Master of Orion II

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1.Master of Orion II Mods - An Overview

2.Master of Orion II and VMWare

Some of you may recall my previous efforts to get Master of Orion II 
running on modern Macs, first with Classic (which was unusably buggy) and 
then in emulators (which was unusably slow and didn't work with sound). 
Well, I finally hit paydirt with VMWare.

I already have VMWare and use it for a couple of applications which just 
don't have substitutes on the Mac. I've tried to use it with a couple of 
games, as it has some degree of DirectX support, but had no luck. I get 
the impression that the DX support is targeted toward certain games only, 
and other games are very hit-or-miss, with mine clearly being miss.

But then I had a bit of inspiration: you don't need DX support for really 
old games. And what better really old game to try than MoOII.

It works beautifully. The mouse control isn't quite as smooth as I would 
like, but I think that's just inherent to the game itself. Everything else 
performs entirely well, with full sound support. Performance for internal 
operations *should* be good, because VMWare is a virtualizer, not an 
emulator, and so applications running inside it run directly on the native 
CPU. And of course this game ran acceptably on a 33MHz system, so a 
2.66GHz system should be no sweat. Graphics performance was my big concern 
because the emulators I had tried before had real problems here, but 
apparently VMWare has this together.

I was able to play through two quick games and experienced no problems. I 
tried medium-sized galaxies with average difficulty; I haven't played for 
years and wanted to make things reasonably easy. I played Klackons the 
first game and went for a colonize-everything-in-sight strategy which got 
me into one short war (I wish the AI would look at your production 
capabilities and not just your fleet size when deciding how weak you are!) 
and then I suddenly won the game when I won the election for galactic 
leader.

The second game was more interesting. This time I took the Psilons and 
went for the strategy of colonizing one other good system, then building 
up both systems as much as possible and aiming to get a massive research 
lead. This worked well once I remembered to keep my fleet at a reasonable 
size. I forgot at the beginning and faced a short war, but built up fast 
enough that I quickly emerged victorious. (It sure is good those Psilon 
scientists can instantly retrain to become shipyard workers!) Orion ended 
up being right next to my homeworld and I was zipping through the tech 
tree trying to get to a point where I could take out the Guardian without 
too much fuss when I was blindsided by an election which the Sakkra won! 
Ooooops. I of course refused to acknowledge the result and resigned myself 
to a fight to the death. But then I discovered that my plan to out-tech 
everyone had *worked*; by this time I had enough production technology 
that my five or so good planets were able to outproduce all of my 
now-united enemies, and enough weapons technology that the ships which I 
produced were vastly superior. After a couple of false starts trying to 
take down heavy planetary defenses with inadequate fleets, I started 
romping around the galaxy mowing down Sakkra colonies. The main limitation 
at this point was ship range, and tech advances and one outpost ship 
solved that, giving me a win by extermination.

I'm very glad to have this game back! But I'm also worried about how much 
time it can kill....

I'm running this on a ridiculously powerful system, a quad-core Mac Pro 
with 7GB of RAM. This system is probably one hundred to one thousand times 
more powerful than the MoOII minimum requirements. However, I would expect 
any Mac capable of running VMWare to run it well, since they *all* vastly 
outperform this minimum spec. Of course VMWare only works on Intel Macs. I 
didn't do anything special, just installed it in my existing Windows XP 
image.

I've read that MoOII also works well in DOSBox, an emulator for a combined 
x86/DOS environment. I haven't tried it myself. This would be slower, but 
it would also work on PowerPC Macs, and with the vast excess of computing 
power available would still probably run very well. It would also avoid 
the cost of purchasing VMWare if you don't already have it.

When it comes to accessing older games, emulation (or virtualization) is 
the way to go, and I think it's important to realize that OS X is 
basically unrelated to all the older OSes. If you've been wanting to run 
that old Mac game you just loved, consider finding and running the PC 
version instead, assuming there is one. PC emulators and virtualizers are, 
in my experience, much easier to set up and a lot more work is done on 
them. There's no real advantage to emulating the old Mac OS in OS X as 
opposed to emulating some other OS, except perhaps for familiarity. And 
once you're in the game that all goes out the window anyway!

Now if only I could think of any other old games with PC versions that I 
actually want to play....

-- 
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software

3.Master of Orion II in Classic

I got a sudden hankering to try MOO2 the other day. I always had to
boot into OS 9 for it, though, because I could never get it to work in
Classic. But in the time since I last got this sudden hankering, I
bought a new Mac, and I no longer own a computer that will boot OS 9.

Googling doesn't turn up much, but I did find one page that claims it
runs flawlessly in Classic, which makes me wonder if I have a problem
with my system. The game actually plays fine until I get into ground
combat, at which point it just dies. The game just quits and I'm out.
This happens every time. Otherwise it seems fine, but it's kind of
hard to avoid ground combat.

So, has anybody else tried MOO2 in Classic? Have you run into this
problem?

Thanks in advance.

4.Master of Orion II very slow

MOO seems to run quite slow on a PPC OS 9.1 Mac (with 300 MHZ and 320 RAM).
Patch 1.6 or memory adjustment doesn`t help. Any ideas how to speed it up?

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