Moving from old iMac to new iMac

[rlantos]

I am in the process of moving from my old iMac (using MacOS 9) to a new iMac (using OS X). I am trying to salvage some of the programs I have been using on the old one. I already found out that these programs do not run under OS X, so I installed OS 9 (Classic) that came with the machine.
  I am running into a problem with it: when I copy any of these programs to the new machine and try to run it, it is not recognized as a program, instead it is asking me to specify what to use to open it. It seems like the computer considers it a datafile.
  Even more bizarre, one of the programs (a solitaire game) that was in a 628 kB file originally, ends up as 0 kB when I copy it. When I move it back it recovers all 628 kB!
  Does anyone have an explanation and/or a suggestion on how to overcome this?