A formative part of my youth was spent flying a spaceship between planets, buying and selling commodities at hopefully profitable margins, and avoiding the attention of space pirates.1
We’re talking the classic Mac game Escape Velocity, of course.
I’ve been thinking about re-installing the game for a few weeks now, in preparation for my lengthy plane trip. However, when I followed the advice of Simple Beep’s Ed Cormany for installing and running not only EV Nova, the last installment in the series, but its two predecessors, I discovered another problem: though EV Nova would launch, soon after the screen faded to black, it would simply quit. A couple of corroborating reports suggested that the issue was an incompatibility with El Capitan and Sierra.
A little digging through the Twitter feed of Escape Velocity developer Ambrosia Software–who has publicly said that there’s no plan to update the fourteen-year-old game–pointed me in the direction of the software company’s forums, where some intrepid folks had not only located the reason the game crashed, but also created a patch for it. After running the Apple Script provided by one of the posters, I can report that EV Nova is now once again fully armed and operational.
Perhaps one of the best 2D shareware games to date on the Mac, Escape Velocity: Nova offers a huge universe to explore as well as plenty of missions to keep you busy. With an open-ended plotline.
For example, the Hybrid Data Management community contains groups related to database products, technologies, and solutions, such as Cognos, Db2 LUW, Db2 Z/os, Netezza(DB2 Warehouse), Informix and many others. Navigating the Community is simple: Choose the community in which you're interested from the Community menu at the top of the page.
It’s probably too much to hope for an Escape Velocity 4 making its appearance on the Mac or iOS, preferably with some sort of multiplayer component, but I’m sharing these instructions on the off chance that some enthusiastic developer might find themselves immersed in the same nostalgia for interstellar commerce and combat. (There is, I will note, a spiritual successor in the form of the open-source Endless Sky if you’re looking to re-live those glory days.)
I also spent a surprising amount of time in ResEdit creating hacks and expansions for the game, which, let’s be honest, mainly involved different versions of the same ships but with new colors. ↩
[Dan Moren is the official Dan of Six Colors. You can find him on Twitter at @dmoren or reach him by email at [email protected]. His latest novel, The Aleph Extraction, is out now and available in fine book stores everywhere, so be sure to pick up a copy.]
Velocity Heaven Mac Os Catalina
If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber. Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community.
Velocity Heaven Mac Os X
Velocity Heaven Mac Os Update
Utilizing an As media 1061 controller chip, the Velocity Solo X1 is bootable in both PC and Mac systems. Once installed, transfer your OS and applications from your desktop hard drive to your new SSD using Apricorn’s EZ Gig cloning software for PC systems, or for the Mac Pro use Apple's built-in Disk Utility.