Running CC2/ABTF on i386-Macs via "SheepShaver"
Q: Does CC2/ABTF run under MacOS X 10.5 / 10.6 ?
A: Yes, it will run via "SheepShaver" on (Snow- ?)Leopard-Macs. On PPC-Macs I recommend to use MacOS-X 10.4 Tiger and it's Classic-Environment made by Apple.
Alternative on i386-Macs tested so far by me: "ParallelsDesktop" emulator will allow you to run the PC-version of CC2/ABTF on an i386-Mac. If you have the original hybrid CD for both worlds (PC & Mac), this requires a real PC to create a PC-only version of this CD-ROM. Otherwise "ParallelsDesktop" will only recognize the Mac-portion of the hybrid CD, and the installation in "ParallelsDesktop" will fail. Another alternative: VirtualBox, not yet tested by me.
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But on Macs with i386-cpu, you can emulate a PPC-cpu-environment using "SheepShaver". It's latest version of 2008 will do the job pretty well. This version is UniversalBinary. It requires some stuff, mainly:
- original installation CD-ROM of MacOS 9.0 or MacOS 9.0.1 or MacOS 9.0.2 or MacOS 9.0.4,
- the correct MacOS 9.0.4-updater archive for your localized OS9,
- a MacOS ROM file,
- the latest "SheepShaver" archive.
Sadly to say: CC2 will crash when "SheepShaver 2010-11-06" is running on SnowLeo 10.6.4, see last chapter.
"SheepShaver" is for free available at this site:
http://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=20
The older version of 2008 for Leopard:
http://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5275&sid=b407b4d2d5442fd65b1619553c6e2cfb
An older version can be obtained from the original authors via:
http://sheepshaver.cebix.net/
http://gwenole.beauchesne.info//en/projects/sheepshaver
or the corresponding wiki entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheepShaver
For more readings about the things you need for installing the necessary items (mainly the ROM file), see here:
http://www.maccompanion.com/macc/archives/January2009/Columns/AccordingtoHoyle41.htm
In most cases you will need a real PPC-Mac to get the ROM file out of the available source using the PPC-application "TomeViewer". May be a problem...
I hope you will be able to download all what you need and setup the folder with the working "SheepShaver" stuff. After this your folder should look like this (or similiar to this when having the 2010-built):
The file "Mac OS ROM" is not included within the "SheepShaver" archive and must be added by you. The file "MyOS9Partition.dsk" must be added by you using "SheepShaver" itself: this file is the virtual HD the emulator is using for installing the MacOS-9. The file "Manual.html" is your key for understanding the installation and setup process of "SheepShaver". Read it and follow the instructions. It is not so much.
After the first run of the emulator I had setup my virtual HD, the "shared" folder for data exchange with the hosting MacOS-X, the ROM file selection and the screen settings done. I prefer a resolution of 832x624 pixels like those original PPC-Macs with 15" monitor. Then I ran the script "Zap PRAM" once.
Next step is inserting the original MacOS-9 CD-ROM into your i386-Mac. Then launch "SheepShaver". It will start from this CD-ROM and you can make the MacOS-9 installation. I recommend to update to MacOS 9.0.4. This will give you also QuickTime™ 4.0.3, which will be sufficient for CC2/ABTF. You can also update to CarbonLib 1.6.1, which can be obtained from the Internet, too. At the moment, I have no more updates done to my installation. For more readings about other games and testing results, see here:
http://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5509
After the MacOS-9 installation is done, you will see your OS9 starting from the virtual HD file:
What is vital to run CC2/ABTF is the next step: select the sound-output source! Otherwise you will hear no sound coming from "SheepShaver" nor will CC2/ABTF start. So select "Control panel" -> "Sound" (in German: "Kontrollfelder" -> "Ton") and select as output sound source "integrated / internal". Perhaps you have to do this every time when SheepShaver launches:
The next step is to shutdown "SheepShaver", inserting the original CC2-CD-ROM into your MacOS-X-Mac and restarting "SheepShaver". Do the installation of the game within "SheepShaver" as you would do on a real PPC-Mac. It will also work with CD-images, but it is necessary that they were made with Apple's MacOS-9 "DiskCopy" tool and not with the MacOS-X tools.
I recommend to give CC2/ABTF application more RAM in the MacOS-9 Finder. 68 MB might be sufficient. Also ensure that you give "SheepShaver" itself 512 MB RAM (the emulator's maximum of 2008) or even more (2009/2010-built: give itself 1 GB RAM).
Then you can start CC2/ABTF. If you encounter the following message "CC wasn't able to allocate memory for playing sounds. Please give the CC application more memory to work with" means that no sound output device was defined. See above: use "Control panel" -> "Sound" to define the sound output device. This problem can occur after running one of the scripts coming with "SheepShaver" as well as when switching between different virtual startup volumes or when switching between CC2/ABTF full version and the demo.
If all works fine, you will hear and see CC2/ABTF starting with it's intro movie sequence. If you have turned videos off in CC2/ABTF, you will see the splash screen:
I recommend to turn videos off for the first testing phase:
Some additional hints:
- SIT/BIN/SEA/HQX-archives for PPC-Macs contain files with data fork and resource fork. I recommend to expand such old archives within the virtual OS9 volume in "SheepShaver" rather than to keep them in the "shared" folder and expanding/extracting them there.
- Two tools you might badly need after setting up a fresh OS9: ResEdit 2.1.3 and HexEdit 1.7.5. Both can be found on the Internet.
- Screenshots via Shift+Cmd+3 will be taken by MacOS-X and therefore stored on the hosting platform. This command will not reach the OS9 in "SheepShaver".
- Sound volume will be exclusively controlled by MacOS-X. Changing sound volume within OS9 in "SheepShaver" will have no effect (and is not needed).
- No experiences/tests yet with CC2/ABTF-networking by me.
- If CC2/ABTF will not find videos (perhaps you are starting from a CD-image without such videos), just click several times in the black screen CC2/ABTF is offering. It will continue starting without them. You must not do a search for the videos. If the game will not start, place this "Close Combat Prefs" file manually into the OS9 "Preferences" folder. This file has "Sound", "Music" and "Video" off to avoid any conflicts. You must unzip this file on MacOS-X, placing the resulting SIT-file into the "shared" folder of "SheepShaver" and the placing it on your virtual OS9 volume there for unstuffing it.
more FAQs here...
2010-11-07: latest problems with SheepShaver, CC2 and 10.6.4: one user was encountering this problem: "...the CC2 just freezes and crashes as soon as I start any game after the setup screen. Either I select a campaign (and choose units and all) or just click "begin" from the very begining, the result is just a black screen and Sheepshaver just crashing." I can confirm this, but this will only happens with the SheepShaver builds of 2010. To get rid of this problem, I changed the SheepShaver preferences (mainly the RAM setting to 1 GB, refresh rate "dynamic", "ignore illegal memory accesses" and other misc. settings). With the following settings I was able to start CC2 on SnowLeo for a few seconds:
But like earlier versions of SheepShaver, this will lead to the following bug when running on SnowLeo:
Even with SheepShaver 2008-07-21 or 2009-10-25 I got the CC2-error message "Out of Command Data Space" just a few seconds after battle start. No idea how to solve this problem. This did not occur on Leopard systems. Perhaps going back to 10.5.8?
