Afterlife is the first (and only) sim game where you, the player, get to build Heaven and Hell. In this tiny, cheesy, demo, you’ll get to do some primitive Rewarding and Punishing, and play with the basic vehicles of reincarnation. There’s a pull-down tutorial in the demo itself, and we heartily recommend checking it out.
Section 2. Starting the demo
Before starting the demo, we recommend that you shut down all other applications. This process will ensure that the demo has the maximum amount of memory that your machine can offer. Once that’s done, all there is left to do is double-click the appropriate Afterlife Demo icon and enjoy your deity-like powers of creation and destruction.
If your machine says “PowerPC” or “Power Macintosh” somewhere on its front, you should double-click the icon labelled “Afterlife Demo (PowerPC)”. Otherwise, you should double-click the icon labeled “Afterlife Demo (68040)”.
Section 3. What kind of machine will I need?
You’ll definitely need:
• 33 MHz 68040 or faster, or any PowerPC
• 8 MB total RAM (16 MB total RAM recommended for best performance)
• 8.2 MB available RAM, 4 MB of which may be virtual memory
• Double-speed (2x) or faster CD-ROM drive
• 7 MB free hard disk space
• System 7.1 or later
• Sound Manager 3.0 or later
• Any display capable of showing 640 x 480 pixels or more
If you’re on the bottom end of these requirements, you should probably run the demo at a screen resolution no higher than 640x480. To adjust the resolution of your monitor, go into the Monitors control panel, click the Options... button, and choose 640 x 480. Close the control panel and you should be set.
If you don’t have a multisync monitor, or if you don’t mind running in a small window, you can force the Afterlife Demo to run in 640 x 480 mode by holding down the option key as you double-click the Afterlife Demo icon. You can release the key once the LucasArts logo appears.
If your system has only 8 MB of RAM, you will need to turn on virtual memory to run Afterlife. To do this, go into the Memory control panel, and click the “On” button next to the Virtual Memory section. Then use the arrows next to the virtual memory control to adjust the amount of memory you wish to have. You should set this value to at least 12 MB, if not higher. If you are loading a lot of extensions and control panels, or if you have a large display, you may need to increase this value further.
Section 4. Troubleshooting
If you experience lock-ups while playing Afterlife, you should make sure that you have installed the latest version of the CD-ROM software that your system uses. In particular, if your Extensions folder contains the “Apple CD-ROM” extension, you should make sure it is at least version 5.1.1 or later (highlight the icon and choose Get Info from the File menu in the Finder). Contact the maker of your CD-ROM driver to get the latest version if you believe yours is out-of-date.
Afterlife requires a minimum of about 8200k free RAM in order to run at 640 x 480; more free RAM is required for higher resolutions. If you have a Macintosh with 8 MB of RAM, you should turn on virtual memory before running Afterlife; see the previous section for instructions on how to do that.
If you are still having trouble finding enough RAM to get Afterlife up and running, this is the section for you. The first step is to find out how much RAM you currently have available:
You can find out how much memory is available on your system by choosing About This Macintosh from the Apple menu in the Finder. Look at the value next to the “Largest Unused Block”. That value indicates how much memory you have available for running Afterlife. Note that if you have other applications running, they will eat up some of your memory, so you should quit them first to determine the maximum available.
Here are some suggestions for reducing the memory requirements of your system in order to give more leeway to Afterlife.
• disable unnecessary extensions and control panels. If you are running System 7.5 or later, use the Extensions Manager control panel that shipped with your system. It is suggested that you turn off everything that isn’t vital and restart before running Afterlife. To do this conveniently, first save your current configuration by choosing Save Set... from the pop-up menu above the list. Name this set “Standard”. Next, turn off everything in Extensions Manager except your CD-ROM driver (either the Apple CD-ROM extension or your particular third-party driver) and choose Save Set... again, naming this set “Afterlife”. Now, before you run Afterlife, simply choose your Afterlife set from the pop-up menu in Extensions Manager, and restart your system. To return to your usual setup, choose “Standard” from the pop-up menu and restart again.
If you are running a System version prior to 7.5, you can do exactly the same thing with the Extensions Manager 2.0.1 control panel available from Apple. You can use the pop-up menu below the extension list to save extension sets, just as described above. However, properly enabling a set with this version of Extensions Manager involves two steps. First, turn off everything by clicking the All Off button. Then, enable the set you want by selecting “Enabled Set” from the pop-up menu and—while still holding down the mouse button—moving the mouse over the name of the set you wish to turn on. When you’ve finished, restart your system to enable the set of extensions you have chosen.
IMPORTANT: Some third-party hardware requires their own drivers to operate properly. If this hardware is essential to your running Afterlife (e.g., monitors or hard drives), you will need to make sure that you don’t disable the extensions and/or control panels that control the hardware. Consult the users manual for the hardware in question to find out what is essential.
• quit all applications before running. Each application that is running takes up some memory that Afterlife could be using. If you’re tight on space, make sure you quit other applications before starting Afterlife.
• reduce the disk cache size and turn off any RAM disks. In Apple’s Memory control panel are options for controlling the disk cache size and for creating RAM disks. If you have created a RAM disk, turn it off and restart your system before running Afterlife. If you really want to push your memory to its max, reducing the disk cache to 96k or less can also help, at the expense of slower disk access.
