The Unofficial Official Mac Users Group

[551262]

If the file system was case-sensitive, you'd've seen it as "HFS Extended, Journaled (Case sensitive).

It's all elemental grade information there, really. 

[vv221]

Learning one more thing every day is one of my goals in life.
Thanks to you I may go back to non-productive things today

[vv221]

Mac OS version is ALIVE!!

Here you can find it:
http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=8446.msg47624#msg47624

Please test, I've nothing here to do it by myself.

[551262]

I'm not up to speed with magnet links.

What would be better for me is something I can download with a download manager, like DownthemAll which I have to use because of my limited internet access.

Other than that, I could definitely fiddle with it. What am I supposed to be looking for? I can't read French at all.

[vv221]

I can give you a FTP link via private mail if you like.
If you've a limited Internet access, I can compress the archive for you too.

Because you're the first one to test it, I think it would be advisable to backup your SMAC installation before anything.

I don't need you to understand French, what I'd like to know mostly is:
_are the videos (especially the intro ones) still in English or not?
_are the main menu texts still in English?

[551262]

Righto. Could you pass me a SHA1 sum or MD5?

I can start downloading it tomorrow I suppose, it'll take a couple of days to get it. Once I do I'll find out how it works in Mac OS 9 and OS X.

[vv221]

SHA1:
328505783714e32f0fee44ace8daa844cbdf030e

MD5:
bb691695a155f8f8dd3f5c3ffcb25cf3

[551262]

Excellent. I'll report back once I have a machine ready to go. I have a 2nd iMac G4 which just needs a HDD, I'll work something out for it.

[551262]

Program quits after loading the red Firaxis logo.

Haven't tried it in OS 9 yet though. I think we may have either 1) a simple error or 2) a Class A Malfunction.

I could perform careful isolation to try and find out what could be causing the issue.

[vv221]

Program quits after loading the red Firaxis logo.

Right when it should load one of the videos my translation archive do modify, maybe the encoding is not the same between the Windows and Mac OS version.
Well, I have to admit I’m a bit lost here.

[551262]

I think I enabled videos. Usually I disable them because they run the risk of crashing the program in OS X. OS 9 -- I don't usually run SMAC or SMAC-X in OS 9 because then I have put the CD in.

I also by default skip Interludes and Monuments, but I'll check those.

Right now I'm held up because of Panther. The other iMac G4 I using for this test has 10.2.8 and 9.2.2. I have 10.3 Panther but my Install Disc 1 has a pit on it which makes it so I can't install/upgrade to 10.3. I'm going to see if I can solve that issue today.

If you're talking about text encoding, there is a difference between Mac OS text encoding and Windows/MS-DOS and Linux/UNIX.

I'll come back to this in a bit.

[vv221]

If you're talking about text encoding, there is a difference between Mac OS text encoding and Windows/MS-DOS and Linux/UNIX.

I am talking about the video encoding, with some strange proprietary codec:

Code: [Select]

$ avprobe ASCETICVIRTUES.WVE
(…)
Input #0, ea, from 'ASCETICVIRTUES.WVE':
  Duration: 00:06:09.99, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 176 kb/s
    Stream #0.0: Video: eatqi, yuv420p, 400x192, 15 fps, 90k tbn, 15 tbc
    Stream #0.1: Audio: adpcm_ea, 22050 Hz, 2 channels, s16, 176 kb/s
# avprobe output

[551262]

You are right, it is weird. However most of the mid-90s to early 2000s Mac games with any video usually had some weird format that was unique. Probably to dodge MPEG2 licensing hassles but also it wasn't until the G3 that video became even remotely useful.

Even the first iMac, which a lot of people remember somewhat fondly, was horrendously slow at video. But Apple promised it would play DVDs, but the end product, a 233 or 266MHz G3 (practically equivalent to a similar Pentium III, and even then I'd give the advantage to the Pentium processor) was too feeble. So they threw in a MPEG2 decoder chip onboard and wrapped up the burrito.

I have a 800MHz G4. It's about equivalent to a 700MHz-ish Pentium III. (I have a PIII 900MHz laptop on hand, so I can compare it easily.) It'll do MPEG2 video fine, FLV is choppy, H.264 is a mess. The Intel Core Duo 2.16GHz Mac mini I had was WAAAY better at video.

Did you apply any kind of translation to the movies?

EDIT: Sometime soon I'll need to get some work done on it. Since you're much more famariliar with the workings of the game, perhaps a list of the top 10 most important things needed to run the game? I'll also have to analyze the difference between the included files and the translated ones.

[vv221]

Did you apply any kind of translation to the movies?

Movies included in the translation archive are a basic copy-paste of the movies included in the Windows French version of SMAC. (audio in French, video identical to the English ones)
I assumed they would work, using the same file extension I thought the encoding would be similar. I guess it won’t be that easy.

Sometime soon I'll need to get some work done on it. Since you're much more famariliar with the workings of the game, perhaps a list of the top 10 most important things needed to run the game? I'll also have to analyze the difference between the included files and the translated ones.

Honestly, I don’t know.
What I’ve done is running a diff between a French and English version of the game to spot the translated files, and make an archive from them. I don’t know anything about the game inner workings…

[551262]

Yes I'm still here...

...eventually I'll get back to this project. I expect that time to be November, December at the latest. Hopefully you'll be hot the draw because I'll be devoting some time every day to figure out what's going on, so there'll be rapid-fire postings/updates.