[plug] To emulate or not to emulate...

[Carl Gherardi]

Hey Onno,

On 5/13/05, Onno Benschop <onno at itmaze.com.au> wrote:
> (With apologies to William Shakespeare)
> 
> Challenge:
> 
>     Find a way to build a bootable CD that will run on many (perhaps
>     lower-end) PC's that will play an existing educational title that
>     was developed in MacroMedia Director 5 in 1997. The title runs on
>     Windows 3.1, Win95 or Macintosh OS 7.1 and requires QuickTime 2.1
>     and some fonts.
 
>     * To emulate a Macintosh requires an Apple ROM image which is not free

PearPC http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/ is one which you've probably
used in this category - i've used it for toying with osx stuff but
never os <= 9

If you are looking at a classroom environment, then it may be pretty
cheap to pick up the required copies of os7 through broken hardware.

>     * It is possible that the software might be able to be imported into
>       the current version of Director, exported as a QuickTime movie,

If it doesn't require user response, then using an mplayer enabled
knoppix distro would probably work at this point. It would probably
work best if exporting as an older version of quicktime.

>       then imported into Flash, for which there is a Linux player. (This
>       would not be trivial and is likely not going to actually work.)

I think this is probably the best free alternative you have.

> Has anyone got any bright ideas?

If you aren't recording interactive content and you can just turn it
into a movie then you have a few options as quite a few cd distros
deal with mplayer, xine etc and there are quite a few apps that will
let you create video files using running applications that run under
win95.

If it is interactive then your options are a bit more limited, and the
director->quicktime->flash path might be the only real solution.

Carl G