Some of you may recall my previous efforts to get Master of Orion II
running on modern Macs, first with Classic (which was unusably buggy) and
then in emulators (which was unusably slow and didn't work with sound).
Well, I finally hit paydirt with VMWare.
I already have VMWare and use it for a couple of applications which just
don't have substitutes on the Mac. I've tried to use it with a couple of
games, as it has some degree of DirectX sup****t, but had no luck. I get
the impression that the DX sup****t is targeted toward certain games only,
and other games are very hit-or-miss, with mine clearly being miss.
But then I had a bit of inspiration: you don't need DX sup****t for really
old games. And what better really old game to try than MoOII.
It works beautifully. The mouse control isn't quite as smooth as I would
like, but I think that's just inherent to the game itself. Everything else
performs entirely well, with full sound sup****t. Performance for internal
operations *should* be good, because VMWare is a virtualizer, not an
emulator, and so applications running inside it run directly on the native
CPU. And of course this game ran acceptably on a 33MHz system, so a
2.66GHz system should be no sweat. Graphics performance was my big concern
because the emulators I had tried before had real problems here, but
apparently VMWare has this together.
I was able to play through two quick games and experienced no problems. I
tried medium-sized galaxies with average difficulty; I haven't played for
years and wanted to make things reasonably easy. I played Klackons the
first game and went for a colonize-everything-in-sight strategy which got
me into one short war (I wish the AI would look at your production
capabilities and not just your fleet size when deciding how weak you are!)
and then I suddenly won the game when I won the election for galactic
leader.
The second game was more interesting. This time I took the Psilons and
went for the strategy of colonizing one other good system, then building
up both systems as much as possible and aiming to get a massive research
lead. This worked well once I remembered to keep my fleet at a reasonable
size. I forgot at the beginning and faced a short war, but built up fast
enough that I quickly emerged victorious. (It sure is good those Psilon
scientists can instantly retrain to become ****pyard workers!) Orion ended
up being right next to my homeworld and I was zipping through the tech
tree trying to get to a point where I could take out the Guardian without
too much fuss when I was blindsided by an election which the Sakkra won!
Ooooops. I of course refused to acknowledge the result and resigned myself
to a fight to the death. But then I discovered that my plan to out-tech
everyone had *worked*; by this time I had enough production technology
that my five or so good planets were able to outproduce all of my
now-united enemies, and enough weapons technology that the ****ps which I
produced were vastly superior. After a couple of false starts trying to
take down heavy planetary defenses with inadequate fleets, I started
romping around the galaxy mowing down Sakkra colonies. The main limitation
at this point was ****p range, and tech advances and one outpost ****p
solved that, giving me a win by extermination.
I'm very glad to have this game back! But I'm also worried about how much
time it can kill....
I'm running this on a ridiculously powerful system, a quad-core Mac Pro
with 7GB of RAM. This system is probably one hundred to one thousand times
more powerful than the MoOII minimum requirements. However, I would expect
any Mac capable of running VMWare to run it well, since they *all* vastly
outperform this minimum spec. Of course VMWare only works on Intel Macs. I
didn't do anything special, just installed it in my existing Windows XP
image.
I've read that MoOII also works well in DOSBox, an emulator for a combined
x86/DOS environment. I haven't tried it myself. This would be slower, but
it would also work on PowerPC Macs, and with the vast excess of computing
power available would still probably run very well. It would also avoid
the cost of purchasing VMWare if you don't already have it.
When it comes to accessing older games, emulation (or virtualization) is
the way to go, and I think it's im****tant to realize that OS X is
basically unrelated to all the older OSes. If you've been wanting to run
that old Mac game you just loved, consider finding and running the PC
version instead, assuming there is one. PC emulators and virtualizers are,
in my experience, much easier to set up and a lot more work is done on
them. There's no real advantage to emulating the old Mac OS in OS X as
opposed to emulating some other OS, except perhaps for familiarity. And
once you're in the game that all goes out the window anyway!
Now if only I could think of any other old games with PC versions that I
actually want to play....
--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software
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