrive 98 Properties control panel. Unlike DataViz’s Conversions Plus, MacDrive 98 doesn’t translate between proprietary data formats — for example, changing an AppleWorks spreadsheet file into a Lotus 1-2-3 document — so it’s only useful when you’re moving files between cross-platform applications available for both Mac and Windows, such as Microsoft Office.
MacDrive 98 can also decode and encode files in MacBinary, and it can decode BinHex — a handy feature if you want to create a file on your Windows computer and send it to a Mac user. The Mac uses these two encoding formats in email and on the Internet. The Extension Mapping feature creates a Mac icon, then MacBinary and BinHex ensure that the Mac type and creator codes survive the transmission.
MacDrive 98 is a great way to help Macs fit into a cross-platform environment. With seamless Windows integration and the abihty to work with both SCSI and parallel drives, MacDrive 98 makes using Mac disk media on a PC a no-brainer. If it installed the necessary drivers on Mac disks and offered file translation, it would be perfect.
Rizzo, John. (January 2000). MacDrive 98 3.1. MacAddict. (pg. 73).
Requires Windows 95, 98, or NT. May run on later versions.
Media4 Productions
Misc
out of 10 (0 vote)
12 / 
2020-09-15 / 
5dde11703d0b64dbabd74cb15a175a4fe1bc9d6b / 
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MACDRIVE_98.img_.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
