How to up-convert a program from Marcomedia Director to Adobe Director

I would first list all the xtras used and see if they are supported in Director 12.

Sounds like you were working in Director v4 or thereabouts.  The backward compatibility in Director only lasts a few versions -  so you need to find a few intermediate versions of Director and update in steps.  You'll have to rewrite any Lingo referencing the old alphanumeric cast numbering system but MOST of your other code should still be compiliable as is.  What IS the version number you were using ?

I have the same issue. The program I need to convert was written in Director 5. How can I at least get my hands on some demo intermediate versions of Director?

Thanks!

CZoch

Thanks ZNemesNemeth for giving me hope.

I authored several CD-ROMs with Macromedia Director 4-6, including one that won prestigious awards for what was then considered cutting-edge multimedia (ScruTiny in the Great Round.) It has been impossible to play them on Macs since OS 9, and in Windows since XP.

I bought a copy of Adobe Director 11 hoping to be able to update these works to play on modern machines. Trying to simply play from the old source code was discouraging - Lingo error messages from the very start. It was dismaying to imagine digging into whatever had changed in Lingo along the way.

ZNemesNemeth, or anyone--how many intermediate versions of Director do I need to buy in order to bring my old work back from the dead?

Thanks,

--Jim Gasperini

Hi Jim,

Short answer is you need D6 to convert D4 and D12 will convert D6, though as you have discovered, the Lingo might break going straight from 6 to 11/12.  Most of my stuff has travelled through MX (D10). 

Having said that, I think one or more intermediate versions may have massaged Lingo a bit to update the syntax.  I'll have a look at some old project versions and see if any of them have radically altered scripts.

Don't get too discouraged - Lingo is pretty good at backward compatibility.  Quite often a global search/manual edit can rip through common syntax changes pretty quickly.

I'll let you know if I can find a version that tinkers with Lingo automatically.

Thanks for all this information. I will look for MX (or MX 2004?) I wonder -- will I also need to get machines with intermediate operating systems in order to run these older versions of Director?

--Jim

I use an old eMac G4 found abandoned on the kerbside(!)

It will happily run legacy apps under OS9.2 including D4 through to MX 2004 (though I actually run MX under OSX 10.4).

It's pretty fast, doesn't take up much room and the built in speakers don't sound too bad.

D7 MIGHT have been the version with the Lingo revisions ... I'll do some more checking.

PS: Sorry, MX 2004 was actually D9

One thing to try, if you’re attempting to run an old DIR or DCR, is this:

_movie.scriptExecutionStyle = 9

There are a lot of errors you might get that are just because of the way syntax changed in Director 10.

Thanks for the tips. I had great success pulling the code from the most

recent of the three CD-ROMs I want to update into MX 2004, then into 2011.

Worked perfectly.

The older ones, alas. are not proving so easy. Where can I find explanation

of how "to rewrite any Lingo referencing the old alphanumeric cast

numbering system..."

When I attempt to play one, it balks at a script In the first frame that

says in part

repeat with x = 328163 to 328166

set the pausedAtStart of case x = 1

I'm afraid I don't now how to use

_movie.scriptExecutionStyle = 9

at this point.

Accidentally posted before finishing, sorry. Running the script mentioned

above produces Script error:  Cast member not found

I imagine I am encountering the problem ZNemesNemeth mentions about the

"old alphanumeric cast numbering system." I would appreciate pointers to an

explanation for how I need to rewrite the Lingo.

Thanks,

--Jim

The pausedAtStart property is used with media members (especially to prevent stuttering starts to movies under Windows)

Correct syntax is

member(1).pausedAtStart = true

OR

sprite(1).pausedAtStart = true

Your loop should use cast or sprite numbers (whatever works for your code) e.g.

repeat with x = member("firstMemberInSequence").memberNum to member("lastMemberInSequence").memberNum

member(x).pausedAtStart = true

end repeat

For the record, the old alphanumeric cast convention used member identifiers such as A5 and B11 - I can't remember the exact details.  You used to be able to compute member ("A" & x) and such. 

Using the newer MemberName property is much easier.

Thanks again. I vaguely remember the early A5 etc convention; I don't think I used it anywhere in the works I want to upgrade, fortunately.

I found an Adobe page about "Converting movies created in previous versions of Director:"

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Director/11.5/UsingScripting/WScf09ce35f85d76b4-4fdb6b3c11d558 55946-7eb1.html

From that I learned that my most recent problems are likely caused by platform mismatch. I was trying to use a Windows version of MX 2004 to upgrade movies made in Mac versions of Director 4, 5 and 6. Unfortunately "You must use the respective operating system to upgrade movies and casts created on Windows and Mac-Intel/Mac-PPC platforms."

I found a Mac copy of 8.5 on eBay. Once I receive it the next challenge will be seeing if it will run in Mountain Lion, and if not a PowerMac 8500. The trouble with the 8500 will be getting the results of upgrading out of it. it doesn't have USB, and getting from SCSI to USB seems to be very difficult. I once tried to network this machine to more recent ones and gave up after many frustrating hours.

