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Text Adventures From The Mac Repository

C

Canalboy

Member
Joined
Sep 7, 2023
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12
Hello Folks

Quite some time ago (2020 I think) I attemped to play (and succeeded) Crystal Cave (Kevin O'Gorman's port of the 1977 original) via HFV Explorer 1.3.1, a Macintosh 250 GB virtual drive and Basilisk II v1.1. This was my first exposure to anything remotely Macintosh related. Following on from this, I decided recently to see what was available on the Macintosh Repository in the way of text or text/graphical adventures. I managed to get a few of the .sit files working by using Stuffit, however I am not sure how to unzip img.sit files so that they will work when copied to the virtual hard drive; I can't seem to run any of them. Has anybody any notion of what I need to do?

Many thanks.

Canalboy
 
.img historically is a Disk Copy image. You'll need to unstuff the .sit archive and then use Disk Copy 6.x to mount the disk image on the desktop.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
.img historically is a Disk Copy image. You'll need to unstuff the .sit archive and then use Disk Copy 6.x to mount the disk image on the desktop.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the information. I shall giveit a bash this weekend and let you know how I get on.
 
I haven't managed to get this working. I tried DiskCopy v6.5 b13 to begin, successfully unpacked it with StuffIt but when opening it I receive "The application program DiskCopy 6.5b13 could not be opened because it might be damaged or not work on this type of computer." I then essayed DiskCopy 6.0.1 from the same source and again successfully unpacked it. Upon activation this gives "DiskCopy will not run on this kind of Macintosh since certain required support is not provided." I see that there are twenty-seven different versions of DiskCopy on this particular site; I suspect I may have to hack my way through the forest to see if I can find one that works.
 
You need Disk Copy 6.1.3. I don't think the versions after that will run on a 68k CPU. 6.3.3 *might* run on MacOS 8.1 on a 68040, but I'm not entirely sure on that. It may be PowerPC only.

Another problem you're going to have is that you cannot store Mac applications or files on a Windows NTFS volume, because it will wipe out the resource fork. Windows and NTFS file systems have no idea what a resource fork is, and it will be immediately lost. This is why you have to encapsulate them in stuffit expander archives or binhex format. Linux file systems are the same same story, but you can install support for HFS file systems and work with them directly.

This is a problem on all of those Macintosh archive sites. People don't properly archive the files, or copy them to an incompatible file system first and corrupt the files before they're archived, making the files useless.
 
Interesting information there. I suppose the incongruities of trying to mix oil and water are going to throw up problems. I have downloaded roughly ten .sit files and I think half of them run okay in my setup; a couple just cause Basilisk to freeze and consequently shut down or report not enough memory to run, whereas some like NotAdventure II (sic) handle perfectly well. I shall have a go with the two versions that you suggest. Thanks for your help.
 
DiskCopy 6.1.3 works fine. As you say' a lot of the files seem corrupted or incompatible but I shouldn't complain when people go to the trouble of putting things up for free. I'm sure there is nothing malicious intended.
 
@GiGaBiTe NTFS technically does have a similar feature (Alternate Data Streams/ADS), but apparently you run into the same kind problems posed by the resource forks when transferring files to another filesystem. --- What a great job, Microsoft! /s

Maybe that would work if there was a way to directly transfer the actual data over a network and have it repackaged on the other end into an acceptable format...

-----

I assume the general approach has remained the same for a long time due to the need for a Macintosh native tool to unpack any particular archival format.

Otherwise, any archive format that merges the data fork and resource fork into a single file while making that operation reversible would do the trick.
 
Generally speaking, if a file is going to be compressed but not binary encoded, then using Stuffit 1.0 format is preferred as it doesn't store anything in the Data Fork like later versions of Stuffit. Although in my experience, Stuffit 1.0 files can easily become corrupted. Not sure how or why.

As it was true back in the day, it is true today: every Macintosh file should be binary encoded before transferring. The most popular was (imho should still be) BinHex.

