Friday, November 27, 2009

Getting The Fool's Errand to Work on an OS 10.5 Intel Mac

Co-authored with Eric Ivancich.


Cliff Johnson has made his old puzzle game The Fool's Errand available for free download, but to use it you have to get it to work on your modern computer. The following procedure worked for me on my Intel Mac Pro.

Get all the stuff you need:

Make a disk image containing The Fool's Errand:
  • Unzip the blank disk images file, and unzip the hfs1400k.zip file in the resulting folder.
  • Rename the resulting file hfs1400k.DSK to hfs1400k.dmg.
  • Double-click hfs1400k.dmg to mount it.
  • From the folder "The Fool's Errand", drag "Fool's Puzzles", "Prologue & Finale", and "The Fool's Errand" onto the mounted disk image.
  • Unmount the disk image.
Run Mini vMac:
  • Launch the "Mini vMac" application.
  • Choose File -> Open Disk Image and choose "Disk608.dsk" from the "System 6.0.8 - Finder 6.1.8" folder.
  • This should make the question-mark disk go away and start up your emulated Mac Plus.
Run the game:
  • Choose File -> Open Disk Image and choose "hfs1400k.dmg" from the "blanks" folder. You should see a new disk called "Untitled" on the desktop.
  • Rename "Untitled" to "FoolsErrand" or some such, and open it.
  • Launch "The Fool's Errand"!
  • "One sunny day a light-hearted fool strolled along a hilly path..." Indeed!
  • To quit Mini vMac: hold down Control while typing 'q' and then 'y'.