#no WONDER that took up an entire disk in the original release of the game oh my god

[lovelessactv]

FINAL FANTASY SEVEN WHAT A GAME

[defiantdreemurrs]

postmortem: installing windows vista on 2008 macbook

so i’ve had the idea ever since i got this machine that i wanted to dual boot windows on it. it’s an early 2008 white polycarbonate macbook, model name is Macbook4,1. it’s the last update of the first generation of intel macbooks, so it’s sort of a time capsule that brings me back to the late 2000s, way way back in my childhood. not that i ever *had* one back then, i didn’t become the owner of a mac until 2012 when i acquired a then-ancient iBook G3, and even then i didn’t own an actually *useful* mac until 2020, when i began to make the switch from windows to mac full time.

no, the computer i had back then was a gateway desktop running windows vista. a computer and operating system that, to me at the time at least, felt almost futuristic. having grown up before that with a late 90s HP tower running windows 98 and a dell dimension running XP, this computer seemed thousands of years ahead of what i was used to as a young pre-teen monster.

using something isn’t the only way for something to become nostalgic, though. late 2000s macs running leopard or snow leopard are also incredibly nostalgic to me, but for a different reason. they were the dream. that thing that you kept seeing, that you thought was so cool, that seemed just so different than what you were used to, but that you could never actually touch. this is what macs were for me for years. growing up my family could never afford macs. we’d been a windows family since 95 at least, if not earlier, and we’d often been a bit behind. so my only real exposure to these mysterious creatures was at the magical world known as “the apple section at the best buy an hour away”.

so when i finally had the opportunity to pick up this 13 year old laptop and go on a nostalgia trip, i took the plunge. it happened at a perfect time too as i was looking for a better place to store the library for the ipod i’d picked up last august. it used to be hosted on a VM running windows XP on my wife’s desktop, but i wanted something that was more period appropriate to sync it with (as well as something that wasn’t a virtual machine). i figured i’d take a gamble and see if my nostalgia for the leopard/snow leopard era was founded in something or if i’d forever taint my memories by removing the rose tinted glasses.

it’s safe to say at this point i was right. i don’t use the machine every day as i don’t really *need* to use it every day nor does it feel entirely capable enough to be my daily driver. that wasn’t the point though. it wasn’t meant to be my new daily driver. i have a 2013 iMac running mojave and a 2020 M1 macbook air, i don’t really need a new daily driver. i wanted what essentially amounted to a somewhat expensive toy. something to have fun with. to play games on. to experiment with running older software on. i got just about everything i’d hoped for and more. if i could just find a way to access discord on it i probably *could* use it as my daily driver for a short time at least.

so to get back to the point of this post: the entire time i’ve owned it so far i’ve wanted to get windows running on it via boot camp. but not just any version of windows. if this machine is going to be the nostalgia machine i really want it to be, it’s going to run windows vista.

i hadn’t put any particular specific thought or effort towards this goal during the first few months since i bought it. i ordered it some time in early february as a birthday gift to myself and started having ideas but didn’t really act on it until this week. i was starting to work out what it would take to get my iMac dual booting windows 10 in order to access the few windows exclusive programs i still use in a native environment instead of through something like WINE. since the iMac is the center of my studio i want to make sure i’m doing it right, i don’t want to accidentally mess something up. after binging a bunch of vintage apple stuff on youtube i got back to the idea of installing windows on the macbook, as sort of a “test run” to get a feel for working with boot camp (even if many versions apart).

the big issue holding me back up to this point was “which version of windows do i install?”, since the decision between vista and windows 7 really works out to a decision between “do i go all in on the nostalgia machine even if it’s a bit useless?” or “do i use the operating system with more longevity that’s still in use on millions of computers across the world?”. because let’s face it, even in a world where windows 10 exists a lot of people still prefer 7. it doesn’t have the intense microsoft spyware factor, it doesn’t have the still somewhat bloated and heavy interface, it’s still very capable and works with a lot of current software, and overall it’s still a very modern operating system almost 12 years on.

