I managed to get Rise of Nations and a couple of other games running.
The problem seemed to be related to a new addition in the disc
formatting options that Apple made available in 10.4. It is now
possible to have HFS+ case sensitive which is what ultimatively killed
Rise of Nations for me. A lot of files had their file extension in
upper case but the game looked for the file with a lower case
extension. Unfortunately I couldn't just rename all file extensions to
lower case (actually I did, thanks to Automator...) because some files
seemed to be supposed to have upper case extensions.
In my book that's just sloppy coding though it probably came from the
Windows version directly as AFAIK the Windows filesystems don't bother
with case sensitivity at all. And as long as the HFS+ most Mac OS X
users use didn't bother with case sensitivity as well nobody noticed
the problem.
While I have now "fixed" the problem by doing a clean install over a
freshly formatted disc without the "Case Sensitive" option set I don't
think this should be the policy of Macsoft for other customers who have
the same problem. Going through the code and making sure the files have
the same case there as the actual ones on the disk is the only option.
In the meantime a tool that fixes the cases of the affected files would
be apprechiated.
Regards,
Sacha
>> Stay informed about: Rise of Nations - Problems on iMac G5 with Mac OS X 10.4.2