Discworld II on OS X 17 September 2008

Update

You can now play Discworld on OSX using ScummVM

Back in March I explained how you could get the original Discworld game working on OS X. Well now, I am going to cover how to get the second game working, Discworld II: Missing Presumed…!? Be warned this is not quite so elegant as before.

You are going to need:

• Boxer
• A legal version of Discworld II for the PC

This is the second Discworld game. What do you mean, ‘’I haven’t finished the first one yet?’’

Good grief, some people… look, give the prunes to the fishmonger, get the dragon to breathe on the mirror, throw the Black Monk to the crocodiles and shoot the dragon with the other dragon. Done that? Good. Now, if everyone’s caught up…

Terry Pratchett

• First you need to run Boxer, which will ask where you want to store all of the game files. Well if you followed my last tutorial you should already have a DOS Games folder, so if so you can click ‘Use my DOS Games folder’, if not… now is the time to make one. Boxer will treat this as your ‘C Drive’.
• Stick the first Discworld II CD in your CD Drive, (or open your iso), and find the Setup.exe application. You need to open this with Boxer. (File > Open With > Boxer).
• Boxer will bring up a DOS prompt, and ask you if you want to install the game, unsurprisingly you do so type ‘install’ at the prompt… minus the speech marks.
• The install program will ask you if you want to do a graphics test… You can hit escape unless you want to see some alarming green boxes appear.
• Right time to install the game. Just follow the instructions, hitting the Return key when prompted.
• Next up is the sound setup. You want to ‘Select and configure digital audio driver’. Find ‘Creative Labs Soundblaster or 100% compatible’, you’ll find it up at the top of the list and hit return. Then select ‘attempt to config driver automatically’, again hit return. Once you are finished with that, you can select ‘Done’ from the main screen.

You can now quit Boxer for the time being. Inside your DOS Games folder, you’ll find a folder called ‘DW2’. This is the messy bit. Multi-CD games are a bit tricky, and Boxer is hamstrung by limitations in DOSBox. What you need to do is to copy the original CD-ROM into the game package (drag the CD icon from the desktop while holding down Option), then rename the copied folder to Volumename.cdrom, (it will probably be called DW2CD1_ENG.cdrom but it depends on what version of the game you have). Then eject the CD. When you launch the package next time, Boxer will detect the CD ‘folder’ and mount it as a real CD with whatever volume name you specified. When you come to need the second CD, you will have to open up the folder and replace the contents of CD1 with CD2. Sorry, but there does not appear to be a way round this as yet.

You can now rename DW2 folder DW2.boxer and get ready to play.

Before you do, you might have to configure the keyboard keys to recognise F1, please refer to my earlier tutorial as to how to do this.

So, all that remains is to open up your DW2.boxer file, and play. When it firsts runs, you will be asked what file you want to run. You can select ‘DWB.exe’ and then click ‘Run every time’. Job done.

Again, my thanks go to Alun Bestor who helped me in the difficult bits, if you find yourself terribly pleased about being able to run these games on your mac, please drop Alun a tip, as a way of saying thanks and to keep him developing Boxer.

Finally, I should note that Discworld II is not freeware at the moment, so it is illegal to download the CD image. For the time being, please purchase a second-hand copy on Amazon or elsewhere.