This program patches Colonization 3.1415926, 24-May-95 to work properly with multiple monitors.
When unpatched, Colonization will use a rectangle enclosing ALL of your monitors to draw its splash windows. In addition, if have any monitors to the left of your main monitor, Colonization will count their widths twice when figuring out how wide to make the splash window. It then centers its drawings and dialogs in this window, so if you have a monitor to the left of your main monitor it will probably move the initial dialog to a location off the right of the all your monitors. This leaves you without a way to even quit. It may also add an illegal rectangle to your GrayRgn (if you have monitors which don't extend all the way up to the menubar), which is a recipe for a bus error.
When patched, Colonization only considers your main monitor when creating splash windows and centering dialogs. This happens to work around the problem of monitors to the left of your main device because they are not considered and so the math errors go away (as they do on a single monitor Mac). It also will not add illegal rectangles to your GrayRgn.
It appears to create a small problem where if you move Colonization monitors to another monitor, then start a new game, they snap back to the main monitor. This is relatively minor, since multiple monitors didn't work properly before anyway. You can move them back again and they will work okay. This has no effect on a single monitor machine.
To patch:
Run the included patcher app. It will ask you to select a file, select a copy of your Colonization app. It will tell you whether the patch worked or not. It will patch both the 68K CODE resources and the PowerPC data fork. This patcher requires System 7 or greater (as does Colonization).
WARNING: if you select a different app (or a different version of Colonization that this was written for) the patcher will almost certainly happily screw it up for you, so don't do that! Patching a Colonization which was already patched produces no problems.
I am unable to fix the following errors in Colonization (which are less dramatic):
1. If you quit from the main dialog box instead of during a game, Colonization will not correct your GrayRgn to exclude your menubar. This looks REAL funny when you run CodeWarrior and its palette is no longer tucked under your menubar, but instead overlapping it. To work around this, start a new game and then quit from there.
2. Command keys don't always seem to work (including Command-Q!), at least on my two Macs. I run the least number of INITs of anyone I know (about 15, mostly 7.5 built-ins), so I think it is a bug on all Macs. They do always seem to work if you don't use the command key, so to wait for next unit, just press 'w', not command-W. You can also select the menu items with the mouse.
3. If you run the app without the associated data files present it just shows random data and crashes instead of giving you a nice error message.
4. When some windows are on a different monitor than the main screen, you may see a few color errors (although far less than Civilization produced). This is purely cosmetic and causes no lasting problems.
5. It STILL runs terribly slowly on a 68K machine. I used to run Civilization just fine on a Powerbook 145B (25Mhz 68030), but Colonization is unacceptably slow on my Quadra 800 (33Mhz 68040). It runs great on a PowerMac, though.
I have to congratulate MicroProse for the great graphics in Colonization, and for supporting the Mac!
My last gripe is that the CD contains a compressed installer, when uncompressed the data is only 13Megs! (Not so much as a readme!) They could have just put the data on there as it appears on the hard drive. This would simplify the install greatly.
I have also included the code for the proper implementation of the function which was incorrect. This is for the education of those who want to figure out what I did (including MicroProse). I compiled it in Metrowerks for 68K and PowerPC and used it as a template for the replacement code, although I had to hand optimize the actual code that is patched in as it didn't fit the "hole" the old incorrect code left when removed (on 68K or PowerPC).
If you want more info on what I did (patching a PowerPC app is MANY times more difficult than I though it would be), feel free to mail me.
