VivienM wrote on 2024-12-31, 03:58:

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-31, 03:36:

If I scroll up in this thread, will I find a reference to exactly what software it is that's giving you this trouble? Given my retro project of the evening isn't going anywhere, I'm tempted to fire up one of my vintage Macs (all G4s, so much newer than yours) and see if I can figure out where you're getting tripped up.

Okay, I found a Sam & Max toast image on a well known Mac abandonware web site. Mounted it on OS X Leopard (that's the only OS that supports the wifi card in my TiBook) and I see what they did. There's a teeny Sam & Max application and then a hidden giant "Sam & Max data" file.

I think the real problem here is that the game developer did something cute. I don't think putting hidden files on HFS CD-ROMs is really something super-proper... although my suspicion is that if you copied that file and made it unhidden, the game would run fine from any volume. I'm just trying to think about how one could do that with only classic OS tools...

Okay, so... I think I figured it out.

The file is marked as 'invisible', that's what it's called in the classic Mac OS. If you open up ResEdit and use the 'Get [something]...' in the file menu, you can see it and make it not invisible. (Oddly, even though you'd think CD images should be read-only, it lets me save the change and see the file in the OS 9 Finder)

But... copy that and the application to a different place and it doesn't run. My guess - they hardcoded the HFS volume ID (I forget exactly how it works, but one of the things the classic Mac OS is very good at is keeping track of unique disks) in their application, so it looks for the data file only on the disk with that ID.

I don't think you can really fault the Mac platform for this - a third party developer did something that made sense that has the effect of requiring a physical/virtual disk to be present; in summer 1995 when this was released, a one year old Quadra 630 had a 250 meg hard drive, so the idea that anyone would want to copy 200 megs of game files to a hard drive would have been utterly insane.

I would also note - if you read the read me for this game, they imagined two scenarios:
1) you run everything directly off the CD, or
2) you copy the teeny little application to your hard drive so you can change the memory allocation, and then it loads the data file from the CD

Maybe these guys should have been like... I forget which Mac game from later in the 1990s it is that gives you an option to copy everything to your hard drive but warns you that you must be insane before clicking on it, but they weren't.

Is this PPC native? Regardless of whether it is or not, you seem to have a fairly high-end period-correct machine for it, so I think you could probably burn it to a CD and it should play at the upper end of the performance the developers intended.

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-31, 04:24:

Okay, so... I think I figured it out. […]
Show full quote

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-31, 03:58:

VivienM wrote on 2024-12-31, 03:36:

If I scroll up in this thread, will I find a reference to exactly what software it is that's giving you this trouble? Given my retro project of the evening isn't going anywhere, I'm tempted to fire up one of my vintage Macs (all G4s, so much newer than yours) and see if I can figure out where you're getting tripped up.

Okay, I found a Sam & Max toast image on a well known Mac abandonware web site. Mounted it on OS X Leopard (that's the only OS that supports the wifi card in my TiBook) and I see what they did. There's a teeny Sam & Max application and then a hidden giant "Sam & Max data" file.

I think the real problem here is that the game developer did something cute. I don't think putting hidden files on HFS CD-ROMs is really something super-proper... although my suspicion is that if you copied that file and made it unhidden, the game would run fine from any volume. I'm just trying to think about how one could do that with only classic OS tools...

Okay, so... I think I figured it out.

The file is marked as 'invisible', that's what it's called in the classic Mac OS. If you open up ResEdit and use the 'Get [something]...' in the file menu, you can see it and make it not invisible. (Oddly, even though you'd think CD images should be read-only, it lets me save the change and see the file in the OS 9 Finder)

But... copy that and the application to a different place and it doesn't run. My guess - they hardcoded the HFS volume ID (I forget exactly how it works, but one of the things the classic Mac OS is very good at is keeping track of unique disks) in their application, so it looks for the data file only on the disk with that ID.

I don't think you can really fault the Mac platform for this - a third party developer did something that made sense that has the effect of requiring a physical/virtual disk to be present; in summer 1995 when this was released, a one year old Quadra 630 had a 250 meg hard drive, so the idea that anyone would want to copy 200 megs of game files to a hard drive would have been utterly insane.

I would also note - if you read the read me for this game, they imagined two scenarios:
1) you run everything directly off the CD, or
2) you copy the teeny little application to your hard drive so you can change the memory allocation, and then it loads the data file from the CD

Maybe these guys should have been like... I forget which Mac game from later in the 1990s it is that gives you an option to copy everything to your hard drive but warns you that you must be insane before clicking on it, but they weren't.

Is this PPC native? Regardless of whether it is or not, you seem to have a fairly high-end period-correct machine for it, so I think you could probably burn it to a CD and it should play at the upper end of the performance the developers intended.

Thank you for taking the time to do all that hands-on research, that definitely explains a lot!

I did read the readme file before posting about it here, and I saw those same notes about copying the executable to the hard drive to change memory allocation. I was sure I was missing something about "installing" the game, but it turns out I wasn't!

