[X-Newbies] Game Opens to EULA, Fails in User Acc'ts

[Michael Winter]

On Jan 1, 2005, at 7:21 PM, Al Poulin wrote:

> By the way, copying to the user's Applications directory went ok, but 
> in trying to launch, I got the usual error message.  It WORKS after I 
> copied from the CD to the user's Home folder.

Sounds very much like a permissions problem. I'm guessing the reason 
you're not finding the preferences file is because many kid's games 
store their preferences and keep track of kids' progress in files 
stored within the folder the game resides in (instead of the user's 
Library folder where it should be).

The problem is, when you drag the Zoo folder to the top level or 
directly into the /Applications folder, only you have "write" 
privileges for that folder. So when your kids (or even another admin 
user) try to run the game, it won't work -they don't have write access 
to the Zoo folder.

The following steps have "fixed" many a kids game for me:

1) Select the "Zoo" folder and then select "Get Info" from the file 
menu.
2) Click the disclosure triangle so you can view the details of the 
"Ownership & Permissions" panel.
3) Change the Access level under "Group" to Read & Write. Do the same 
for "Others". It may ask you to authenticate yourself as an admin user 
before you can do this, or if these options are dimmed, click on the 
lock to get access..
4) Click on the button to "Apply to enclosed items"

You may have to repeat this process with one or more folders within the 
Zoo folder. The trick is to find the one where the user and progress 
data is stored. The down side of doing this is that everybody who uses 
the computer can now trash the folder or do whatever they want with it 
(usually not a problem unless you have a kid who's prone to accidently 
deleting things).

The problem with saving data into the same folder as the game is almost 
universal for games that have to run under Classic. Unfortunately, some 
game programmers haven't yet changed this behavior for OSX native 
games.

Hope that helps.

-Mike