The Orion Nebula

It took a lotta googling and a lotta tweakin, but I got it all up and running.

I'd be happy to spread the good cheer if there's any other commies out there running MACs.

Before you ask, my girl's a video editor, so she's got a good excuse to running a communist machine. And tell me, if your woman was anxious to play a little on her lunch break, wouldn't you go through this trouble, AND not complain about her puter?

A friend of mine plays the mac version... do you have the dosbox version running on mac? He might be interested in that.

Yup.

There's a MAC version of dosbox, and it was easier to find that than a MAC version of MOO2, cheaper, too. Once you're running it, the pain in the a$$ part is the command to assign a dos-style drive letter to a MAC file system.

After that it's easy. Install through dosbox just like normal. I had to experiment with the video settings in the conf file, but it works.

Now, if we could get Atari to make a new version compatable with all machines, with easy installation and cross platform multiplayer support, we all wouldn't have to go through this to get one of their games to work.

So, yeah, about that pain in the a$$ part... how does one do that?

First, you gotta copy the MOO2 cd to the mac. I'll assume you put the entire contents under USERNAME\Orion

Where USERNAME is presumably the MAC's name.

Then find and install that MAC free- or trial-ware version of DosBox.

Then, after you install it and run it, the mount command is:

mount c ~/orion

Dos-style C: is now mounted to the USERNAME\Orion directory. Now do what Lord Brazen tells you to.

Patching:
Lorb Brazen's patches won't run on a MAC. The first is a zip file. No biggie. Unzip that into a directory, and use the Mac Finder to copy over the patched files. For patch 1.4, I installed and patched on a windoze box, paid attention and wrote down the patched files (you know, the ones that patch prog talks about while you're executing it), and copied those patched files (I think there were 4) to a second patched-file directory, which I copied into the MAC installation directory, again using Finder. They just wouldn't run for me through dosbox.

After you're done copying and installing and patching (which hopefully wasn't that confusing), you'll want to edit the conf file, right? It's under USERNAME\Library\Preferences\DOSBox 0.73 Preferences

If you've gotten this far, I'm sure can figure out how to modify that mount command to the orion2.exe directory. I had trouble getting the video to work right, and had to experiment trial-and-error style to get it working right. I think what finally got my girl's video working right was 'output=overlay'. The IPXnet commands worked the same as windoze. It's been a while, but I think I didn't have to worry about installing IPX or a MAC version of NWLink. I think.

Enjoy.

And to think this could all have been avoided if we didn't have to worry about MACs.

I use Boxer, by Alun Brewster. It's an excellent GUI for DOSbox. I have had excellent success running MOO2 on that. Just double click and it works.

I need to try installing the patch though.

I got mine to work too. Spent all weekend playing again
Such a great game.

Originally I copied my CD to disk and tried to mount it as a cd from there, but that didn't work and kept giving me assertion errors in jim*.lbx and some other file.

The next attempt was to mount the original cd as a cd, install it, and then change the orioncd.ini file to the directory I had copied the cd to, which worked up until I tried to generate a galaxy where it bombed out with the same sort of assertion errors, but a different file.

Finally, I installed the patch and it worked like a charm. Still on 1.31 Vanilla, but that makes me happy.

Hi there,
first post in this forum.
I used to play MOO2 long time ago, and I've happily rediscovered it.
I bought the Mac version of it (the Win version is also included), and started playing it.
However, I'd like to apply the latest patch, and play with some mods.
I've read this thread, but it seems to be difficult to apply the patch on a Mac, especially if (my case) you cannot patch it on a Windows machine first.

I can happily run the Win version on Dosbox, if that's the only available solution. In that case, how to apply the patch?

Any good suggestions?

Thanks for any help!

Hi there,
you cannot patch it on a Windows machine first.

If you have the DOS version of the game you can play it using dosbox on a Mac.

The most recent patch can be applied from dosbox however it will only apply to the DOS version of the game. Not the windows version or the Mac version.