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Mac SE: system error when sound plays on very old games (but Mac is not frozen)
Posted by: theirongiant on 2025-04-15 09:29:09 I have a Macintosh SE FDHD and am attempting to play some older games off the floppy disks. The built-in 40 MB hard drive has System 7.1, but I can also boot from a floppy disk. One game that works perfectly is The Fool's Errand, which comes on two disks. The Game disk has a modified System 3.2 file (some fonts and drivers were removed to make room), and Finder 5.3. The sounds work perfectly, and the game is awesome. When I've tried a few other games, they don't work as well. For example: I tried making a boot disk with System 5.1, and loading just one game on that disk: Columns. The game loads and plays fine UNTIL I complete a column, and it produces a sound. No sound is played. Instead, the message appears: "Sorry, a system error has occurred" with error code "ID = 12". I had similar issues starting the game Lancelot. The game loads, "System Error" ID = 11 appears, but I can still sort of interact with it in the background. I also installed System 5.1 on a 20MB BlueSCSI volume, and the Mac boots fine. I still have the same issue with sounds on some games. Dungeon of Doom v5.4 played sounds without a problem. Crystal Quest plays just fine as well. The first time I went through the gateway, I lol'ed. The games in question are all those that would have been published prior to 1989 and the introduction of System 6. The SE is supposed to be pretty flexible in that it can (and clearly does) boot really old versions of Mac OS. Am I just hitting compatibility issues with really old-ass games designed for the 128k / 512k systems? Should I boot System 1 or System 2 for these instead?
Posted by: adespoton on 2025-04-15 10:04:37 Any chance you can fill in some of the games you're testing on https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wg45xflCn8MAPvE0H4un7OmbavRNW5qlSHbeZg39Q9A/ ? So far, it's mostly just got results from G4 hardware and emulators testing these older games.
Posted by: volvo242gt on 2025-04-15 10:16:20 Probably would be worth sticking with 3.2 and older on those early games. More likely to function correctly. Suspect the game is expecting to have its code loaded into a certain memory address and gets confused with System 4.1 and higher.
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