(First published December 17, 2010)
I have acquired my brand new 21-inch iMac desktop 'puter. It is a thing of great beauty. It has 8 gigs of RAM and a 2T hard drive. (I also acquired an iPod classic, which fortunately cost considerably less than 400 monies.) As I'm making more money from Kirkus, I ought to be able to pay Dad back in about six months. Am alllmost halfway there already.
It arrived, I unboxed it, and of course the first thing it asked me to do was to download all my data from my time capsule. That took all night, 12 hours, but when I got up the next morning, there was my old 'puter right there on the new 'puter! It copied and installed my wallpaper. I didn't have to reload the printer software--it just worked. It even saved my progress in a stupid little match-three game I had going. Everything. No data lost at all, and I only had to click one button.
But the coolest thing is that instead of having my Windows XP on Bootcamp, now I have it in a virtual machine. I got VM Fusion instead of Parallels because it had a $30 rebate, and the two are virtually identical in what they do. This thing loaded the XP program easily. It uses the Mac mouse (the new, spiffy magic mouse, with just a flat smooth surface that scrolls up, down and sideways). I can drag and drop stuff between the Mac and the XP window. I can have it go full screen, or run in a window. I can take "snapshots" and reload those if I want to undo some problem. I can just minimize the whole XP window and surf on my Mac while stuff loads.
The only problem is that two of my older games have bad color depth. But they run fine. Newer games look perfect.
I'll have to start Ghost in the Sheet all over again, but here's something fun. I can play the game in an XP floating window, and have this blog open to write as I play! Hah! (Addendum: no, I can't. The game captures the cursor. Might as well run it in full screen, then.)
First though, I have a copy of the Lemony Snickett's A Series of Unfortunate Events game. I've had it for years and insist that I will play it because I adore Tim Curry's voice work. He narrates the game, brilliantly, just as he read the books, brilliantly--the kid actors are another story, alas. It would never load on my former bootcamp XP. However, it loads on Fusion (although with lousy color in the animations--the rest of the scenery is fine--it's just that the Beaudelaire children glow even with the brightness turned down). I tried playing it on my Dad's HP laptop with Vista and it seemed to run fine, but it turns out that it left out whole areas, and stopped cold when I was about halfway through. I won't know if the problem is in the disc, or if it was incompatibility with Vista until I get to that point.
It isn't the type of game I really like much. You have to use the keyboard and the mouse, and it's a bit of a shooter, jumper style thing like the Harry Potter games. But I've had so many false starts with it on the laptop that I'm now pretty good at the combat. I should be able to zip through to the halfway mark in a day or two. [Edit: I got through it! I think there may be something wrong with the disc at that point, because the background color looked unstable, but the game let me into the tunnel where it had frozen on the Vista laptop even after reloading. So I can probably finish! Hooray!]
But you cannot revert to an earlier saved game. The game saves at set points, and that's where you start. If you missed anything, too bad. Lousy game design. However, I did miss something, so I just reverted to an earlier snapshot on my virtual machine!
I am loving this. I don't have to restart the whole 'puter and have my Mac unavailable to me while I'm in Windows. Now I have both running right on the same screen.
And Fusion even gives you a free one-year subscription to McAfee security.
So I'm set! Let the games begin! Again! (Um, after two more Kirkus books and Lemony Snickett)
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