If Monks Had Macs
| Rating: | |
| Category: | |
| Perspective: | |
| Year released: | |
| Author: | Brian Thomas |
| Publisher: | The Voyager Company |
| Engine: | HyperCard |
ifmonkscd.cdr_.sit (49.83 MB)
MD5: 6935a3df637e36769fd1085e9654332c For System 6.x - Mac OS 9
It's hard to define exactly what If Monks Had Macs is. On just one CD-ROM, you can enjoy fiction from G.K. Chesterton and Nathaniel Hawthorne; read essays about various subjects such as art; learn more about the JFK assassination; and play games like Meat & Conversation, an adventure game in which you play as a monk whose vivid imagination defies reality and questions the human soul. Though its hard to define as a game, all of this content makes If Monks Had Macs a truly mind opening experience that is hard to forget and even harder to pull away from. The software was later released as freeware in 2009 and included new content not seen in the original CD-ROM release.
Description source: Adventure Legends/If Monks had Macs
See also Applelinks.com and developer's page Rivertext.com who made this freeware in 2009.
Amazon.com Buy link: If Monks Had Macs
CompatibilityArchitecture: 68k
This is a Mac-only CD-ROM.
System requirements:
System 6.0.7 or higher
Any color Macintosh
3.5MB RAM free
HyperCard 2.1 or later
13" (640x480) monitor
Single Speed (1X) CD-ROM Drive
Note: Despite what the manual and official system requirements state, the majority of this disc will work quite well on a monochrome Mac. You must copy the Monks Fonts briefcase from the CD-ROM to your System Fonts Folder on your hard drive. Then you must select each individual stack directly with HyperCard 2.1 or above. You can also copy individual stacks from the CD onto your hard drive. There are only a handful of stacks that will not display correctly because they are hard coded for color, like The Tower of Babel.
Comments
Located on the "Macworld SuperStacks: Winners Showcase" is the original freeware "If Monks had Macs" from 1987. - Missing from the Winners Showcase is the accompanying addition, "The White Rose".
The original "If Monks had Macs", plus the missing "The White Rose" can still be downloaded from rivertext.com, as mentioned in the comments by Slik, below.
Because of some of the sound resources used in the original version, this early version is not compatible with the Mac II or newer Macs and only runs on Mono Macs like the Plus and SE, etc. (& Mini vMac).
I made a podcast documentary about Monks based on an interview with Brian: http://ludiphilia.net/9
I think it does work with 6.0.7. and above. Also the CD-ROM is made up of many smaller stacks, some which were created with Voyager Expanded Books Toolkit. I haven't tried it, but some of the stacks may be extracted and run individually under Hypercard 2.1. This means that it should be theoretically possible to run these on a Classic B/W Mac. For example, JFK Extras! on the CD-ROM looks like a straight 1 bit B/W Hypercard Stack from the late 80s.
Rather buried in the author's site is the original 1988 freeware version which works nicely on System 6.0.8 in Mini vMac. He requests that the hosting page not be linked, but you can get there from the "archived here" link at bottom of his "ancient history" page. I remember seeing that version in college; it epitomized just how cool Macs were compared to any other personal computer in the 1980's.
Made me think of this:
http://travelograph.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Travelograph_monks-ma...
The system requirements are not so clear as it seems. Is this item compatible to System 6, maybe?