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Old Trick
Authored by: saint.duo on Feb 17, '02 11:10:41AM

This trick worked with most games in Mac OS 9 and earlier, as well. I used to do it to speed up games on my old PowerBook. Or, I would use it at the store I work at to make certain titles demoable without having the chance of a CD being stolen from a machine.

The only games I ever found that this doesn't work with is anything from Blizzard. (Starcraft, BroodWar, Diablo, Diablo II)

I'm glad to see that it still works in X.



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Re: Old Trick
Authored by: Paul Burney on Feb 17, '02 09:57:34PM

I've used it forever too. The difference between the OSX .dmg format and the old .img formats is that the .dmg contains all the data on the disc, not just that on the mac partition. I think the reason that the Blizzard games wouldn't work under OS 9 was because they were Hybrid discs.

With OSX, I can now play my carbonized Brood War without needing to lug around (and possibly damage), my game CD collection. Now if I could only find an OS 9 program that would mount .dmg files.

I'm pretty sure this has been common knowledge for a while, at least by gamers with laptops. Hopefully, game developers won't restrict this use of their games.



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Re: Old Trick
Authored by: bhines on Feb 18, '02 04:48:25AM

Also, .dmg is a data-fork based format. If you make a compressed DMG (an option in DMG maker), there is no need to stuff or even macbinary it when posting online.



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Re: Old Trick
Authored by: saint.duo on Feb 18, '02 08:49:23AM

Concerning Blizzard games, I have the Mac only (original release) of Starcraft, and it won't work for that. Somehow, Blizzard got their games to check for a physical disk.
That's cool that you can now use dmg files for Blizzard games. I think it has to do with the way Mac OS X uses volumes, now, with it having a UNIX core.



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Re: Old Trick
Authored by: chabig on Feb 18, '02 10:17:59PM

I have tried this with Riven and it wouldn't work for me. As far as I can tell, Riven uses hard coded paths that break when disk images are used.



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Re: Old Trick
Authored by: nordy on Feb 19, '02 03:26:52PM

Just tried this with the Sims and it doesn't work. With the old Unreal engine games there were a couple of files you could copy on the disk images that only amounted to about 500k that accomplished the same thing.



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Old Trick
Authored by: dang on Mar 11, '02 07:55:10PM

Can you get the application(s) installed via the disk copy-ed "virtual CD" to then automount the disk image upon start-up or are you stuck with needing to have all disc images you'll ever use mounted at login time? I've tried this a couple of times under OS X but so far, no luck. Seems like this used to work under OS9. My main objective here is to eliminate pre-K students having to handle CD's or mount disc images for games/etc. that require a CD, such as Reader Rabbit and company.



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Old Trick
Authored by: flowb on Jan 10, '03 10:02:36AM

I found that this trick does work with some Blizzard games, the first thing I did when I bought WC3 was make an image. I also used it to play Total Annihilation by MacSoft. With my Powerbook, it would never let me play the missions because disk 1 had to be in to start, then it would never recongnize disk 2 for the missions. I was always stuck playing custom games, which got old fast. I did have to make multiple images because it mounted as both a data and audio disks.



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