vista, meanwhile. windows vista certainly has a reputation. it’s buggy. it’s bloated. it’s not very secure. the thing about reputations though is that they tend to stick regardless of how much things are changed. most of vista’s reputation comes from the RTM version. vista on first release certainly did live up to its reputation. several years of updates compiled into service packs has helped to fix a lot of those issues though, and even in my nostalgia sickness i had no interest in using the RTM version unless i absolutely had to. even fully updated windows vista may not be a perfectly modern OS the way 7 is, but again, it doesn’t really *need* to be. it’s a project. it’s for fun.

eventually i finally did settle for vista, and started trawling the internet for an image of the install DVD. this turned out to be the next big roadblock. you see, vista comes in many different flavors. there’s the two home versions, home basic and home premium. there’s the business version. there’s the *enterprise* version which is business plus some extra exclusive features that is sold under a different license for enterprise users. then there’s the ultimate version that has *everything* (except for the enterprise exclusive features). these all come in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. a number of these also come with the service packs pre-installed. not to mention the sheer amount of languages this operating system was released in. all of which had separate releases (something wonderful about mac OS X is it’s never had this degree of version glut; there is a single edition of each version and each one comes with support for dozens of languages, alongside a separate server release up thru 10.6). i ended up going with vista ultimate because i don’t like the idea of getting screwed out of features just because i didn’t pay a big corporation an extra hundred bucks.

so i gather my tools, start downloading disc images, grab a flash drive, and have the macbook start partitioning the drive in boot camp assistant to get the computer ready. everything goes fine, until i hit my next obstacle: disk utility in big sur is refusing to restore the disc image to the flash drive. at first i figure “well that’s not really a problem, i’ve had this issue before i know what to do. i pull up a terminal and start using the unix dd command to do it instead, and it works. so i thought. i stick it into the macbook and click “install windows” on the boot camp assistant… and it says it can’t find the installation media.

the boot camp assistant version 3 is built for helping you install windows 7. snow leopard, having released in 2009, is really the “mac equivalent” (if such a thing exists) of windows 7, not windows vista. i figured this wouldn’t actually be that big of an issue, since the idea was to use boot camp to help get the drive partitioned and the new partition formatted right. the installation media not booting must have been an issue with the image, or maybe the way i set the flash drive up. i started working under the assumption it was the latter since that was the easiest thing to get going.

no dice. i tried every which way i could think of to get a bootable USB out of that disc image and it just refused to work. i tried using disk utility again, didn’t work. disk utility on the old macbook itself, didn’t work. kept using dd in the terminal, didn’t work. i even carried it over to my old windows laptop to try using rufus to make a bootable flash drive and it just would not work. so i figured i needed to try a different disc image. i set about finding a couple others and having them download, while in the meantime i got a copy of windows xp burnt to CD to see if maybe i needed to use the disc drive.

i did end up getting windows xp setup to boot from the CD but after trying several different vista images none of them would boot. i knew for sure it wasn’t an issue with just trying to boot from USB because that’s how i originally installed snow leopard on this machine (thanks to not having any blank DVDs to burn it to nor a disc drive to burn it with at the time due to not having an OS on the macbook yet).

at this point i kind of gave up on getting vista installed and decided to look for a legit copy of windows 7. i knew my wife had one lying around so i bit the bullet, went looking for it, and got windows 7 installed on it. it wasn’t what i wanted but at least it was *something*, and maybe having some kind of windows installation on the boot camp partition would allow for me to try and install vista later on?

following all this though i ran into another problem: drivers. windows needs the boot camp drivers to be installed after windows is installed. but these are all on the snow leopard disc. and in my case, *only* on the snow leopard disc. i’ve trawled the internet looking for these drivers but as far as i can tell they’re nowhere to be found, at least not these specific ones. because i’m on snow leopard which comes standard with boot camp 3.0, i need the 3.0 drivers. the 3.1 and 3.1 drivers and various drivers for different versions of boot camp 4 and 5 are all available on the apple website. the 3.0 drivers are not. they’re all on the snow leopard disc and only that disc.

so that’s roughly where i’m at right now. i have a macbook dual booting snow leopard and windows 7, but i can’t even really *use* windows 7 on it until i get those drivers installed, which will take some time as i have to download yet another copy of snow leopard (since mine got lost in an accidental hard drive wipe). i’ve also got some blank DVDs coming in the mail in the hopes that maybe i can still get vista installed, as well as to prepare for another piece of kit coming in the mail in the not so distant future.

