It seems to me that they owe you a refund. From the way it sounds, they did no testing at all of this product on a Macintosh.

I liked huskerchad's idea, but I think for it would work, one would have to be able to tell the application to store its preferences, cache, data files, etc on the disk image, and the disk image itself would have to be quite large.

Any solutions yet?
 

I just purchased JumpStart Phonics. Reading the package it seemed to meet my Macs' specifications ideally. Wrong.

First I put it into my G3 800mhz iBook running 10.3.5 (640mb RAM). Running it from the CD ROM, or hard disk (or variety of disk images) produces the "disk space critically low" error. Booting into OS 9 makes no difference.

Now here's the strange part. If I put the CD into my G4 800mhz Quicksilver (1gb RAM), also running 10.3.5, the program runs fine, either from the HD or CD-ROM. I have no idea why. JumpStart also works fine in a 1ghz G4 eMac with 640mb of RAM. The only problem is, I need this program on my laptop -- not my desktop.

Maybe I will play with SheepShaver tomorrow and see what happens. If anyone has any ideas, please throw them my way. It really irritates me that the company seems to have done NO extensive testing of this software on Macs, and refuses to acknowledge it's a real problem. I'm only theorizing that this could be a problem with portables; if that's the case, then what might the next experimental step be?

No answers to offer, just an observation that Almist had further correspondence with the company with no joy:
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthr...threadid=71868

A solution but sad one at that
 

Hi guys,

Its been quite a while since i posted this.

I have come to terms with it and guess what, my solution if you call it one
is to run Virtual PC 6.1 to run my JumpStart apps.

Never really liked running VPC but because of JumpStart I did not have a choice. Runs real slow but bearable for my kids.

Danny

I'm going to experiment some more today. There is some reason it's working on some of my machines and not others, and I just can't accept that it's because of a G3 CPU, or any of the ludicrous explanations the company is giving. I sent them an E-Mail by the way, which may or may not generate a response.

Also, does anyone else find it deceptive they list this program as OS X compatible when it just runs in classic? There's plenty of people without classic installed in their OS X installations that would be in for a shock once arriving at home.

After hours of experimentation I may be making some progress. I found that the program will run if I put my PowerMac in target disk mode, and boot the iBook from it. This kind of rules out the whole G3/HFS+ issue; it has nothing to do with that.

It may have something to do with portables though, specifically their 4200 RPM hard drive, or possible software for energy saving. You can follow along with what I've done so far over here.

JumpStart actually runs well with Win98SE in VPC -- but I'm determined to get this little program working natively.

You should run the "Console" app and look for any error messages that might be relevant.

Console doesn't say anything, probably because this is an OS 9 app. My next step is to see what may be different about the OS 9 system folders on the PowerMac and iBook. What's confusing is I believe the OS 9 system folders for both systems were copied from the same location, and should be identical. I'll check it out tomorrow.

BTW: Is there a good program that could help me compare the contents of the two folders to find missing or additional files between the two?

if you are not afraid of the terminal, try:
cheers, pink

I compared the two folders with diff, and the only thing different was the MacOS ROM file. Right now, I'm acting on someone else's suggestion to defragment the hard disk. If that doesn't work, I'll try copying my PowerMac's System 9 folder to the iBook, even if diff doesn't see any differences.

More Strangeness
 

I defragmented, then used Disk Warrior to repair the directory, and also repaired file permissions afterward. That didn't work.

I copied the System 9 folder from my PowerMac to the iBook, and then started classic using that folder. Still didn't work.

I'm still thinking this is some weird issue where this program hates my iBook's 4200 RPM drive, so I copied the iBook's System 9 folder to an external 7200 RPM firewire drive, and then started classic from that drive's System 9 folder. Sure enough, the program launched flawlessly!

Still not a viable solution though, since I can't lug a firewire drive with me. What if the bare essentials of OS 9 were put into a ram disk somehow, and then classic started from it? That could be an option, though it's really not very intuitive.

There has to be some way to hack around this.

I have gotten a few OS 9 only programs to work by installing in them in the /Users/Shared folder. That's why in my earlier post I thought it was a permissions problem. The user not being able to read/write back to the application's folder when it was in the Applications (OS 9) folder or at the root level of the HD.

This program doesn't write to the applications folder; in fact, it doesn't even need to be installed on the HD to launch. It only leaves a few files (depending on how many players there are in the game) in a folder within the System 9 preferences folder.

Everything is really pointing to this being some kind of weird drive speed issue, especially since Almist is having the same problem on his PowerBook.

I forgot to mention Vivendi Universal responded to me today. Aside from a list of template answers (like make sure the CD is clean, disable extensions, etc) they noted that they do not test their products on laptops.

Right now I'm trying to see if it's possible to open the application file with a hex editor and somehow bypass whatever is causing this check to occur. I'm not too savvy when it comes to 'cracking' things though, so I don't know how it will turn out.

The first thing I would do is determine whether that message (about disk space) is coming directly from the application or if it is coming from a system library used by the application. You might be able to determine this by using '/usr/bin/strings' on the application executable and grepping for the exact error message you see. Or you could do a grep through all of the system libraries for that message.

I found the error message inside the application file. The file is only about 1mb, so if anyone else would like to take a look at it I'm willing to send it.

Wow, all I can say about this company is avoid them. They make no attempt whatsoever to figure out what the problem is. They sent me an E-Mail suggesting I just send the CD back for a replacement; when I explained to them this is not going to resolve anything, they sent me this E-Mail back.

Reinstall Windows? I've already tried that? Are they even reading anything I'm sending to them? It looks like they're sending any old response just to get rid of me. Anyway, here is my last response to them -- which hopefully relates the frustration anyone who's experienced this problem feels.