The odyssey continues...

jim,

you might give sheepshaver a chance.

http://sheepshaver.cebix.net

you can access macosx from it and it runs os 9.

i have a running version with os 9 here on a 10.8.5 macbook pro.

mine does surely run director 4.04 and should run up to d 8.5 that uses the same fileversion as mx and possibly mx2004.

the scsi thing is a special problem.

think of zip drive, that where available as scsi ,  ide and parallel drives and an ide to usb adapter.

or if you find an old mac with scsi , connect your drive and exchange files via tcpip / ftp and ethernet wiring.

good luck

Thanks for tracking down the useful link about D8.5 Jim - should save everyone a lot of heartache.

For transfers from non-USB Macs I use the never-caught-on but very handy Imation SuperDisk LS-120 120MB USB PC & Mac Drive.  Plug it into your new Mac via USB and it reads 3.5 inch floppies written on old Macs.  You can still find them on eBay. 

Floppies need to be HFS formatted. I think the older Mac format might be readable except anything in folders won't be accessible.

There are also 1.44MB USB External Floppy Disk Drives available on Amazon but I haven't tried any myself so I can't vouch for them.

Hello again--

Thanks for the tip about Sheepshaver. After some fiddling with zipped virtual drives etc. I managed to install the Mac copy of Director 8.5 I found on eBay. I was able to open one of my Director 5-era CD-ROM source files, and with minor fiddling it ran quite well. It balked at "if the movierate of sprite 10 then" ("integer expected") but was happy with "if the movierate of sprite 10 = 1 then." i pulled out some old Xtra transations (Xaos) that "failed to inititialize."

I saved the updated file and casts, and moved it all out of the shared folder. Unfortunately I am unable to open in Director 11, whether I try to open from within the applications or double-click the Director file. 8.5 Either way, a "Choose a File" dialog opens, displaying: 

     Where is ""? 

below the header. All the files in the Finder window display disabled, as does the Choose button. My only option is to select Cancel. Doing so momentarily closes the window; then it reopens. I am stuck in an endless loop - the only way out is to force quit out of Director 11.

Saving from 8.5 produced files with no extensions. I tried adding .dir to my source filename and .cst to my external casts. This enabled Mountain Lion to display the appropriate file icons, but otherwise made no difference

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

--Jim

The asking for “Where is” sounds like linked media that is missing. The link to media is a hard coded path. Can you delete anything that uses linked media while in 8.5, then recreate that in D11?

Thanks, and yes, I do seem to have issues with linked external Quicktime videos. There are a couple dozen in the CD-ROM I'm currently working on. They are central to this thing, so I'm not sure how I could "delete" then recreate.

I went through the laborious process of relinking each QT castmember in 8.5. I was then able to open the movie in 11. When I played the movie, alas, though the QT sound would play, the video would not. In the castmember properties, I saw that though the "audio"checkboxes for linked .movs were selected, "video" checkboxes were not. When I select the "video" checkbox, however, the instance of the video on the stage displays slightly smaller than the bounding box and rotated about 30 degrees within it. The video does play, but only in this weird off-kilter way.

In my eagerness I had not tested at the 8.5 stage to see how QTs played there. I went back to that stage and found the same issues:  QTs play sound-only, and if I try to turn on video in cast properties, the image displays weirdly rotated.

Thanks in advance for advice about what is going on. Rereading this, I wonder if I have ignored the central point of your advice Colin. Do I need to extract all reference to linked cast members from cast, script and score, then recreate it all once I get to Director 11?

--Jim

I was mainly getting you to look in the right area, which I was guessing would be linked QuickTime movies.

You could reconstruct the hierarchy that the cast is expecting. Like, if one of the movies is linked to “MyCD:Data:Movies”, you could create a volume with that name, and put the files into the right folder. Then the Director movie would find the files where it’s expecting them. Might have trouble though in that OSX uses / instead of :

Director has the searchpaths, which is a list of places it will look for documents. Setting the filename of the QuickTIme members to just the file name, and then setting the searchpaths to know about the folder the files are in might still work. For my CD-ROMs I used to put the source files onto the disc, I could dig out one and show you how I would handle that!

About the zero size video, I thought that Video and Cinepak codecs were still supported. Maybe you used something more exotic? Also, try showing the controller for the video.

Thanks for the suggestions. I seem to have fixed the major problems, though

I don't quite know how. I went back to my original source files, updated

them first in 8.5 (in Sheepshaver) then in 11, checking the status of

Quicktime links at each stage. This time it all seemed to work, and I can

now play all the QTs as originally embedded. For codecs btw they used

"Cinepak, Linear PCM."

Next:  bringing to modern times a CD-ROM authored even earlier, in 1995...

Thanks again