Romance of the Three Kingdoms VThe classic Macintosh game, with its music, on Mac OS X 10.4, in English and in Traditional Chinese.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms V (三國志V, KOEI, 1996) is the fifth of KOEI's grand strategy games set in the China of the Three Kingdoms. You take a warlord of the age, from Cao Cao to Liu Bei to a ruler of your own making, and work towards one China: 47 cities to govern and take, hundreds of officers with their faces and lives, seasons that turn, battles fought in formation, envoys, plots and duels, and a soundtrack of twenty pieces. The Power-Up Kit expands it. The Macintosh edition was only ever Japanese.
Here it is as a PowerPC Macintosh plays it today: the CD audio replaced by MP3 playback, so the music is there under emulation and from a hard disk; native on Mac OS X 10.4 without the Classic environment; and in English, down to the map's city names, the 500 biographies and the names you type. Each package holds both editions, the base game and the Power-Up Kit, for Mac OS 9, Mac OS X 10.4 or, since revision 4.7, a 68K Mac. A Traditional Chinese edition has begun as well, with the text and the font of KOEI's Chinese edition for DOS.
English edition, revision 4.7 Delivered 2026-10-15
Everything the game shows in English: conversations and messages, 546 officer and city names, the lists, panels and menus, the 500 biographies, the map's 47 city names, redrawn buttons, a moving season mark, names entered in Latin letters. Revision 4.7 puts right what a campaign and three playtests on an emulated 68K Mac turned up, and adds a disk for 68K Macs. The Japanese MP3 edition is its base; both editions, base game and Power-Up Kit, are in each package.
| Mac OS 9 | ROTK5-English-OS9-v4.7.toast The complete ROTK5 English folder as a CD image. Mount it or burn it, copy the folder to a hard disk, open ROTK5 English MP3 or ROTK5 PUK English MP3. |
193 MB |
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| Mac OS 9 | ROTK5-English-OS9-v4.7-Update.img Only the files revisions 4 to 4.7 changed, for a copy already installed (3 to 4.6): mount it and drag the contents of each of its three folders into the folder it names in yours, in the Finder, replacing. |
8.0 MB |
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| Mac OS X | ROTK5-English-OSX-v4.7.dmg The ROTK5 English folder with ROTK5 English.app and ROTK5 PUK English.app, native PowerPC applications for Mac OS X 10.4. Copy the folder to a disk you can write to. |
129 MB |
81a6346a8b3dc2bba8fbc4c9bdd3374783530c46c58006d0b2d466f0d49615ad | ||
| 68K Mac | ROTK5-English-68K-v4.7.dsk New: the ROTK5 English folder for 68K Macs as a raw HFS disk. Both launchers' 68K programs are in English too, and the music plays from AIFF-C files with no CD. Copy the folder to a hard disk. |
320 MB |
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- Mac OS 9: a PowerPC Macintosh with Mac OS 9.2, QuickTime 6, and Japanese language support with the Osaka fonts (the game still draws kanji in places). The Read Me First inside the image says what is English and what is not.
- Mac OS X: 10.4 on a PowerPC Mac; no Classic environment is used. QuickTime plays the music. Saves are the same files as on Mac OS 9.
- 68K Mac: a 68040 Macintosh with Japanese system software and 256 colours, and a memory partition of 16.5 MB. Tested in the Basilisk II emulator (a Quadra 650 with KanjiTalk 7.5.3) only, not yet on a real 68K Mac. The launchers of the Mac OS 9 image run KOEI's untouched 68K program on a 68K Mac: use this disk there.
