JDW
Well-known member
It's quite fascinating to me that Epyx Winter Games has been on Macintosh Garden since 2009 and yet nobody appears to have gotten it to work.
I still have an original copy of Winter Games on 3.5" disk for the Mac that was purchased by me back in 1985. It boots my Mac512 just fine, and all the games work except Biathlon, which reboots the Mac every time I try to launch it. When I boot from another disk and check the contents of my Winter Games disk, I see a few 1k files with garbled names. I also see that the file size of my disk's "Biathlon" file is smaller than the file size of the same file contained in the archive on Macintosh Garden. But the files on Macintosh Garden don't work, and everybody since the 2009 upload have been commenting about that fact in the comments section on Macintosh Garden.
Copy II Mac says Winter Games can be copied using Sector Copy, so I used version Copy II Mac 7.0 to do just that on another 400k floppy (real disk). It is an identical copy, which boots and works fine, except for Biathlon, of course. The 400K disk is packed with files such that I cannot simply copy the bigger Biathlon file from the Macintosh Garden version to my copied floppy. Using the bootable copy I made, I deleted all the 1K files with garbled names, since none of those are in the Macintosh Garden version. Even then I didn't have enough disk space to replace my Biathlon file with the larger file on the Macintosh Garden IMG. I needed to delete something else, so I deleted the file containing high scores. I was then able to replace Biathlon. However, booting from that floppy disk produces a dialog that says my disk is not an unauthorized copy, and it asks for the original disk. If I put in the original Winter Games disk, and do some disk swaps, eventually the game will boot and even Biathlon works great! So that means the Winter Games files on Macintosh Garden are good, but they won't boot as an authorized copy of the game.
The file on Macintosh Garden was created as a non-bootable IMG that contains scanned images in addition to the game files. Using that Macintosh Garden IMG file, I manually copied all the files relevant to the game to a 400K DSK image, but that didn't work. I then recreated the folder structure that I see when viewing files on my Winter Games master disk, but even that doesn't work.
The problem is twofold: (1) I want to make a bootable copy of Winter Games on floppy that allows even Biathlon to work, yet which doesn't ask for the original disk, and (2) I want to get that copy to work on Mini vMac so I can share it with others.
I used Copy II Mac 7.0 to do a Sector copy of my original Winter Games disk to a blank 400K.dsk file on my FloppyEMU. Sector copy completed without error, but the copy doesn't work -- I get the unauthorized disk error when trying to boot from it, whether booting from my Mac512 or Mini vMac. But as I said before, if I make a Sector copy of the original disk to another real disk, the copy works fine (except for my broken Biathlon game, which quite frankly, is one of the best games on the disk). This tells me that the game is copy protected by means of the variable speed disk drive, something a digital copy of the game cannot replicate.
The question now becomes, is there anyone savvy enough among us to hack the game to get around that copy protection scheme?
I still have an original copy of Winter Games on 3.5" disk for the Mac that was purchased by me back in 1985. It boots my Mac512 just fine, and all the games work except Biathlon, which reboots the Mac every time I try to launch it. When I boot from another disk and check the contents of my Winter Games disk, I see a few 1k files with garbled names. I also see that the file size of my disk's "Biathlon" file is smaller than the file size of the same file contained in the archive on Macintosh Garden. But the files on Macintosh Garden don't work, and everybody since the 2009 upload have been commenting about that fact in the comments section on Macintosh Garden.
Copy II Mac says Winter Games can be copied using Sector Copy, so I used version Copy II Mac 7.0 to do just that on another 400k floppy (real disk). It is an identical copy, which boots and works fine, except for Biathlon, of course. The 400K disk is packed with files such that I cannot simply copy the bigger Biathlon file from the Macintosh Garden version to my copied floppy. Using the bootable copy I made, I deleted all the 1K files with garbled names, since none of those are in the Macintosh Garden version. Even then I didn't have enough disk space to replace my Biathlon file with the larger file on the Macintosh Garden IMG. I needed to delete something else, so I deleted the file containing high scores. I was then able to replace Biathlon. However, booting from that floppy disk produces a dialog that says my disk is not an unauthorized copy, and it asks for the original disk. If I put in the original Winter Games disk, and do some disk swaps, eventually the game will boot and even Biathlon works great! So that means the Winter Games files on Macintosh Garden are good, but they won't boot as an authorized copy of the game.
The file on Macintosh Garden was created as a non-bootable IMG that contains scanned images in addition to the game files. Using that Macintosh Garden IMG file, I manually copied all the files relevant to the game to a 400K DSK image, but that didn't work. I then recreated the folder structure that I see when viewing files on my Winter Games master disk, but even that doesn't work.
The problem is twofold: (1) I want to make a bootable copy of Winter Games on floppy that allows even Biathlon to work, yet which doesn't ask for the original disk, and (2) I want to get that copy to work on Mini vMac so I can share it with others.
I used Copy II Mac 7.0 to do a Sector copy of my original Winter Games disk to a blank 400K.dsk file on my FloppyEMU. Sector copy completed without error, but the copy doesn't work -- I get the unauthorized disk error when trying to boot from it, whether booting from my Mac512 or Mini vMac. But as I said before, if I make a Sector copy of the original disk to another real disk, the copy works fine (except for my broken Biathlon game, which quite frankly, is one of the best games on the disk). This tells me that the game is copy protected by means of the variable speed disk drive, something a digital copy of the game cannot replicate.
The question now becomes, is there anyone savvy enough among us to hack the game to get around that copy protection scheme?
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