Wing Commander on Mac

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Is it possible to play Wing Commander games on Mac OS X? If so, how?
 
DOSbox will play the older, DOS-based games, and is available for Mac OS X. For Windows games, you can try Darwine, although I think Wine is a bit hit-and-miss with regards to compatibility.

Alas, you cannot play WC Macintosh ports on Mac OS X because they need the older pre-OS X systems to run.
 
Thanks! I look forward to getting back in the cockpit! Haven't flown a mission in years since I switched over to Mac!
 
Are there any special instructions that I should know to run games in Dosbox on a Mac? I see a lot of instructions on here about running on Windows, but haven't come across anything related to Macs. Thanks!
 
The host operating system is irrelevant. DOSbox has been built for both Windows and Mac OS X, and inside DOSbox, programs can't tell the difference. So instructions for DOSbox in Windows should still be applicable for DOSbox on Mac OS X.
 
http://boxer.washboardabs.net/

This is essentially a GUI for dosbox for mac, but it goes a bit deeper than that. I use it to run many dos games on a mac, in some cases it works better than the windows versions!

M.

EDIT: Ha! Just noticed there is a Privateer screenshot on that front page for Boxer. Nice.
 
http://boxer.washboardabs.net/

This is essentially a GUI for dosbox for mac, but it goes a bit deeper than that. I use it to run many dos games on a mac, in some cases it works better than the windows versions!

Thanks for directing me to that! Just a few questions though. Is there any way to make the game screen larger than the initial dosbox screen? Also, I tried to open the game from install.exe, went through the installation process for the soundcard and video stuff, and then get stuck on a screen that asks for the drive to copy from or to, I can't remember right now, while at the bottom it runs text saying that it's copying the files. It won't let me input an answer as to which drive I want to copy from, and it just sits there with nothing happening.

After getting frustrated with that I ran it from wc.exe. It went straight into the game without any installation, but I don't have any sound.

Any suggestions?
 
copy the game folder to the folder on your pc you want to use , make all files not read-only and then try again. if that still doesnt work, make a blank wc.cfg and then re-run install.exe :)
 
http://boxer.washboardabs.net/guide/

Pretty much all you need to know is here, on the website. Tells you how to do fullscreen etc. etc. Have a read through there.

I never had any issues like you mentioned, worked fine for me first try. I would just try deleting the whole gamebox/folder from the Boxer window and try re-installing. Make sure you follow the instructions from the website - it gets unhappy if you try and use it like REAL dos.
 
Help with Running WC using Boxer

First of all, thank you to everyone who's responded to this thread to help me out with this. I truly appreciate you guys taking your time to help those of us out who love these games but don't quite have the technical savvy to get them up and running without some assistance.

I am, however, still experiencing difficulties in getting my game up and running. Please excuse what may be rather mundane information in this post, but I thought perhaps if I posted a walk through of exactly what I did to try and get the game running one of you guys might know exactly how to solve the issues that would allow me to play my game.

I am trying to run the Wing Commander 1 deluxe edition cd-rom on a MacOSX using Boxer. Here's what I do.

1. I insert my WC CD and open up Boxer.
2. I drag the cd icon into the Boxer window and drop it on the install icon.
3. Boxer creates a WING_COMMANDER icon in its window and opens up dosbox.
4. Dosbox displays a message that says:
"The ORIGIN Systems CD Pack programs need a drive on which to write information. A hard disk should be preferred over diskette drives because it will operate faster. If your choice is a diskette drive then you will keep a diskette and label it "ORIGIN CD Game Pack Data Disk."
Below that there is a text box that says:
No Data Disk was found.
Would you like to make a Data Disk? (Y/N)
5. If I press N, nothing happens, so I press Y.
6. The next screen says:
"Please select the drive you want to use as your Data Drive. If you select a diskette drive, first insert a formatted diskette. Games already in progress on the disk are safe."
The text box below this says:
"Please Select Your Data Drive"
and it give the options of:
Disk Drive A
Disk Drive B
Disk Drive C
So I choose Disk Drive C
7. "Are you Sure you want to make drive C: your data disk?" (Y/N)
I say Y.
8. The next window says: "The DOS utilities (APPEND.EXE, SUBST.EXE, JOIN.EXE) could not be found. To correct this problem you must locate your DOS disks. ORIGIN CD Game Pack will install what it needs from them on the Data Disk, or you can exit ORIGIN CD Game Pack and install the DOS utilities yourself.
The text box below this says: "If you have the DOS disk(s) ready ORIGIN CD Game Pack can copy the utilities it needs into the Data Disk.
Do you have the DOS disk(s) ready? (Y/N)
Whether I select Y or N it bring up and error screen and exits me out of dosbox.
9. A window then appears from Boxer saying: "Your game is now installed. Would you like to import the "WING_COMMANDER" CD too, so that you can play without it?"
I choose to import the CD.
10. I click on the WING_COMMANDER icon in Boxer.
11. The finder comes up asking me to choose the program I would like to start from this gamebox.
12. From here I've tried several different things to run the game. First of all, I always go to the WING_COMMANDER.cdrom file. Under that I've tried a few different routes.
a. I click on ORIGIN.BAT, which simply takes me back to the previous dosbox routine outlined above.
b. I click on the ORIGIN folder, then the WC folder, then INSTALL.EXE. The Wing Commander Installation Menu appears. Under the Driver Installation Menu I select C drive, with C:\WING as the directory. I choose to expand the files to Save Time. I select 256 colors and Creative Labs Sound Blaster. Is asks if the current configuration is correct? I say Yes. The next window asks me "Copy from which drive?" But doesn't let me respond. Down at the bottom it says "Copying game. Please wait..." But nothing ever happens. So eventually I exit out. It asks me "Please insert your original Wing Commander Disk 1 in drive, Press any key to continue:" But no matter what I press nothing happens. So I close out the window. It does create a folder under WING_COMMANDER, but it's empty.
c. Finally, I go back and open up the WC folder as earlier, but this time I click on WC.EXE. It runs the game without any problems, everything looks great, and the missions fly well, except there's not sound and no way to save the game. Anytime I try to save a game I get the message: Error: Game not saved.

