So we were going to fire up a StarCraft LAN game, with my two legacy comps and one semi-modern Mac and I ran into an issue.
At some point, Blizzard removed the StarCraft patches and installers from their website completely, opting instead for a Launcher type app, that always installs the latest game client.
The problem? My Mac will only install version 1.23 thru the launcher, and the legacy computers won't even run the launcher. The latest patch I have archived for myself for my PCs is SC/Broodwar 1.16.1. Thus the newer Mac can't join any games hosted by the older systems.
Is there an archive of installers or patches somewhere that would allow me to use the original SC install disc to install SC on my Mac, instead of the Blizzard launcher?
Last edited by leonardo on 2019-11-20, 21:36. Edited 2 times in total.
Great! I now have the patch I wanted, StarCraft/Broodwar 1.16.1...
But now I have a different problem... In order to get the game to version 1.16.1, I need to install an older version first. However the version of the game included on my disk doesn't support macOS 10.x series at all, it's intended for System 7.6 and later!
I'm sure there used to be an installer for the game available thru the Blizzard website that allowed you to install the OS X client using your original CD and CD-key as assets, but I could be mistaken.
akula65 wrote:You need to define exactly what the Mac is. Is it a PPC Mac or not, because that's what StarCraft was originally written for. […] Show full quote
leonardo wrote:
my two legacy comps and one semi-modern Mac
You need to define exactly what the Mac is. Is it a PPC Mac or not, because that's what StarCraft was originally written for.
Yeah, it's starting to come back to me now. I just remember my friends and I gaming on different hardware, one friend having an early Unibody MacBook Pro. But those would have run OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard back then so I figured maybe the StarCraft OS X installer linked earlier only works on the earlier versions of OS X. I went digging and I found this old thing in the closet (by now it's too late, the LAN is over, but hey):
It's a Core Duo, probably one of the first Intel MacBooks produced with 1 GB RAM. I put it away because it had some issues, like a dead battery, Bluetooth gone haywire and because it couldn't run an up-to-date OS. Now this is looking like a perfect StarCraft LAN-client...
So for Macs up to OS X 10.6.8 the solution is this:
You need to get a later DVD-cased release of the game. In my case I found this one going for 7€ used. Not a bad deal. The box says you need WinXP, Vista or 7 - OR OS X 10.3.9 and later. The version of the game on disc is actually 1.15.2 which can be patched (with the patches from the earlier post above) to 1.16.1.
This brings all the clients running Win95/98 and OS X Leopard/Snow Leopard on the same plane for LAN.
This means all early Intel MacBooks.
If you're running anything later than Lion, this is not going to work, obviously. We may need to resort to WINE or something else to run the same client across all the generations of hardware from a Pentium with Win9x to a modern Win7 PC or a Mac with the latest OS.
...and the solution to post-Rosetta (OS X 10.7 onwards) Macs is to us the original PC-CD version of the game with WINE.
I tried the precompiled WINE 2.0[1] version from WineBottler and it works great with a few tweaks.
After installing the game and running the 1.16.1 patch[2], I had to perform the following tweaks to fix the interface lag and frame rate issues[3]:
Double click WINE from your Applications folder, if it's not already running, then proceed with the following:
1) From the menu-bar on the top of the screen, choose Configuration. From the Configuration-window, select the Applications-tab and click on the 'Add application' button
2) Navigate to StarCraft.exe and add it to the list of applications with separate configuration options:
3) Now, make sure you're editing the settings for StarCraft.exe and move to the Graphics-tab. De-select 'Allow the window manager to control the windows' setting:
4) After saving the settings, we need to open the Registry Editor from the WINE-menu at the top-right corner of the screen, as the remaining tweaks can't be accessed via the GUI:
5) Navigate to the path HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\AppDefaults\StarCraft.exe using the pane on the left side of the Registry Editor. Then, create a new key underneath StarCraft.exe named Direct3D.
Inside the Direct3D-key, you need to create three new String values called DirectDrawRenderer, OffScreenRendering, and RenderTargetLockMode.
After creating the String values, right-click each and choose 'Modify' from the submenu to give them these values:
gdi (DirectDrawRenderer), fbo (OffScreenRendering), readtex (RenderTargetLockMode).
After this, your copy of StarCraft / BroodWar will run glitch-free and smoothly and you can LAN-play with original hardware all the way down to first-gen Pentiums. 😎