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Mac se superdrive and the dark queen of krynn

Thatguyagain

Member
Joined
Oct 27, 2021
Messages
35
Location
Mn
I have a macintosh se superdrive with system 7.1. Someone gave me a copy of the dark queen of krynn but when i pop it in i get " application program used to create it could not be found". I have no literature for it. Does anyone know what application its looking for is? My computer came from a college so it wouldnt surprise me if something was changed so people couldnt run certain programs.
 
"application program used to create it could not be found" is an extremely generic non-specific error that can quite literally mean anything. According to the internet, that game was released for several platforms. Are you sure the version you have is for the Macintosh? If it was the PC version of the game, you wouldn't even be able to open the disk to look at its contents without the PC Exchange control panel installed, but assuming you do, your Macintosh still won't be able to open PC programs, which would give you that error if you tried to open one. Usually PC floppy disks will have "PC" or "DOS" floppy icons on the desktop.

Another potential cause of the error is if you're trying to open a compressed archive without a decompression program installed like Stuffit Expander. If you do have Stuffit Expander, it may not be installed properly, in which case, you can drag the file over the Stuffit Expander program to try and expand it.

Yet another potential cause is data corruption. If the executable is corrupt, it may not run properly and spit out any number of errors.

And a word of warning running System 7 on an SE, be VERY careful about what applications you run on the machine, or you may end up with a clobbered hard drive. The Mac SE is a 24 bit machine, and should ideally run System Software 6.0.8 at most. While it can run System 7, attempting to run older 24 bit applications can cause erratic problems due to how 24 bit applications worked. Two examples of games to never, ever attempt to run on System 7 are "Dark Castle" and "Return to Dark Castle" - they will clobber your hard drive and require you to reformat and reinstall the operating system. Been there, done that.

The problem resides in the way 24 bit applications handle addressing. In order to save memory, applications would use a full 32 bit address and the upper 8 bits beyond the first 24 bits were used as flags. The 68000 used in the original Macintosh and several subsequent compact Macs like the SE didn't care because the 68000 address bus was only 24 bits, the upper 8 bits were masked off. However, when later Macintosh machines came out with 68020 and 68030 processors, they had full 32 bit address buses and System 7 had to take that into account. So when System 7 runs an old 24 bit application, it may treat those extra 8 bits as part of a full 32 bit address, which will send the processor off into completely random bits of memory that it has no business in and potentially write junk there and cause havoc. In the case of both listed games above, it sends the CPU into the disk subsystem and writes garbage to the hard disk and clobbers everything.
 
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