Again, please forgive what may be trivial and mundane information. I just figured the more you know the better. Any suggestions you may have, please keep in mind that I am only very moderately technically inclined, so the more detail you could provide in how to fix this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!
 
So I've never used boxer i'm afraid so can't help you with that, but dosbox I know :)

Basically, your problem is that the wc1 deluxe installer to install to disks needs append and subst etc which dosbox doesnt contain - you could find a copy of dos to use but frankly that isnt a solution

your issue is mainly that the install program can't find a hard drive to install to - so you need to mount a drive initially, i'm not sure personally but this site:
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/DOSBox_and_Mac_OSX
does know

anyway once you've mounted a folder on your computer
(so on my pc i'd make a folder called dosgames on my c-drive (c:\dosgames) and then in dosbox 'mount c c:\dosgames' would mount the dosgames folder as the c-drive in dosbox

it looks like the only difference is where the dosgames folder exists in macosx - which if it's in the root is ~\dosgames

I would guess then that the CD would be loaded by :
mount d ~\WING_COMMANDER -t cdrom(assuming WING_COMMANDER is what appears on your desktop as the CD name?)

indeed a search on the same dosbox wiki gives:
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/MOUNT#Mac_OSX
so that mounts a hard-drive folder to C and the CD iso image to D, alternatively, the line above (under linux) should work for the real CD:

Z:\>MOUNT D /MEDIA/CDROM/ -T CDROM
(note the one below that with the ioctl and similar, might work better but see if the first works!

Finally, have a look at this guide:
http://steen.users.oregonfast.net/osxdos.htm

As I say I don't have mac osx myself, and my girlfriends laptop which does is sadly kaputt! so I can't work it out perfectly for you (and I assume it doesnt work on os7 :D)
 
Success! Well, mostly at least. I've been able to get the game to run, and even save my progress, but I still don't have sound. Here's what I did:

1. I created a folder on the hard drive and titled it wingcommander. I loaded the cd and copied the files from the cd into the folder.
2. I opened dosbox and mounted the folder as the drive using mount c ~/wingcommander.
3. At this point I tried running the installation program from the cd. I had to figure out the short name for the cd, so I did mount x/volumes. Then I went to the x drive and searched the directory. This showed me that the cd's short name was wing_c~1. I went into the cd files until i found install.exe, ran that, and pretty much just came to the same window as before, where it would ask which drive I wanted to install from but sit there frozen. I exited out of there. But when I look in the wingcommander folder on my hard drive, I find that it did create a folder within it called wing, but it's empty.
4. So I go back to dosbox, and instead of trying to load the contents from the cd, I try and install from the files I had previously copied into the wingcommander folder I created. Again, with the same result as before.
5. Then I figured out that if I go into dosbox, mount that wingcommander folder and get into the appropriate folder within the files that I had copied from the cd earlier, and just type the prompt wc, the game runs, and runs beautifully, and allows me to save my progress! The only problem is that there is no sound.

So does anyone have any ideas on how to fix that little problem?

Thank you to everyone that has been so helpful in getting me back into the cockpit here. Especially to madman, those links really helped me figure out my way around dosbox on my mac.
 
So I assume that this is the wc deluxe cd?

Anyway, mount the c drive and then mount the cd drive "d" using the folder in volumes

so mount d /volumes/wing_c~1 (is that the right folder path for the cd?)

and then run make_wc.bat on the cd. that should fix it right up! (repeat with make_sm1 and make_sm2)

if you still have no luck then can you tell me the following info:
the path to your cd drive (which starts /volumes/)
the file-list from your cd? (at least the root folder)

good luck!
 
I should point out that Super Wing Commander runs fine in sheepshaver on MacOSX. I haven't tried the mac os port of WC3 as I also have the Dos version and have been using that instead. Sheepshaver is pretty amazing but dosbox is much better in terms of stability.

But if you haven't taken a look at Sheepshaver and have an os9 disk lying around, then I highly recommend it. Although, you will need a rom file from your old Classic Computer.

www.emaculation.com
 
Heh, I had real issues with sheepshaver but not with basilisk (which is the harder emulator on paper) on both though i did have issues with corrupting disk images, so make sure you back up regularly!
 
While I'll admit Sheepshaver isn't the most stable emulater around, it isn't bad, and I have had no more trouble with it than I did Basilisk. I think SWC needs sheepshaver though as it emulates a ppc computer.
To be honest I haven't experienced this disk image corrupting business. Are you using the latest build on www.emaculation.com? It has a load of bugfixes in it that the last official one doesn't have, as well as some improved performance. But if you are, then I'd still check with them because it shouldn't be happening.
 
Sheepshaver does PPC, but basilisk can emulate the 68k and ppc (and since swc supports both it makes sense to try basilisk)

I think the corruption was mostly on basilisk and is allegedly something to do with the way the files are written - either way i just made backups regularly so if it black screened and refused to load then I had a restore point :D

Again though, probably worth noting that both emulators were being run on windows xp, so probably the macos versions are more stable (definitely sheepshaver's support seems better for mac than pc)
 
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