So while at a garage sale the other day I discovered this old Mac game I use to play as a kid called Operation: Weather Disaster; what I consider to have been my first real video game. Gotta love nostalgia! Anyway, at first I didn't think it was possible to run it on my PC but it looks like I almost have it... Usually I would download a ROM and open it with an emulator like I've done before but this time I'm trying to play it through the disk. I can access the files using a program called MacDrive and can even watch the video segments using VLC, but am still unable to open and play the actual game. I opened it up using Shockwave media player within Firefox which worked for a few seconds up until the title screen when an error popped up. Perhaps there's another player or even a *Mac emulator to run .DIR files? *Just to clarify: you know how you can play old school PC games using a DOS emulator? Well I want to play old school Mac games and was wondering if there's also an emulator that will allow me to do that. Or any other program which will open and play the game (a .DIR file). Thanks! [Edited by - Taran Shiro on May 18, 2010 3:35:07 PM]

So you are asking if there is an Emulator. For Macintosh?

Err...

Quote: Original post by Antheus
So you are asking if there is an Emulator. For Macintosh?

You know how you can play old school PC games using a DOS emulator? Well I want to play old school Mac games and was wondering if there's also an emulator that will allow me to do that. Or any other program which will open and play the game (a .DIR file).

.dir sounds like it might be a Macromedia Director file (but it might not be). I don't think the early versions of Director were cross platform, but the new versions are. So maybe if you open it up in Director, there's a small chance that it will be able to read the old file format and let you run it. A very small chance.

You're going to need to find an old Mac and dump its ROM in order to make most 68k Mac emulators anywhere near legal.

Seems weird that it is a DIR; is it an FMV game of some kind? Director should be able to open it: DIR is not an executable type on any platform. Director and Flash are "kinda" compatible but I doubt that Flash has a lot of the native client extensions that Director exposes.

Is that the Operation: Weather Disaster from the Discovery Channel? I Googled a bit, and it looks like they made a PC version as well. Why not track down a copy of that? I'm sure you can find a copy to buy for $5 or less.

The old HFS file system on old Macs (pre-OS X) was a two-fork filesystem. The concept of DOS file extensions was completely irrelevant and entirely inapplicable. Old 68K files would have executable code in the data fork and FAT files or PPC files had their executable code as CODE resources in the resource fork. You will have to figure out if you're looking at the data fork or resource fork through your Windows program.

Quote: Original post by Bregma
The old HFS file system on old Macs (pre-OS X) was a two-fork filesystem. The concept of DOS file extensions was completely irrelevant and entirely inapplicable. Old 68K files would have executable code in the data fork and FAT files or PPC files had their executable code as CODE resources in the resource fork. You will have to figure out if you're looking at the data fork or resource fork through your Windows program.

Yeah, but the fact that it actually has an extension should be a pretty good indicator that it's not an APPL. There should be an application file somewhere on the disc, though.

Director didn't store resources in the resource fork, either - I believe they were just compressed bytestreams in the file after a certain period.