Ambrosia Software Web Board: Holy Cow You're All Still Here! - Ambrosia Software Web Board

Title says it all. All of you familiar screen names, and even some new ones, still here after I stopped posting in... 2005? Cythera was the first place I ever role-played (although I see we're still calling it Team Stories). You guys were one of my touchstones of sanity as I was very busy having bad reactions with the ADHD meds my doctor was feeding me, struggling with my overprotective, hyper-conservative parents & upbringing, and failing out of my freshman and sophomore years at Texas A&M.

And you're still here! And posting! And writing Team Stories! I feel like I've stumbled upon an ancient civilization and found that they're still just doing their thing. This is so cool you guys are still here.

We're kind of like Atlantis, barely scraping by deep in the ocean internet where few dare to venture. Good to see an old face again.

Pretty much everyone still on the forums goes on IRC too, if you feel like stopping by to chat. We're on #cythera on Afternet now.

Sacred bull, a visitor!

There are only two forums that are really active on the AWB these days. I'm not sure I would have guessed ten years ago that Cythera would be one of them.

(Did you play Ares back in the day? Let me plug Antares for you)

Wowev! Whenever I meet one of the ancient Cythera writers, I don't know what to say except, "Oh my turtle, it's really you! Can I have your autograph? I'm a big fan!" I didn't become active on this board until 2006 (I think?), but I've read all the old stories and I have so much respect for the writers ^_^ I remember you as the mastermind behind The Alliance of Living Things :D I liked how you tried to keep that story accurate to the setting of Cythera (unlike the other TSes around that time). Anyway, it's very nice to meet you! I'm glad this community was able to help you through rough times; it has surely helped me through a lot too.

The current TS, Out of Reflection, has been going on for years and is very slow-moving. But, we still have a few people working on various Cythera-related things. Kat is working on writing a real novel that's sort of based on Cythera, Tyry, Sely, and I are writing chronicles, and Bryce is doing stuff with the Cythera data. Cythera (the game) is awesome, and Cythera (the community) is even awesomer :D

Say, how are you guys even playing Cythera now days, since it won't run on OS X? Is there a reliable Classic emulator or something?

I actually managed to track down a good OS 9 emulator, at this link: http://www.macwindow...ntain-Lion.html
Though that page is a couple years old, the version for Mountain Lion seems to work ok on my iMac running Yosemite.

Sheepsaver will emulate any Classic architecture you want, down to System 7. However, I'm using the version with the "Chubby Bunny" ROM with OS 9 pre-installed, because I'm not willing to dig my old monster of an eMac out of my parents' garage just so I can build a ROM from it. (Here's a direct link to the .zip) But I know every one of you has an old Mac sitting around somewhere, making it legal for you to have the ROM and OS, right? />

I just booted it up and tried it out with Cythera, and it seems to run just fine. It's a little complicated to actually get Cythera on there, because the "ChubbyBunny" ROM does not come with a web browser pre-installed:
1. While the emulator is off, drop the Cythera installer and one of the empty disk images that come with the download into your users/shared/ (Do not open up the disk image on OS X, because as long as it's mounted in OS X, the emulated machine cannot see it.)
2. Run the emulator. On the emulated desktop, there will be three drives: "Classic HD", the virtual disk you dropped in the Shared folder, and a "Unix" drive, which is also apparently your Shared folder.
3. The Cythera installer will be on the drive labelled "Unix", and you can copy it over and install it on the blank virtual hard disk. I wouldn't recommend installing it to the virtual disk labelled "Classic HD", as that seems to be just for the OS. Save your games to the blank disk, too.
4. The first time you run the game, the game may crash and you have to restart the virtual machine because it freaks out over some sort of Quicktime conflict, but Cythera should run fine after that.
5. Don't forget to register! Your old registration code still remarkably seems to work.

I'm sure that would be less complicated if I installed a browser and got the virtual machine talking to the internet, but meh.

Edit: It turns out that "ChubbyBunny" even comes with ResEdit pre-installed, so any of y'all wanting to mod EV Classic or Override the old fashioned way can do so.

This post has been edited by Big Joe: 12 May 2015 - 02:48 PM

Congrats on installing an emulator! Luckily Bryce installed Basilisk for me, because I had no idea how to do it (even with instructions...) @_@

Is Yosemite an operating system? That doesn't sound like a kind of cat. Is it OS 11?

BreadWorldMercy453, on 12 May 2015 - 03:54 PM, said:

Yosemite is OS X 10.10, the current version. It's really nice, and also free if you have a Mac. No more paying for OS updates.

