Help me relive my pinball addiction

November 19, 2012 6:56 AM

I decided to take my old G3 iMac down from the attic and play some old games. The old computer still works great, and yet there was a problem...

I wanted to play Fantastic Journey, an awesome old pinball machine simulator I used to be addicted to (anybody know it?) So I plugged in my old iMac and fired up good ol' OS 9, and that's when I encountered problem no. 1: The iMac's CD drive appears to have conked out. So I plugged in my trusty external BluRay drive and inserted my original Fantastic Journey CD. I wasn't sure that would work, what with the ancient OS and the new optical drive, but it actually did; the CD loaded fine and the volume appeared on the desktop. But then came problem no. 2: upon launching the game, a dialog box insisted: "Please insert your Fantastic Journey CD." Somehow, the game only reads the internal optical drive and ignores the external USB drive.
So, does anyone know a way around this?

posted by Silky Slim to computers & internet (5 answers total)

You might start with trying the good ol' compressed-air trick and clean out your old CD drive.
posted by Namlit at 7:07 AM on November 19, 2012

I'm a bit rusty on OS9, but couldn't you make a disk image of the CD? I vaguely remember doing that trick with some CD required games and having some success.
posted by littlerobothead at 7:13 AM on November 19, 2012

Depending on how badly you want to do this and how handy you are with hardware, it looks like it's not that difficult to install a new optical drive.
posted by Gev at 7:35 AM on November 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

Not at all sure if this will work, but it's worth a shot.

- Put the CD in a newer Mac with OS X.
- Open Disk Utility and create a new disk image (say, fantastic.dmg) from the CD.
- Open Terminal, navigate to the directory with your disk image, and run: hdiutil convert fantastic.dmg -format Rdxx -o fantastic.img to convert it to an OS-9-style disk image.
- Get fantastic.img to your G3 iMac via the internet or an external disk. Cross your fingers and try to open it.
posted by whitecedar at 8:13 AM on November 19, 2012

I would try running the game in emulation. You can set up SheepShaver on a more modern computer, and run OS 9 inside it, along with your game. Let me know if you need help setting it up.

You also could try acquiring the Windows version of your game, if one exists. Windows often has better backwards compatibility for games.
posted by vasi at 12:59 PM on November 19, 2012