This Old Gamer: Boba Fett Meets Old Games

By Joey Cooper 

Have you ever heard of Mac software for "throttling" down the speed to play old games? A while ago I fired up the old game Microprose Pirates, and on a then G3/233 it was just way to fast. I just put in a 466 Zif upgrade so now it would be even worse... I did have an older Mac a while back and I forgot to try it. Is there any way to drastily slow down a mac? Maybe I could run a 68k emulator under Virtual PC :) -Tobias

I've never seen such a program, but I too would be interested in something like this. A little background on this topic is that many older games were set to go a certain speed (like a alien running across the screen) simply by how fast the computer could process the graphics and data. Unfortunately, for those of us who enjoy older games this is a problem because our super fast PowerPC G3s and G4s simply fly through processing the data and it some cases it is hard to play the game.

One game I own that does this is an old bowling game (I think the name is just "bowl"), which has a black bullet symbolizing the bowling ball going from one side of the screen to the other. When you hit the space bar it stops the side to side movement and shoots the ball down the alley. On a newer system, however, the ball goes side to side so amazingly fast that it's impossible to try to play the game with any skill involved (it's just a matter of chance because it's going so fast).

Have any of you readers heard of such a "processor throttle"? If you have, please let us know and we may feature the answer in an upcoming column.

Dark Forces and RAM
In a previous column I talked about the Marathon series of first-person shoot 'em up games. Another first-person shooter game which I really enjoyed was Star Wars Dark Forces. I remember when I got it for Christmas (this must have been 1994 or 1995) I installed it, but when I tried to play the game I think it either crashed the computer or came up with an error.

At the time I was really shook up, because it was quite a blow to have a $55 Christmas present not work at all. Dark Forces was one of those games I had seen in MacMall and MacZone for months and really wanted. I had asked my parents for the game many times, and finally I got it for Christmas and it didn't even work!

Luckily, I went outside to do something else and when I came back my dad had worked some magic on the computer and had the game working. It turned out that with only 8 MB of RAM in our old Performa and Ram Doubler turned on, it just wouldn't run. So my dad setup a special Extensions set that only had things Dark Forces needed to run, and with that setup the game would run.

In the end, my brother and I had a lot of fun playing Dark Forces, which really is a pretty good game. Never before could we fight Storm Troopers and Boba Fett in any game, and the graphics and gameplay were pretty good. The major complaint I have is that they never came out with Dark Forces' sequel for the Mac! According to MacMilitia.com's John Norton, Lucas Arts could "easily" port Dark Forces 2 because the game engine has already been ported -- in the Droid Works children's game. Oh well.

That's all for this week's This Old Gamer -- remember to send in your stories, questions, and comments! Your letter might be published in a future column!

-Joey Cooper got vintage games for Christmas this year.

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