Tag: retrogaming

Retrogaming and retro-disking in Rome

I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole this weekend, thanks to an online index of Open Source Game Clones—basically, freely available re-implementations of old paid games. The first game I looked up was Caesar III, which was one of a few games (along with Marathon and Myst) that I played a lot on nights that Lisa was attending grad school classes, in our apartment in McLean, Virginia. It’s a city building game that allowed you to experiment with, as my college friend attorney Tim Fox would say, zoning. Namely — if you make streets too long, if you fail to build adequate agriculture or mercantile or entertainment options, your city fails to thrive and stand up against invasion.

Lo and behold, Caesar III has a few open source clone projects, of which one, Augustus, is an active project with a Mac port. So I went to check it out. Like Devilution, Augustus emulates the engine of the game — the actual Mac application that runs the game, takes input, handles saves, etc. It does not attempt to recreate the original game assets (art, storylines, music); instead, it requires you to provide them.

I actually still have my original Caesar III CD-ROM, but found that I couldn’t get it to read with my Mac’s SuperDrive. That, it turns out, is because modern Macs can no longer read HFS file systems, which many CD-ROMs meant to be read by Macs in the 1990s used. HFS was replaced by HFS Plus in 1998, which is still supported today, but if you have old media (floppies or CDs) formatted with HFS, you can’t read them with modern drives—at least, not without the help of additional software.

I explored a couple options to get access to the disk (as well as a few other disks that were in the same binder). All options required using the Mac Disk Utility to create a disk image (.DMG) file from the CD-ROM. Once done, you can then find software to read the image. One option that seemed promising was a set of command line utilities called hfsutils, which can be installed via Homebrew and which promised access to mount and access HFS-formatted disk images. But you need to be very precise with the commands to copy these files and I couldn’t figure out a way to work with them other than one at a time. (There is, of course, a way, using the -f flag and the wildcard, but I didn’t find that until later.)

Enter a most useful utility, Kevin Brewster’s HFS. It is very simple: drag an HFS formatted disk image onto the app window and tell it where to save the files. And it works! … Except… it copied the Mac installer out, which Augustus can’t use, and I couldn’t get the installer to run from within my Classic Mac emulation environment.

So I went to plan B. It turns out that you can buy the Windows version of Caesar III on GOG for about $6, and Augustus can use those game files. So now I’m up and running again, and re-learning all the frustrating bits of Roman zoning law.

But the exploration of HFS utilities wasn’t wasted time. I think the HFS utility will turn out to be a great way to get content off old floppies… and that’ll be the next project.

Again, gone to the devil, again

I’m not convinced that Diablo II wasn’t made for these times.

I started re-playing the original Diablo, thanks to the open source program Devilution, about three weeks ago. I made it all the way through and thought, what’s next? Do I re-play on a higher difficulty? And I did. But after two run-throughs, I was bored.

I then remembered that, in the box where my original Diablo game disk was, there was a two-CD case, containing my Diablo II disks, and, importantly, with the license code on the front.

Turns out that Blizzard will allow you to convert the old pre-download license code to a new modern license code that will allow you to play older games as fresh downloads. And that the Diablo II codebase still works on all Mac OS versions up to (and not including) Catalina. And that I still have one Mac running Mojave.

So I’m now about ten days into Diablo II. I’m partway through Act III, playing with an Amazon who’s pretty good with a bow and OK with a sword. I die a lot; I once had to spend all day getting killed over and over again in the Act II finale by Duriel before I wore him down enough to destroy him. (Amazons don’t do well against Duriel, but I beat him without hiring a mercenary, the old fashioned way: by dying a lot.)

And it’s amazing. The game ticks all the right boxes for my brain chemistry: sometimes exciting but basically mindless, never ending, just frustrating enough.

But I’m eager to get to the end of it. Because it turns out that in these days, while I have a lot of aggravation to get out, I also don’t have a lot of spare brain cycles. It would be nice to get those back.

Right after I go after Mephisto.

Gone to the devil, again

If you’re like me and staying home is starting to get tedious, you could do worse than checking out DevilutionX. It’s an emulator for the original Diablo game engine, so all you need is the data file from your CD and you too can get lost for hours. I’ve been playing it on the Mac, but there’s apparently a version for Android, Linux, Windows, and even the Switch.