The best solution I found took a bunch of messing around to get set up, but I was able to use the "Autotyper" that comes with the [urlhttps://www.macintoshrepository.org/1616-virtua ... cd-utility]Virtual CD\DVD Utility[/url]. Once you copy that to the desktop, and then learn how to do a "desktop rebuild" during a system restart, you can then drag and drop image files onto the autotyper and it will associate that image file with VCDU so that you can double click the image file to mount it, then double click the game launch icon to run the game from the mounted image.

As a side point: How can I find hidden files on 7.6.1? I checked for things like this before posting but I didn't see any option to show hidden files, like one would find in Windows. I just assumed it was some kind of Mac Jedi mind trick saying "There's no data here. Move along." while waving it's hand at me.

In the meantime, I have run into more woes...

As it turns out, Sam and Max simply doesn't use a second mouse button. I am able to customize the right click in the operating system, but the game only responds to left click to interact with things and Tab to change the cursor... it seems it doesn't make use of anything else. I think this game is just running some kind of early Mac version of ScummVM, since it has scaling options and such. Notably, the "graphic smoothing" video mode in Sam and Max makes it run noticeably worse on my 6200. Not real surprising given the 75Mhz CPU. Running it at Double Size seems okay.

I tried some other games and was met with several other problems. I could type all night about this so I'll just summarize...

Lots of .img files will not mount with VCDU, and the "Autotyper" breaks the files completely if you try to use it on them, even though it looks like it worked (the icon changes). After getting a fresh copy of the .img file (which hasn't been "autotyped") I was able to open it with DiskCopy. I'm assuming this is because they are floppy images, but that just adds further confusion since there are files of both types that are .img, so it makes the process a bit weird. I didn't think this was a floppy image at all though because the game I tried (Vette!) was in a 10MB .sit file. Perhaps it was the manual that made it so large... I don't know.

And along with that, when I run Vette (which did allow me to copy the files to the hard drive), it tells me to drop the desktop to 16 colors... but doesn't offer to do it for me. And once I do drop the colors, while the game is running there is horrible full-volume static and pop noises coming out of the speakers. The volume controls have no effect on how loud this is. Doing yet more research I see that there were some fundamental changes made involving something called "Sound Manager" at some point between system software 5, 6 and 7 and lots of things are broken with later versions (seemingly Sound Manager 2.0 is what people want?). The kicker: here we are, 30 years later, and people are just barely piecing together what version you want that doesn't break things, how to get it, what OS version contained it, etc. This is just... astounding to me. This would be like if VOGONS in 2024 had conversations where people were just starting to discuss the mystery and wonder of whatever "Sound Blaster" is... (I know it isn't like that... I am just easing my own frustration through hyperbole.)

And finally... when I try to extract certain files, the system will grind to a halt. It seems that a lot of game downloads contain massive additional files (huge PDF manuals, box art, etc.). The issue here is that I can't just extract these files on my PC and transfer over JUST the game, because doing so would break all of the metadata attached to the files in the .sit.

Hoooooooly moly...

Gonna take a break from this for a while. Thank you again for all the help though guys.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-31, 06:01:

I did read the readme file before posting about it here, and I saw those same notes about copying the executable to the hard drive to change memory allocation. I was sure I was missing something about "installing" the game, but it turns out I wasn't!

No, you weren't missing anything. The classic Mac OS (and OS X) has always been very flexible about running software off all forms of media and they clearly designed this accordingly.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-31, 06:01:

The best solution I found took a bunch of messing around to get set up, but I was able to use the "Autotyper" that comes with the [urlhttps://www.macintoshrepository.org/1616-virtua ... cd-utility]Virtual CD\DVD Utility[/url]. Once you copy that to the desktop, and then learn how to do a "desktop rebuild" during a system restart, you can then drag and drop image files onto the autotyper and it will associate that image file with VCDU so that you can double click the image file to mount it, then double click the game launch icon to run the game from the mounted image.

Okay, that makes sense. Remember that in the classic Mac OS, type/creator codes are used to magically open things in the right application when you double click on them. A much smarter design compared to file extensions in Windows, but unfortunately, very ill-suited to transferring over TCP/IP networks so that's largely why it was abandoned (OS X effectively uses file extensions). So this thing is probably setting the type/creator codes for your disk images.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-31, 06:01:

As a side point: How can I find hidden files on 7.6.1? I checked for things like this before posting but I didn't see any option to show hidden files, like one would find in Windows. I just assumed it was some kind of Mac Jedi mind trick saying "There's no data here. Move along." while waving it's hand at me.

I... don't know. My vague recollection is that you can't see invisible files unless you make them visible using something like ResEdit.

Keep in mind that these invisible files are, typically, much more systemy than hidden files on Windows.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-31, 06:01:

In the meantime, I have run into more woes...

As it turns out, Sam and Max simply doesn't use a second mouse button. I am able to customize the right click in the operating system, but the game only responds to left click to interact with things and Tab to change the cursor... it seems it doesn't make use of anything else. I think this game is just running some kind of early Mac version of ScummVM, since it has scaling options and such. Notably, the "graphic smoothing" video mode in Sam and Max makes it run noticeably worse on my 6200. Not real surprising given the 75Mhz CPU. Running it at Double Size seems okay.