You can get away with not encoding a DiskCopy 4.x disk image file, but then you lose the Creator & Type resources. This can be easily fixed using ResEdit or something better like Snitch or AutoTyper.

@Istarian The most popular Text Adventure game for the Macintosh was probably The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I think I saw it installed on most computers back in the day. :P
 
I see I am reading expert analyses here. Well done for helping me, although I don't understand a lot of it! One thing is for sure chaps, Microsoft never did anything that didn't line their own pockets. I still think it was shameful the way Bill Gates took Willie Crowther's Colossal Cave and didn't pay him a penny for it because he was too decent to charge people in the first place or worry about copyright law. I feel I may have wandered a bit from the start of the thread.
 
Istarian said:
I assume the general approach has remained the same for a long time due to the need for a Macintosh native tool to unpack any particular archival format.

Otherwise, any archive format that merges the data fork and resource fork into a single file while making that operation reversible would do the trick.
Click to expand...

Back in the 68k era, Mac files on the internet were generally sent via .sea.hqx (binhex'd self extracting archive) or .sit.hqx (binhex'd stuffit expander archive.) Things that were stored as .sit files had problems with corruption, even though Stuffit archives are supposed to help preserve the resource fork. Some stuff was sent as a generic hqx file too, but I never saw that much.

Something else that's a problem now that I forgot to mention are Mac OS X users using new versions of Stuffit Expander that aren't compatible with the old 68k/PPC format Stuffit used to use, and can result in corrupt archives. I've had to get people to download archives like that and unpack them for me because I don't have a modern OS X system.
 
That's interesting information regarding StuffIt. One error message I have seen a few times is:"One of the files that you tried to expand could have been enhanced if you had DropStuff with Expander Enhancer of StuffIt Deluxe installed."
 
We're back to the question of which version to plump for, I see that they run from 1.5.1 to 8. Versions 5 to 5.5 seem to be the latest versions that don't require PowerPCs to run and the ones recommended for Basilisk II. Would you agree or should I try another version? Thanks in advance.
 
Canalboy said:
That's interesting information regarding StuffIt. One error message I have seen a few times is:"One of the files that you tried to expand could have been enhanced if you had DropStuff with Expander Enhancer of StuffIt Deluxe installed."
Click to expand...
DropStuff is a shareware add-on that gives you accelerated compression just by having it installed. It was automatically included with later versions.

I use a combination of Stuffit Expander 4.5 and DropStuff 3.5.2, but for your purpose, using the combined Expander & DropStuff 4.5 will be fine. I also made a patch for the program called "BundleUp" that added a couple new icons and files type support so you can double-click on BinHex files and they'll open directly in Stuffit Expander instead of having to manually drag & drop it. For some very strange reason Stuffit Expander doesn't know what a BinHex file is despite knowing how to decode one. A slight oversight by the programmers. They just forgot to add a BNDL, type support, and icon.

You can download it from my website if you like.
 
olePigeon said:
DropStuff is a shareware add-on that gives you accelerated compression just by having it installed. It was automatically included with later versions.

I use a combination of Stuffit Expander 4.5 and DropStuff 3.5.2, but for your purpose, using the combined Expander & DropStuff 4.5 will be fine. I also made a patch for the program called "BundleUp" that added a couple new icons and files type support so you can double-click on BinHex files and they'll open directly in Stuffit Expander instead of having to manually drag & drop it. For some very strange reason Stuffit Expander doesn't know what a BinHex file is despite knowing how to decode one. A slight oversight by the programmers. They just forgot to add a BNDL, type support, and icon.

You can download it from my website if you like.
Click to expand...
The internet has spawned a lot of God awful crap as it has aged; from sloppy, click-bait journalism to "influencers" and similar assorted garbage. Fortunately there are still places like this forum where helpful, knowledgeable people like yourself can be found.
 
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