Is Abandon Them Mac only?

I’m trying to play Abandon Them, and it appears to be a dmg file. Is there any way to play this on windows?

If not, I think this is the first ‘mac only’ game IFComp has had. (Cat Scratch was an Android APK, so also not playable on windows without emulator).

It’s not the only non-Windows-compatible game in the current comp: Alice Blue apparently runs only on Linux. (And with a rather fiddly list of instructions for getting it to run, even if you have Linux.)

I poked at the file a bit to see if I could mount it under Linux, but wasn’t able to – which surprised me, because I’ve managed to mount .dmg files easily enough before. The results, all in all, were kind of weird.

sudo mount -t hfs AbandonThem.dmg /mnt/temp and sudo mount -t hfsplus AbandonThem.dmg /mnt/temp both give mount's generic “wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0, missing codepage or helper program, or other error” error message. The file command suggests it has an MBR boot sector, plus another partition, which it doesn’t identify beyond saying that it’s type 0xEE, which is apparently a partition type used by GUID-capable software to fool older MBR-related software into not accidentally overwriting a partition they don’t understand. (But the parted and gparted tools, which should understand GUID-based partitioning, see the image as containing only blank, unallocated space.)

Thinking that maybe it was compressed in an unusual way, I tried using dmg2img to convert it, but that too just gives an “inflation failed” message, with no further information, on partition one. Running it with increased verbosity suggests that dmg2img thinks that the file contains eight partitions, seven of which are only 430 bytes in size. (Partition 4 is apparently 4232 bytes. No, these numbers don’t come anywhere near adding up to the file size on disk.)

Running fdisk on it prints a size warning, “GPT PMBR size mismatch (136507 != 59505) will be corrected by w(rite).”

None of this inherently suggests any trickery of any kind; it might just be that the image was created by software that creates comparatively unusual .dmg files (or maybe just a newer version of macOS that the Linux tools haven’t yet caught up with). It seems weird to me that disk-imaging software would create an image file with multiple partitions and a partition table, but then, I’m not a Mac person, so maybe that’s the way that Apple or third-party software designers are designing imaging software for Macs these days.

However, the 7z program managed to decompress it (good ol’ 7-zip!), and it looks like yes, there is no story on there that’s not a Mac-only executable.

I’d guess it’s an APFS DMG and not an HFS+ DMG.

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Alice Blue seems similar,perhaps only running on Linux? Here are the instructions for play:

Running Aliceblue Under Linux

Aliceblue should run on most Linux distributions providing they meet
the following criteria:

  1. You should be running the Gnome desktop.
  2. The display server should be X11.org and not Wayland.
    You can check this by entering this command in a terminal window:
    echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
    and it should display x11
  3. You should have the following packages installed:
    On Ubuntu-type systems enter the following:
    sudo apt-get install xterm dconf vorbis-tools wmctrl
    On Fedora-type systems enter the following:
    sudo dnf install xterm dconf vorbis-tools wmctrl
  4. You also need to adjust your gnome terminal preferences:
    Under TEXT select custom font and set it to Monospace Regular 14
    Under COLOURS uncheck “Use colours from system theme” and
    uncheck “Use transparency from system theme”
  5. Adjust your sound volume.
  6. Download and unzip Aliceblue.zip
  7. Change to the Alice directory (cd Alice) and enter this command:
    ./aliceblue 12
    where 12 is the font size you wish to use.

A quick look suggests that ALICE BLUE is written entirely as a single bash script, bash being a language for Unix shell scripting. I guess it might be possible to get it running under macOS, although the specificity of the setup instructions and the fact that the game immediately performs some trickery with the terminal suggest that might be a fiddly process, if it can be made to work at all.

My best guess would be that the easiest way for non-Linux users to play it would be to run a recent version of Ubuntu in VirtualBox, then play it in there.

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Thanks!

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Hey All!

This is Alan, creator of Abandon Them. I saw this post and realized there could be a problem with judges accessing the file.

As far as I know, the dmg file can only be accessed on a mac. This is my first time entering the competition, so I wasn’t sure if more than one file could be entered. I’m working on a mac, so I made it a mac file.