[ciathyzareposts]

Game 111: Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch (1992) – Introduction

Written by Reiko

The last game I played through for the blog was Dune (let’s pretend Rome never happened), which was more or less based on the famous science fiction novel, and before that was Gateway. Up next, I have the opportunity to present another game based on a famous science fiction novel: Ringworld, by Larry Niven. I’m seeing a theme here.

Front cover of the original release.

Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch was released right at the end of 1992 by Tsunami Games, early in their career (they’d only just been founded in 1991 by designers originally from Sierra, according to both Wikipedia and Mobygames). One name that appears a lot in its credits is Chris Hoyt. Listed for both game design and programming, he’d already had a lot of experience before this by programming for King’s Quest IV and V and Police Quest 2 and 3, among others. Another big name was Ken Allen, who wrote the score for Ringworld’s music, after having also composed for a number of Sierra games.

So there was some talent involved with this game, which shows in its colorful graphics and detailed character and setting designs. The graphic design actually reminds me somewhat of the 1994 strategy/adventure game Alien Legacy, but it’s possible that it’s just the level of the tools available at that time.

Front cover of the CD-ROM release.

Sometime in the next year, a CD-ROM version was released (the original was on floppies), but I haven’t found much information about the differences. The CD-ROM was supposed to contain several tracks of music, but the archive.org description indicates that the tracks didn’t seem to exist on the disk, or were written in a non-standard format.

As with the other games based on science fiction novels, adapting the setting and concept to a game format meant changing the plot and characters, often significantly, or taking a completely different perspective on the plot. I haven’t read much of the original novel, but some copies of the game shipped with the book, which seems to be implying that it might be a good idea to read it. Ringworld ties in with Niven’s “Known Space” setting, in which he wrote several other books and stories, so the setting is well-developed and complex. I read up on it in preparing for this game.

Artist’s concept of the Ringworld

At any rate, I was already familiar with the concept of a “ringworld,” since that has been carried over into other science fiction settings since then, including multiple 4X space games like Stellaris. A ringworld is a huge ring-shaped structure built along an entire orbit around a star. Instead of a planet orbiting around the star, the whole structure just rotates around it.

It’s a cool concept for an alien structure in theory, but in practice, it’s completely silly. I have no idea where you’d get enough physical material to even build that large of a framework, never mind all the organic material needed to make it habitable. Niven’s Ringworld was supposedly large enough to have the surface area of millions of Earths. Even Jupiter only has the mass of 318 Earths, and quite a lot of that is gaseous, so even if you (somehow??) spread it out relatively thinly into a flat ring structure, I’m not sure you’d have enough. But “aliens did it” and that’s all you need to know, apparently. It’s the science fiction equivalent of “wizards did it.”

Title screen

After the title screen displays, we get the option to see the introduction or just start the game. The introduction starts with a credits listing, including an official credit to Larry Niven. Then we get a cutscene introducing the main conflict. So far, this game is rather plot-heavy, so I’ll do my best to summarize. Also, it feels like a sequel to an existing story, which doesn’t help. Actually, I noticed the back cover mentions Larry Niven himself saying that it’s a sequel to the first two books. So I guess we’re jumping into the middle of the story. Whee!

Back cover of the box

Let me start with the characters. The introductory cut-scene is between the Kzinti king, or Patriarch, and his trusted centurion Shachra. The Kzinti are a violent race of male-dominated felinoid aliens. Niven’s setting involves several wars between humans and Kzinti, although I don’t know exactly where in the timeline the game is set. I suspect it’s fairly late, because the first thing the Patriarch says is that he wants to destroy the Puppeteers for their audacity in using the Kzinti in a breeding experiment. Hence, “Revenge of the Patriarch.”

The Puppeteers are a very strange race which I’ll describe more later if they show up on screen, but they’re highly technologically advanced, very focused on the safety and preservation of themselves and their race, and like to meddle in other races’ social and genetic development. So the Kzinti want to destroy them because the Puppeteers deliberately instigated the wars between humans and Kzinti in order to kill off the more aggressive side of Kzinti society. (The experiment didn’t extend as far as the Patriarch yet, I guess.)

The throne room decorations look rather Aztec to me, appropriate for an aggressive race.

