First post, by Xermald'Oh
- Rank
- Newbie
I have the 1996 Macintosh version of 'Warcraft: Orcs & Humans'. The game was released on a so-called hybrid disc which contains the Macintosh version of the game along with its MS-DOS counterpart. The hybrid CD can be read by both a PC and a Mac – when the CD is inserted into a PC, you'll see all the MS-DOS-compatible files whereas a Macintosh would only show the files that are understood by Mac-specific filesystems.
Since there are rumors floating around about the Macintosh verion being slightly revamped from its MS-DOS counterpart, I would like to try out the Mac version of the game. Allegedly, the Mac release has VGA graphics at 640x480 pixels (or it could be fake 640x480 which looks similar to 320x240 as the pixels can be doubled – I wish I knew) and actual audio CD tracks instead of MIDI music.
The problem is that I do not have any old Macintoshes at my disposal at the moment so I would have to resort to using emulators, virtual machines or compatibility layers. Besides, I'm a complete neophyte with Macs – they're not particularly widely used here in northern Europe when compared to the most Mac-friendly countries.
I tried to configure a couple of emulators with the help of the instructions that can be found at http://www.emaculation.com but the results were poor, and to be honest, I found the emulators rather lacking in functionality as I was repeatedly greeted by a delightful black screen of death after launching the emulators despite experimenting with a myriad of configurations. Moreover, since all of my host computers are PCs equipped with 64-bit flavors of Windows 7 and 8, I cannot access any CDs within the emulated Macintosh as the necessary file, cdenable.sys, is a 32-bit driver. This means that I would have to find an optical disc authoring program that is supported by the old Macintosh operating systems that the emulators can run.
In addition to playing the Mac version of the game, I would like to make a 1:1 digital copy of the hybrid CD for preservation purposes. Since hybrid discs are somewhat special, I wonder if programs such as CloneCD could make completely identical disk images of the CD. At least the image that I created with my trial version of CloneCD seems to contain both 'partitions' or filesystems (Mac & PC) along with all the audio CD tracks but I would have to actually test/play the Mac version to be totally sure.
*breathes*
To quote the manual, the Mac version of the game has the following system requirements:
*Warcraft has a minimum requirement of System 7.0 or greater. It requires a Macintosh or Power Macintosh (or compatible); for best results, a 68040 or PowerPC processor is strongly recommended. Warcraft is completely native on the Power Macintosh.
*Warcraft requires a color display with a minimum of 256 colors and 640x480 resolution.
*Your system should have at least eight megabytes of total memory.
-Which emulator, virtual machine or compatibility layer would you recommend for playing the game? And how would you configure the emulator? Notice that a configuration that appears ideal on the surface may not work flawlessly on the emulator because of all the possible bugs in the code...
-Would anyone of you be interested in trying out the Mac version of the game? If I can create a 1:1 disk image of the CD with all the audio tracks, I could perhaps upload it to some file hosting service and then post the download link here in this thread unless, of course, VOGONS has something against this kind of file sharing. The fact that the game can be freely downloaded on many abandonware websites seems to suggest that the game is either abandonware or that Blizzard Entertainment no longer cares whether people distribute the game across the Internet... But I'm not entirely sure!
By the way, thanks to MacDrive, I was able to create checksums for the contents of the 'Mac partition' of the CD so if you want to verify them against files on your own WC1 hybrid CD (if you happen to own one) to ensure data integrity, take a look at the attachment. The hash method that I used is MD5. If you get any error messages, my CD (or yours) might be damaged...