The Unofficial Official Mac Users Group

[vv221]

...eventually I'll get back to this project. I expect that time to be November, December at the latest.

That’s perfect, I’m currently on other projects that should take me roughly to November~December

[551262]

I recently went on a spending spree ($21 total) at the local Goodwill and with it, came a somewhat-beatup boxed copy of SMAC PC version.

Woo hoo! No longer will I have to be skittish about kicking out 50+ trawlers to harvest the Freshwater Sea or Geothermal Shallows by reason of laggy framerate! On the contrary, I'll have to turn off the toggles for fast unit movement because it's so fast that I risk loosing out on certain opportunities.

Actually the game plays almost identical on the late 2.16GHz Core Duo Mac mini compared to the current iMac G4 800MHz. Haven't tried it much under OS 9 though.

Hey BUncle, shall I sometime in the future make a post that describes the difference in the PC and Mac versions? One thing I noticed was the music wasn't the same, and that mind worm "sound" when Psi combat is engaged in doesn't escalate in pitch on the Mac version: it remains steady.

I take it there are just about zero other Mac players onboard? Started a game just the other day, Gaian, Huge random map, tech stagnation. I think we're in the late 2200s and still nobody has Fusion Power.

[Buster's Uncle]

I think that sounds like a great idea - not enough info is out there about the Mac version.  I hate that those guys have so much trouble finding each other.

[vv221]

Hey BUncle, shall I sometime in the future make a post that describes the difference in the PC and Mac versions? One thing I noticed was the music wasn't the same, and that mind worm "sound" when Psi combat is engaged in doesn't escalate in pitch on the Mac version: it remains steady.

Yeah, you really should do this!
It would help me greatly in my translation attempts for the Mac OS version of the game.

[551262]

I have completed the one-year-project and will be coming back to work on SMAC here for a little bit.

vv let me know if you're still in.

[vv221]

vv let me know if you're still in.

I’m still in

What would help me greatly is an upload of a video sample from the Mac OS version.
I think LOGO.WVE (from the "Add-On Movies" directory) is the lightest one.

Or if you have ffmpeg or libav-tools on your setup, the result of "ffprobe LOGO.WVE" / "avprobe LOGO.WVE" should be enough for me to try to spot the differences between the Mac OS encoding and the Windows one.

[551262]

Righto, I'll see what I can do this weekend.

I don't think I have ffmpegX installed because the ffmpeg video encoder that was similar but not quite like SUPER for Windows didn't work. Since I'll be testing it on an alternate but identical iMac G4 I don't see a problem with tossing in ffmpeg libraries.

Normally I disable movies because I've seen them all before (the CBA movie is my favorite, along with the Living Refinery SP) and they tend to cause crashes.

[551262]

Well then...

Today I fiddled with it a little bit. Last time I dropped all the stuff from the smac-fr Data folder into my Data folder, started up. I believe I reported that it didn't work.

So here I wanted to try it in piecemeal. First I started with alpha.txt, since that is generally the "critical" one. I don't know much about SMAC innards but I think it's a good place to start. Program would launch, then quit. Okay well maybe it's a fluke. Let's try faction.txt. Nope, same thing. mmmh what about help.txt?  See the attached image for what it looks like.

Here's what I can do: Mac OS X is not easy to run inside emulators. Generally, you need at least 10.4 Tiger because that was the first release that had support for Intel processors but 10.5+ is probably better. So what I can do is cook up a SheepShaver disk image for you, walk you through the process of getting it going (it's not that difficult) and armed with a .iso of SMAC, you should be able to look at what I see. I don't know how well SMAC will play inside SheepShaver but I can give it a shot if you want.

Or, seeing that most of the data files are simple .txt files, I can send you all of the ones to look at. Oh yeah. That movie thing. None of the movies work. (I tried the Scenario Editor -> View SP movie) and did a trial run of the WP.) I toss in a image of MediaInfo which is for OS X, I think you'll gather what it does. Also I attached the THEYTRANSCEND.WVE in a .zip archive. It's about 3.4MB, which shouldn't hurt BUncle's server budget too much (It's for great justice anyways, I don't think he'd mind).