In the Ringworld novel, the main characters are Louis Wu and the Kzinti Speaker-to-Animals, also called Chmeee, who end up on a mission to Ringworld at the request of the Puppeteers. But the game starts off with Louis Wu’s mercenary friend Quinn and Chmeee’s son Iacch-Captain, who must find out what happened to Louis Wu and Chmeee after they mysteriously disappeared. The Patriarch mentions Louis Wu and “the traitor Chmeee” as having acquired a new and improved hyperdrive (which in the novel is a reward from the Puppeteers for escaping Ringworld), which the human government immediately used to construct a fancy new exploration vessel. I assume Chmeee is considered a traitor by the Patriarch for working together with a human.

So the Kzinti (at least the Patriarch’s faction) want to destroy the Puppeteers and strike a blow at humans as well. Somehow they’ve managed to duplicate the human exploration vessel. The Patriarch expects his centurion to captain this duplicate and accomplish three tasks: kill everyone at the Chmeee family home, find and destroy the entire Puppeteer homeworld, and take over the human ship. I had to wonder very briefly if we were supposed to be controlling this centurion, but no, I’m sure we’ll have to thwart these plans, so it’s important that the player knows about them.

I should mention that the backstory of the human-Kzinti wars isn’t all explained in this introduction. If you’re familiar with the setting, you’ll likely know it, but if not, I think it would be rather confusing being dumped into the middle of this conflict. It’s not very clear to me, either, especially when it comes to what Louis Wu and Chmeee have already done before the game even started.

Quinn’s motivation for being here

Gameplay begins at the Chmeee family home with Louis Wu’s mercenary friend Quinn, who is over 200 years old, thanks to something called “boosterspice” (presumably no connection to Dune’s spice), which halts aging for a period of years. Louis Wu was 200 at the beginning of the original Ringworld novel, too. Quinn muses briefly about how Louis Wu is the only one who would have the foresight to send a “just in case I disappear” message before he actually disappears. Convenient, that. So Louis Wu has disappeared and Quinn has to track him down.

Now I have to pause for a minute to show the interface. It’s more or less a tidy reskin of the familiar Sierra interface, with a few subtle differences that make it slightly more awkward to use. The right-click button will bring up the menu in a compact triangular-ish design right on screen, rather than in a menu bar at the top. The top button is the look action; the next two are move/walk and use/touch. Bottom left is talk, bottom middle is inventory, and bottom right brings up the utility menu, including save and quit.

Interface with initial inventory

It’s all pretty standard for adventure games of this era, really. Very intuitive. Except that, with the exception of look (and move), the other actions (touch, talk, and using an inventory item) all shift back to the default move cursor after you click on something. That means that, as far as I can tell, you can’t try using multiple things on-screen in a row without going through the menu every time. And you can’t try using an inventory item in multiple places without bringing up the item again every time.

In Sierra games, the cursor would stay on a particular mode until you shifted it with the right mouse button or clicked on a menu item. Here, the right mouse button shows you the whole menu. And the clicks aren’t as responsive as I might like. Sometimes the right-click doesn’t work right away, and sometimes I right-click and end up with the wrong menu option selected.

The entrance to the Chmeee family home

I mention these interface difficulties because I’m a little worried that there might be a bit of pixel-hunting. The first gameplay screen shows Quinn outside the front doorway of the Chmeee family home. The door is blocked with a laser doorbell system. The laser is only a couple of pixel-widths high. It took me an embarrassingly long time to determine that to proceed, all I had to do was touch the laser to block it, which basically rang the doorbell and alerted the family that they had a visitor.

Quinn’s inventory starts out with three items: a stunner weapon, some kind of scanner, and a signet ring from Louis Wu. I spent far too long trying to scan that laser before I figured out how to trigger it.

I’ll pause here, with Quinn having gotten the attention of the Kzinti in the home. Next time, the plot will thicken and we’ll have to make a run for it.

Ringworld can be played from archive.org or downloaded and played through DOSBox if you’d like to play along with me.

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introduction post, it’s an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won’t be able to solve a puzzle without putting in an official Request for Assistance: remember to use ROT13 for betting. If you get it right, you will be rewarded with X CAPs in return. It’s also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it. All correct (or nearest) votes will go into a draw.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-111-ringworld-revenge-of-the-patriarch-1992-introduction/