I typed the word Turbine in the search facility and got 16 hits but only 2 or 3 seem to refer to the UP machines.
I can think of one immediately that talks about them a bit from David P. Morgan back in the mid 50s.
I found a bad scan if anyone is keeping track:
Issue #195307 page 21 and 22 are scanned incorrectly where pictures are cutoff from previous pages. It doesn’t affect the readability, but the pictures aren’t there.
Alas, the fear that these DVDs will become ususable due to technology changes has already come true in less than a year. On the Mac, both “70 Years of Trains” and “Classic Trains: The First 10 Years” stopped working in mid-October when Apple sent out a security update to the Mac operating system. The symptom is that when you click on the thumbnail image for an issue, the “busy” cursor appears, and then after a minute or so the application crashes with an illegal memory access. Kalmbach customer service advises that we watch the FAQ on the kalmbach.com web site for notice of a fix. Evidently the PC version is fine.
I hadn’t tried the DVD application on my Mac until after reading ecoli’s post and noted the same problem. The FAQ on the Customer Service page list the new files, I downloaded the files, installed according to directions and the application works again (and seems a bit faster as well).
Couple of notes - the two files are large at about 65 MB each, so a fast connection is a lot less painful. The zip files are the MACOSX type, they unzip on other systems, but come out as two directories per zipfile as opposed to “one file”.
- Erik
The two zip files fixed the problem on my Mac (MacBook Pro 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running Mac OS X 10.6.8)–for a week or so. Then yesterday morning I tried to run both the “Trains Complete Collection” and “Classic Trains” applications, and each freezes after displaying its “splash screen” (the photo of the signal bridge for the former, the photo of the CB&Q steam loco for the latter.) The horizontal red progress bar is stalled at about 1 mm of length. The applications never even get to the point of drawing the window full of thumbnail photos of magazine covers. Kalmbach customer service says basically, “It works for us”. Anybody else seeing this problem?
Hi! I loved (past tense) this DVD. But now it will no longer work on my Mac. I don’t have the option of not updating. Since these are all passworded PDFs, if I knew the user password, I could read them anyway. Any chance you could let people who bought this have the password? Thanks!
The situation is badly compounded by crApple’s unwillingness to provide installers for versions of OS X prior to 10.10, or (evidently) to provide any sort of workaround for owners of the DVDs.
I don’t own the DVD’s in question.
Is there any possibility that they will play on a commercial DVD player for regular Television rather than through computer software?
It’s been so long since I last loaded the Complete Collection from disc that I have forgotten what type of disc it uses.
No, you couldn’t play back the disc in a consumer player and see the files – they are specially encoded PDFs, and I haven’t ‘reverse engineered’ the format to find out what they did. DVD-ROMs essentially use the higher storage density of the ‘digital versatile disk’ DVD media in a computer storage format, like a CD-ROM on steroids.
You wouldn’t get much out of a data CD-ROM if you tried playing it back at 44.1kHz in a CD player, and you wouldn’t see much from a data DVD if you played it back on a home-theatre setup.
Personally, I find it a bit difficult to imagine that it can be ‘hard’ to provide searchable page images under OS X on a Mac. It’s been made artificially hard. While Kalmbach of course has the right to protect its intellectual property and content, the IT department went a little overboard in providing the clunky interface and shell, and in my opinion they owe us Mac owners quite a bit of upgrading for the $149 we have now essentially wasted.
Mind you, at this point I would happily settle for Kalmbach procuring rights to an installer for a version of OS X, even a limited one, that works with the program, and allowing Mac users to download that installer and create a bootable partition on one of their drives that could be set up as the startup disk for those times we want to look at the Complete Collection.
I’ve been holding off upgrading to OSX “Yosemite” for a couple of reasons. One is that I don’t want to lose the Trains and Classic Trains collections. Two is worrying about what other software might break. Three is that I’m still miffed when Jobs yanked ZFS support from MacOS. One possible solution is Codeweavers Crossover for the Mac - though don’t know for sure if it will run the Windoze version of the Kambach software.
There’s an odd quirk about the collection software on the Mac - the software will spin its wheels if the computer has been up for a long period of time (meaning months). A reboot will take care of that.
- Erik
I am simply very disappointed with this. When you buy archival media, you should still be able to view it 5 years later. What about it? Come up with some way to make this happen, guys.