[ete]

You guys may be interested in what's going on in the patches forum:

On a side note, one of my goals with SMAC/X decompilation projection would be to create a native mac version that runs without the need for wine or emulation.

[551262]

Noted and replied.

[vv221]

Well, first thank you 551262 for all that new matter for me to dig in
The .WVE file will be especially useful!

So even the simple .txt files don’t work?
Might be something about encoding or end-of-line character varying between Linux, Mac OS and Windows versions…
Could you send me a copy of your original alpha.txt?

-----

Just ran a test, and the encoding is the strictly the same between the Windows movies and the Mac OS ones.
I might have been following the wrong trail thinking they were the cause for your crashes, and not the .txt files.

Which would be good news: I couldn’t have done a lot with the movies (commercial encoder), but text files are easier to mess with.

EDIT: Woops, I missed the part in your message where the movies don’t work at all…
Well, I guess it means my work is still far from done.

-----

I had a look on SheepSaver…
If you can help me to get that running, it will be a huge step toward a working French translation for Mac OS.

-----

ete: Thank you for the head up, I’m going to have a curious look at scient’s project

[551262]

The plain text files don't work.

If you do the movies...ugh let's say I am strongly in favor of subtitles rather than voiceovers. Voiceovers spook me. When I watch foreign movies, the foreign language becomes part of the atmosphere, for me at least. Also the native voice of the actors will be preserved...

The problem with SheepShaver is that you'll need to first get the Alpha Centauri copy for Mac. Only with SMAC and SMAC-X Carbon is the need for the CD skipped: and of that, only in OS X. SheepShaver cannot run OS X. I can do a trial run to see if it'll work though, that will save you from having to download an .iso plus a 300+ MB disk image.

The plain basic install of SMAC is about 220MB. A suitable install of Mac OS 9 that has the essentials is about 40-120MB, not sure precisely. (Mine on my iMac is 303MB, but it has Stuffit extensions, ...actually there isn't that much I installed over the default, but there is a lot that can be removed.)

I attached a zip file of every text file that comes in the /Alpha Centarui/Data/ folder.

[vv221]

If you do the movies...ugh let's say I am strongly in favor of subtitles rather than voiceovers. Voiceovers spook me. When I watch foreign movies, the foreign language becomes part of the atmosphere, for me at least. Also the native voice of the actors will be preserved...

No way to add subtitles to the movies without the original encoder, and I don’t think it can be found today.
Plus the French voice-overs are of very high quality, on of those really well done professional translations.

The problem with SheepShaver is that you'll need to first get the Alpha Centauri copy for Mac. Only with SMAC and SMAC-X Carbon is the need for the CD skipped: and of that, only in OS X. SheepShaver cannot run OS X. I can do a trial run to see if it'll work though, that will save you from having to download an .iso plus a 300+ MB disk image.

The plain basic install of SMAC is about 220MB. A suitable install of Mac OS 9 that has the essentials is about 40-120MB, not sure precisely. (Mine on my iMac is 303MB, but it has Stuffit extensions, ...actually there isn't that much I installed over the default, but there is a lot that can be removed.)

Bandwidth and disk space are not a problem for me

I attached a zip file of every text file that comes in the /Alpha Centarui/Data/ folder.

Thank you, I’m going to have a look on this.

[551262]

Let me know if you plan to investigate SheepShaver. I can't get the CD drive (external USB 2.0) to be recognized by SheepShaver or Basilisk II: it just spits it back out. I know I did use CDs with OS X and SheepShaver because I used to play Bolo under SheepShaver.

I think if we sort out the text files and that stuff, we might be okay. I don't know if the menu texts will be changed and stuff like the "COMMLINK". I doubt it.

[vv221]

Let me know if you plan to investigate SheepShaver. I can't get the CD drive (external USB 2.0) to be recognized by SheepShaver or Basilisk II: it just spits it back out. I know I did use CDs with OS X and SheepShaver because I used to play Bolo under SheepShaver.

Do you have a link to some place explaining how to use SheepShaver?

I think if we sort out the text files and that stuff, we might be okay. I don't know if the menu texts will be changed and stuff like the "COMMLINK". I doubt it.

On Windows and Linux, my translation archive takes care of these too.
Nearly everything in SMAC is defined via text files!