Hi!!! I used to play Dark Castle in black and white decades ago, i believe on an ancient Mac, i don't remember what kind. and i loved the game! it recently sprung up out of the depths of my memory, and i realized how much i missed it! man, i used to play it for hours and hours, and i can still remember all the zany sound effects! so i did some searching and found this forum, and i hope you guys can help get me back into it.

Currently, i have a 2 year old HP PC, and a Mac Powerbook G3, with no floppy drive. What is my easiest route to start playing DC again? I don't really care what version--I'd most like to play the original black and white, but I'd also like to play the sequels and remakes. Any help is greatly appreciated! long live DC!!!!

You should be able to run Dark Castle and it's sequel "Beyond Dark Castle" though an emulator on either of those computers, what you'll need for it is a few thigs:

• The Emulator, which I will link to.
• A classic mac ROM file - The hardest thing to get.
• A copy of the original Dark Castle game disks/a downloaded copy of the game files.
• If you do not have the original game disks, you will need a system which can be obtained for free.

First off tell us: Do you have the original Disks? Do you have a working old mac? Would you rather have the emulator running on the mac or the PC?

From there We can help you more clearly.

Link to emulator:
http://minivmac.sourceforge.net/

thank you! i downloaded the emulator--so funny that it is only 44kb! To answer your questions: I don't have the original game disks, I don't have any working mac older than the G3, and i'd rather have the emulator running on my Windows machine. Thank you for all the help! i cannot wait to play DC =P

Alright, then you will need to find a Mac OS ROM file, you'll need a mac plus one (SE works also). You should be able to find one through google. If you have troubles I'll try to help.

Here is the link to what you'll need to do to get the emulator working once you have the ROM file, including the system files you'll need for the emulator (Don't worry not for your system, but for system 6 that the emulator runs).
http://minivmac.sourceforge.net/doc/start.html


Lastly google: Dark Castle Mac Download


And you should just about have it. If you run into any problems, let me know, I'll see what I can do.

Okay thank you so much. I think i have all the necessary files, I'm just not sure how to navigate them. The Mac emulator is a bit confusing. Here is a screenshot of what I've got:



Any idea what I need to do? Thank you!!!!!

You will need to create an Apple HFS disk image to load the system software onto. I have attached a (zipped) 24MB blank disk image to this post.

You will then need to boot mini vmac with your system install disk image, and when it asks for a disk, drag the (unzipped) blank image on.

Hopefully drag+drop will work as well on the PC version as the Mac - but I don't know since I've never tried it. If you have problems, you may find you have more luck getting everything set up on your Mac, and then transferring the final disk image back to your PC afterwards.

btw, welcome to the board :)

First, are those folders with DC and BDC holding disk images? They need to be images for you to play. Other than that, you should just be able to open the program, and then open the disk images (if you have separate ones, always the first one first so the virtual machine can start up). Unless you are creating a massive disk image (like a hard drive) you won't need the System Software disks just to play DC/BDC. If you are having trouble as far as the DC/BDC disk images goes, send me a PM.

Name's John by the way, how about you?

Richard, what i'm afraid of is that if he has straight mac files on the PC like that, they won't have their resource forks: only their data forks. Without a Mac resource fork, the files will be useless.

Yes, that's a very good point - Windows will destroy any resource forks on a standard NTFS disk.

Best bet is to not decompress the archives that contained dc/bdc. Instead, either decompress and copy onto the image on your Mac, or just run from the disk images themselves (if they came as disk images). Don't open the disk images on windows though.

La Porta is correct - it is probably easier to do it direct from disk images on Windows.

Ok thanks for the blank Apple HFS disk image, I installed the system software onto there correctly. It brought back memories of the days before CD-Roms, when you used to get a new OS on a set of 25 floppies and had to switch them in and out, lol.

So I don't think these are disk images. Here are screenshots of what's inside the Dark Castle, BDC 1, and BDC 2 folders.

Dark Castle:


BDC 1:


BDC 2:



I downloaded them as some sort of Mac compressed file, put them on a flash drive and unzipped them on my G3 (since i couldn't find a good windows unzipper for stuffit type files), then brought them back to the PC. Thanks for all the help guys!

You have the system installed on the emulator then? It should be on a disk image then.

Here's a short cut if it works. Open it with whatever you open ISOs with and mount it. Then copy that dark castle folder onto it.

If that doesn't work, then post again, and we'll help.

You still around?

I PM'd this guy last night to help him out, but maybe he lost interest?

I'm going to make a how-to for PC people, without linking directly to any files.

That might be good - though I think the problem above is that as soon as the file system is exposed to windows, it is going to mangle the resource forks... I think the way to do it is either play directly off the DC disk image(s) without mounting them in windows, or copy them to the hard-disk image inside mini-vmac by mounting both the DC images and the HD image.

Well, if he comes back you can ask him.

sorry guys, i got carried away with work this week. someone sent me an image of BDC and i've been playing that--it is so incredible and awesome to be playing again!!!! =PPPPPPP

man i love it. it is so hard though! i am getting the hang of it again though, slowly. but i never, ever forgot the classic sound effects; neither did my mom--she remembers them from the 80s too, and she never even played the game, lol!

so, could someone send me a disk image of DC pretty pretty please?? : ) thanks for all the help guys, i really appreciate it!

I would ask a user of this forum named La Porta, he should be able to supply you think it. PM him.

ok i got both games working now, thanks guys. should i assemble the necessary files and upload them somewhere to save future newbies the hassle? it was quite a bit of work and messing around--about 4 hours plus a lot of help from this forum. the lower the hurdles are, the more people will play.

I suppose you could do, but under heavy disclaimer about legally owning he original games. Technically downloading would be illegal. Hence a direct link from this forum would be bad. (note how previously the links were in the form of google searches)

Yeah, as much as I'd like to have a download of Mini vMac, along with Dark Castle here, it would probably get the forum in trouble, which I don't want, so the best we can do is what we did for you.