E-Maculation

I run OS 9.0 with sheepshaver on Mavericks. I have been having problems getting various games to start. I know these games are comparable with OS9 because I've run them on my old G4.

The games (Descent 3 and F/A 18 Hornet Korea) work on the loading screens and such, but when I try to start the game (or in the case of D3 when the main menu would come up) it gives me an error code saying "couldn't initialize DirectSound. Make sure your sound card is installed correctly." Or "Unable to initialize sound channels"

I did some research and saw people suggesting that the "Sound Manager" and "Apple Audio" extensions be turned off. I did. It still doesn't work. The system sounds work fine (with "sound manager" extensions on), but now I'm out of ideas. Anyone else have any?

Thanks

--D3maniac

I haven't been able to run Descent 3 and F/A-18 Korea in SheepShaver, and those games' pages at Macintosh Garden indeed don't indicate anything regarding SheepShaver. I would guess the main issue with both these games is graphics, that is, they both require OpenGL/hardware acceleration, which SheepShaver doesn't support. I guess the games use sound features that SheepShaver doesn't support either. The DirectSound error is basically saying, "something isn't working," as DirectSound is part of the DirectX API, which is Windows-only (which means GraphSim didn't bother making a different error message for the Mac version).

The only way to run these games on a modern Mac is by running the Windows version in Windows, or maybe in WINE. I run both of these games in Windows XP/Vista in Parallels Desktop for Mac. I use nGlide for Descent 3. If you want more details on these methods, just ask.

The Windows versions of these games both run under Wineskin.

Ah, I see. Well, I can play both games on windows anyway: I have VMWare Fusion. I just wanted them on good ol OS9 for the nostalgia Thanks so much for the help!

Maybe if those games are too new, you can help me with a problem with Descent 1! It runs waaaay too fast. Ive look into throttling with no luck so far. Any ideas there?

--d3maniac

For Descent and Descent II, see dxx-rebirth.com. From there, you can get an updated .app that runs the games' original files in OS X.

For in-game music, see my comment on Descent's page at the Macintosh Garden.

Also, I found interesting that there is this program called "The Unarchiver", available for free in App Store or from the developer's website, that can unpack files from the old Mac installers, such as the ones in these games' discs. The readme in the dxx-rebirth files recommends this method (so you wouldn't have to use a classic Mac OS to reach the files).

The Unarchiver is truly an excellent swiss army knife of unpackers, as it will even unpack text and images from PDFs, unpack iso images, unpack diskdoubler images, etc. If you need something out of a container file of some sort, it can probably help (although I haven't tried using it to extract audio from a .mov container).