Are most files here .exe? I can can convert it and reupload so more people will be able to take a look at my entry. Also for those with questions about the file conversion and its origins, I made the application in Godot Engine. Not sure if that helps any.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention and I hope everyone is enjoying the other entries so far!! Will reupload soon!

Alan

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Most works are actually released either in HTML or a format that can be played with a HTML/JS interpreter (Glulx, TADS 3, etc). It does look like Godot can build to HTML, so if you could do that it would be the most accessible.

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Hi @Dannii! Thank you for filling me in!

I’ve uploaded and HTML file to itch.io before, but I wasn’t sure if that was permitted in this competition. Do you know if that’s an okay thing to do? Otherwise I don’t know how to upload an HTML file so people can access the game.

I’m still new to programming/ interactive fiction. I appreciate your help!

Alan

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You can contact the comp organisers at ifcomp@ifcomp.org and they’ll be able to work through the details with you. It may be possible to just upload a zip of the HTML, JS, images etc, that’s how a lot of the other entries were submitted. (And if you want to you can probably upload it to itch.io as well.) I’m not familiar with Godot so can’t really say much more sorry.

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@Dannii Thanks for your help! I’ll contact them and figure it out!

In the meantime, the game is now uploaded as an .exe file. Since I can’t run it on my computer, if someone could confirm that it’s runnable on Windows, I would appreciate it!

I’ll likely end up going the HTML route, but this is a good step towards more people accessing the file I think :slight_smile:

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Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work, at least on my machine. When I start the exe, there is a console window and a dialog box, both saying:

Error: Could not load game data at path ‘.’. Is the .pck file missing?

Fortunately, I think that can be fixed, as the error message says, by distributing the AbandomThem.pck file along with the AbandomThem.exe file (put them both in the same directory and zip that up for downloading from the IF comp site).
I got it running by doing this:

  1. Get the Mac-compatible .dmg file (which I had already downloaded in the big all-games download).
  2. Unpack it with 7-zip (as @patrick_mooney mentioned above).
  3. From the unpacked directory Abandon Them.app\Contents\Resources, copy the file Abandon Them.pck to the directory where the Windows executable AbandomThem.exe is.
  4. Rename Abandon Them.pck to AbandomThem.pck, so that the filename matches that of the .exe file (except for the extension, of course).
  5. Run the executable.

Also, there’s another problem: on the comp site, the download now points to the .exe file, meaning that Mac users can’t run the game.
To ensure that most people can play the game, you could try to export it as HTML, if that’s possible without loss of features, or alternatively, there should be two download links on the IF Comp site (one for the Windows version, one for the Mac version).
If the comp site does not easily provide that possibility, then the easiest solution would be to bundle both versions together into a zip file for a single download.
(I should mention that it’s also possible that the IF comp site gave me the appropriate download link for Windows because it had detected on which operating system my browser is running, and that it would provide the Mac-compatible download link for MacOS visitors.)

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Hey All!

To update anyone checking back on this thread, I decided to host the game through itch.io. A link to the game is now in the blurb.

I will likely switch the game file back to .dmg (Mac only) as the .exe is not working.

The itch.io file is up and running and should work on everything besides mobile.

Thanks for your patience while I figured this out,
Alan

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Hi Alan, it’s great that the game is running online, cheers! :+1:

As I said in my post above, I think both points are fixable:

  • The .exe should work if you distribute the resource file “AbandomThem.pck” alongside it in the same directory.
  • You can put both the Mac Version and the Windows version into a single zip file which you then distribute via the “Download” link on the IF comp site.

(Feel free to ask here or in a private message if it’s not clear how to do this.)

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Thanks for your feedback and support! I haven’t had much time on my home computer the last few days, but I should be able to put together a zip file tonight. I will definitely follow up with you if I can’t figure it out!

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Online version seems to do the trick. I have a Mac as well and ran the game there. The experiences are slightly different but mostly the same so the itch.io solution seems to be a good option for non-Mac users.

FWIW, I can confirm that the .exe plus the extracted .pck works on Windows.