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70 Years of Trains Magazine on DVD-ROM
I own both “Trains Magazine The Complete Collection” and “Classic Trains Magazine: The First 10 Years” on DVD and now cannot play them since I upgraded to Apple’s new operating system (“Yosemite”) last month. Anyone know what I can do to be able to use this $200.00 worth of great information? Thanks! Great products!
This collection is fantastic. I absolutely love it. I’ve spent literally weeks in this collection, if it were all added up. And I’m not so sure but that it would take 70 years of spare time to fully peruse and appreciate all that’s in there. And that’s why I’m very troubled: since upgrading my Mac’s OS to 10.10 (Yosemite), the application no longer will operate. It kind of loads, but then starts getting error codes. I delved into the problem, and it turns out that there is an Adobe authoring environment at the root of the DVD which Adobe has stopped supporting. It will require re-authoring the DVD in some other environment. An alternative might be to make it available through Zinio, the Trains Magazine digital content host. In any case, the DVD is beyond help as it is; every page of every issue is password protected, so you can’t get to it any other way.
I would most willingly buy this content again in a form that is guaranteed to work for a decade more, and they might as well include the past 5 years and make it a 75th anniversary collection. After another 10 years, I’d probably want to buy it again for THAT content. I am not angry or regretful for having bought it. I’ve already gotten my money’s worth. I’m just sad that I cannot continue using it on my large, brilliant monitor until they remake it. These things happen all the time in the computer world — a reason to put great thought into how to keep something current for future OS generations, or at least for keeping the data in a form that easily lends itself to upgrades or changes of authoring systems. Adobe, Apple, and all the rest will pull the rug out from under any platform, app, system, plugin, or whatever without warning or care. The info must be fluid and structured to re-author at any time. The PDF seems to be a safe format, at least for now, along with jpeg for images.
By the way, I’ve got a 13 year old laptop, an Apple Titanium G4 from 2002, that will run this — very slowly. The
Note that this DVD will NOT run on Mac OS X 10.x. According to a customer service representative, Kalmbach has no plans to upgrade this DVD to run on Apple’s latest operating system, so my $200 DVD is now a coaster!–even though Kalmbach is about to release a similar DVD of Class Trains that they say does run on Mac OS X 10.x. So Kalmbach knows how to do it if it wanted to.
Except for my iPhone I am not an Apple product user, so take this for what it’s worth… Maybe one of the Windows emulators running on your Mac would allow you to use and enjoy that version of the data. If you have the skills and the software, copying the DVD files to a hard drive might allow bit level bypass of the password requirement. Last time I worked with bit level data was in CP/M and MS-DOS days… You have been warned!
Apparently, I have not tried to read from the Trains DVD since I upgraded to OS X Yosemite Sam several months ago. I have not been very impressed with either Ford Mavericks or Yosemite Sam, but that’s not the problem. In this case, it’s Kalmbach’s contractor’s choice of authoring tools that seems to be the issue (INM Xtra for Adobe Director). As near as I can figure, that tool is what provides the thumbnails of the covers and the search engine; the actual content is in PDFs. Lots and lots of PDFs. Encrypted PDFs. I think I’ll work on it from that angle for a bit. I’m fairly confident that that is a dead end, so the other alternative is to re-install the archive in the Windows 7 VM that resides on my MBP.
The system requirements above should have a tag added that “OS X Yosemite and beyond are NOT supported” as the “10.4.11 to 10.9” is too easy to miss. I’ve had these since they came out, so it’s not like they tricked me, but I am a little annoyed. That’s the sort of problem that happens when you have a product outside your core competency and outsource to a contractor to build it.
For all of those Apple users there are several possibilities. The first might require you to use Bootcamp which I believe comes with current releases of Macs with the Intel microprocessor. You can get a copy of Windows 7 or 8.1. I imagine 8.1 is going really cheap. You can probably run it on 10 once that comes out. That is a free upgrade. If that is not your bag you can also try virtual memory. There are several applications including Parallels. Peter’s solution is probably the best if you do not wish to go the Bootcamp route. As for Kalmbach you were warned even though their staff uses Apple. Hopefully they will reissue with the full 75 years and at that time find a way of making the product compatible for subsequent Mac upgrades.
I recently purchased this DVD and it functions quite well on Windows 10. So far it’s has exceeded my expectations.
I am very disappointed that this will not run on the Mac. Kalmbach needs to provide update or some means of accessing the library on the newer Mac OS. Get your head out of the sand gang. This needs to be fixed!