BreadWorldMercy453, on 12 May 2015 - 08:53 AM, said:

It's like… fan-fiction fan-fiction, I think we established? Which has since spawned its own fan-fiction.

Big Joe, on 12 May 2015 - 01:14 PM, said:

*cough* Yeah, we're totally all still playing it. >_>

This post has been edited by iKaterei: 12 May 2015 - 04:46 PM

iKaterei, on 12 May 2015 - 04:45 PM, said:

I thought so. After all, you can only play through it so many times in the 16 years since it was released.

Which for me is zero. I can never play it now; have a reputation to uphold. :V

Welcome back, Joe: it's always nice to see old faces around .

BreadWorldMercy453, on 12 May 2015 - 08:53 AM, said:

Actually, I think you might have been active earlier: it was probably 2006 when everyone discovered you were a girl .

The Alliance of Living Things was the ongoing TS when I first discovered the board. I lurked for awhile before joining though, after Echoes had started. I think the TSs have played a major role in sustaining the board, even though the current set has gone a bit long.

Big Joe said:

Sheepshaver is the emulator that I and Wizard use. He wrote a guide to setting it up, although he last updated it in 2012 and it looks like you already figured out that part anyway .

iKaterei, on 12 May 2015 - 06:30 PM, said:

Indeed, you don't even dare watch the youtube playthrough that I created .

Selax, on 12 May 2015 - 06:51 PM, said:

Did that TS get finished? It's not linked in Best of Cythera.

Quote

Hey, I watched some of it!

iKaterei, on 12 May 2015 - 07:21 PM, said:

Definitely not. We successfully rounded up a handful of players that wanted to ride in a titan-cavalry against some unknown dark force, and we were trying to establish an alliance between plants, animals, humans, and elemental powers to combat it. We got waylaid by ruffians, and then I flunked out of college and mostly stopped posting.

We should totally resurrect it! We could call it "The Alliance of Living Things, part 2" and we could each hijack a long-gone writer's character :D

BreadWorldMercy453, on 12 May 2015 - 08:58 PM, said:

I still have no idea where I was going with it. Most of my thought process was "ooh! cavalry!" as opposed to planning much for the story.

TSes are just hard! If you plan ahead, it causes problems, and if you don't plan ahead, it causes problems.

Clearly the solution is to plan ahead and then throw out the entire plan.

:o Y'all should try that with OoR!

Hey, it's nice to see an old face again! We've missed having you arou-

Big Joe, on 12 May 2015 - 04:07 PM, said:

Lost all respect.

BreadWorldMercy453, on 13 May 2015 - 08:05 AM, said:

I think I'm going to try to catch up on the current TSes before I bother rebooting a 10 year old one.

Avatara, on 13 May 2015 - 11:42 AM, said:

It's nice in that it's free, and I do like it better than the cat-named ones. Would have been nicer if they hadn't dumbed it down from Mavericks, though, I agree.

Edit: Ha! They have a Hector emoticon! I really haven't been around in a while, the whole forum system is different from what I remember. I remember hard-to-read maroon backgrounds for Cythera boards.

This post has been edited by Big Joe: 13 May 2015 - 01:28 PM

I miss the maroon background, it was Cythera-y. But, it's probably for the best that it changed, this way is easier on the eyes.

You're going to read the current TSes? That's quite an undertaking! The current series ("Dark Mirror" and "Out of Reflection, Into Reality" are two parts of the same story) is hundreds of thousands of words long! @_@ It's crazy, man. I mean, it's a really impressive story, but very long and confusing. Oh, and there's soundtracks available on the Glass Menagerie thread (those are still there, right?) that you can listen to while reading - really adds to the experience ^_^

This post has been edited by BreadWorldMercy453: 13 May 2015 - 01:58 PM

BreadWorldMercy453, on 13 May 2015 - 11:36 AM, said:

All two of us, you mean?



Incidentally, as previously mentioned, there have also been a number of good chrons recently. Some of them are fairly lengthy but worth reading if one has the time, although it should be noted that some are tied into previous TSs. At least, I would certainly recommend reading Pallas's completion of Grapper's Return.

Selax, on 16 May 2015 - 11:08 PM, said:

Yeah!

I don't mean to distract you from reading Dark Mirror, but I second the suggestion of reading Grapper's Return ^_^ Did you read the original Grapper's Return, Joe? The continuation totally matches the awesomeness of the original, plus all the chapters are fairly short, so it's easy to get into :D

It's amazing to see some of the previous members return! And such a small world too. Do you still live in Central Texas, Big Joe? I was surprised to see that you were a former A&M student; I'm a student there now!