I'm not sure why this surprises you. This is a game from 1995. Macs had one-button mice at that time. Maybe some niche specialized folks had multi-button mice, but your typical home user who got their LC III or their Performa would have the single-button Apple mouse.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-31, 06:01:

I tried some other games and was met with several other problems. I could type all night about this so I'll just summarize...

Lots of .img files will not mount with VCDU, and the "Autotyper" breaks the files completely if you try to use it on them, even though it looks like it worked (the icon changes). After getting a fresh copy of the .img file (which hasn't been "autotyped") I was able to open it with DiskCopy. I'm assuming this is because they are floppy images, but that just adds further confusion since there are files of both types that are .img, so it makes the process a bit weird. I didn't think this was a floppy image at all though because the game I tried (Vette!) was in a 10MB .sit file. Perhaps it was the manual that made it so large... I don't know.

Classic Macs don't use file extensions. The fact that some random person 20 years later uploading the software to a retro web site happened to use a .img file extension doesn't mean much.

My sense would be that .img tends to be floppy images, .toast or .bin/.cue tends to be CD images though, but that's just a convention used by people uploading to retro repositories.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-31, 06:01:

And along with that, when I run Vette (which did allow me to copy the files to the hard drive), it tells me to drop the desktop to 16 colors... but doesn't offer to do it for me. And once I do drop the colors, while the game is running there is horrible full-volume static and pop noises coming out of the speakers. The volume controls have no effect on how loud this is. Doing yet more research I see that there were some fundamental changes made involving something called "Sound Manager" at some point between system software 5, 6 and 7 and lots of things are broken with later versions (seemingly Sound Manager 2.0 is what people want?). The kicker: here we are, 30 years later, and people are just barely piecing together what version you want that doesn't break things, how to get it, what OS version contained it, etc. This is just... astounding to me. This would be like if VOGONS in 2024 had conversations where people were just starting to discuss the mystery and wonder of whatever "Sound Blaster" is... (I know it isn't like that... I am just easing my own frustration through hyperbole.)

Again, vintage Mac land is relatively small and many vintage Mac enthusiasts would have a broader collection of machines, so... my guess is that they'd just play this game on the most period-correct machine in their collection and it would be fine. And 1995 is effectively pre-Internet so unless you want to look at things like the Tidbits archive, you're not going to have much from back in the day.

That being said - okay, Vette is a 1989 game. You're trying to run it on a PPC running System 7.5+. Lots of Mac software from the 1980s had dubious forward compatibility. (Try running non-32-bit-clean software on System 7 with 32-bit addressing on, it's an instant system crash) Frankly, with no memory protection or anything else, a very limited number of machines to target, a very slow-moving OS development process and no multitasking (MultiFinder only became mandatory in System 7), people went absolutely wild addressing the hardware directly instead of using the proper Toolbox APIs.

Find a nice IIci or IIsi running System 6.0.7, turn off MultiFinder, and I'm sure it will run just fine. 😀 (But oh my will you have a culture shock with System 6 - System 6 is wonderful, in many ways the 'purest' version of the classic Mac OS, but it is very unique especially 35+ years later.)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-31, 06:01:

And finally... when I try to extract certain files, the system will grind to a halt. It seems that a lot of game downloads contain massive additional files (huge PDF manuals, box art, etc.). The issue here is that I can't just extract these files on my PC and transfer over JUST the game, because doing so would break all of the metadata attached to the files in the .sit.

Maybe you need some additional vintage Macs in the family 😀 Beige G3, G4 MDD, etc. And on the other end of the spectrum, a 68030 machine (I would probably skip 68040s for games - there were only 'affordable' 68040 machines for like a year so I doubt there's that much of a gaming library for those)

As a quick reply to what I scrolled through while catching up... (Sorry for going silent. Somehow, the "new post" e-mail fell behind the metaphorical desk.)

Yeah, I remember LucasArts CD games being particularly prone to doing CD checks. For example, The Secret of Monkey Island VGA CD for DOS.

Also, it is possible, at least with Toast 5 Titanium, to mount CD images in Toast with three clicks. If you set the Type/Creator codes correctly, double-clicking it will take you right to the Toast window with the Mount button.

(I don't know what the simplest 7.6.1 counterpart would be but, for Mac OS 9.2.2, I use an extension named FinderPop which lets you set a file's Type/Creator codes from the context menu, and a utility named File Buddy to take a dummy CD image I made in Toast and then discard the contents (delete resource fork, delete data fork), leaving a 0-byte file with the desired type and creator codes, which then goes in the folder of templates for FinderPop's type setting submenu.)

The issue here is that I can't just extract these files on my PC and transfer over JUST the game, because doing so would break all of the metadata attached to the files in the .sit.

You could set up a mac emulator with plenty of RAM, no CPU throttling, and a nice big disk image and then unpack and repack the .sit in there. That's what I'd probably do.