Traditional Chinese edition, revision 0.3 Delivered 2026-10-14
A first build, not finished. The game in Traditional Chinese: its conversations and messages, the words of the two programs, the painted buttons and panels and the menus, in the font and the wording of KOEI's Chinese edition for DOS, with the Japanese MP3 edition as its base. Names of officers and cities draw in traditional characters, the map has the city names of KOEI's Chinese edition, and a new officer's or item's name is picked by pinyin. Still to do: the two movies, and a look at much of the game on the screen. Both editions, base game and Power-Up Kit, are in each package.
| Mac OS 9 | ROTK5-Chinese-OS9-v0.3.toast The complete ROTK5 Chinese folder as a CD image. Mount it or burn it, copy the folder to a hard disk, open ROTK5 Chinese MP3 or ROTK5 PUK Chinese MP3. |
193 MB |
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| Mac OS 9 | ROTK5-Chinese-OS9-v0.3-Readme.txt The Read Me: installing, what it needs, what is not finished. |
2.4 KB |
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| Mac OS X | ROTK5-Chinese-OSX-v0.3.dmg The ROTK5 Chinese folder with ROTK5 Chinese.app and ROTK5 PUK Chinese.app, native PowerPC applications for Mac OS X 10.4. Copy the folder to a disk you can write to. |
129 MB |
c4b0a9954f53909dd390b6bb64de5739b319231c35eb10afe3998c318eb9eaef | ||
| Mac OS X | ROTK5-Chinese-OSX-v0.3-Readme.txt The Read Me for Mac OS X. |
2.3 KB |
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- Mac OS 9: a PowerPC Macintosh with Mac OS 9.2 and QuickTime 6. The game's own text needs nothing more: the Chinese font is inside the game. For Chinese menus and a Chinese window title, install the Traditional Chinese language kit from the Mac OS 9 CD (Software Installers, Language Kits); without it they show as garbled letters and the game plays all the same.
- Mac OS X: 10.4 on a PowerPC Mac; no Classic environment is used, and nothing has to be installed. Saves are the same files as on Mac OS 9.
- Tried under emulation only so far, not on a real Macintosh. Over an earlier revision, replace the whole folder; saved games are the two SAVEDATA.S5 files in S5DATA and PKDATA.
Japanese edition, MP3 1.0 Delivered 2026-10-11 (Mac OS 9) and 2026-10-12 (Mac OS X)
The original Japanese game and its Power-Up Kit as installed from the CD, with the CD audio replaced by QuickTime MP3 playback so the music plays under emulation and from a hard disk. On Mac OS X the same game files run in the native host.
| Mac OS 9 | ROTK5-MP3-OS9.toast The complete ROTK5 folder as a CD image: both editions, the Power-Up Kit's movies and the 20 soundtrack MP3 files. Open ROTK5 MP3 or ROTK5 PUK MP3. |
193 MB |
9a455d025d0728447f7112477fbd4ebc498c680125d9eee5a28ed823f86b14ba | ||
| Mac OS 9 | ROTK5-MP3-OS9.sit The same folder as a StuffIt archive, for a Mac that would rather expand than mount. |
186 MB |
55ce9fbb4f8fe7d2fd060678bfbe57946292c2325076d4d16562f134aabe125a | ||
| Mac OS 9 | ROTK5-MP3-OS9-Readme.txt The Read Me: installing, requirements, limitations. |
1.6 KB |
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| Mac OS X | ROTK5-MP3-OSX-r3.dmg The ROTK5 folder with ROTK5.app and ROTK5 PUK.app for Mac OS X 10.4 on PowerPC, host revision 3. |
129 MB |
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| Mac OS X | ROTK5-MP3-OSX-r3-Readme.txt The Read Me: what is inside each application, what revision 3 changed. |
1.8 KB |
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- Mac OS 9: Mac OS 9.2 on a PowerPC Macintosh, QuickTime 6, Japanese Mac OS or Apple's Japanese Language Support with the Osaka and Osaka Mono fonts.
Source no game code, data or music
The two parts of the work that are source alone, as published on the hub:
| Mac OS 9 | rotk5-mp3-patch-20261011.zip The MP3 patch, version 1.0: the source and the tool that patches the game's two applications to play MP3 files in place of CD audio. |
29.2 KB |
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| Mac OS X | rotk5-osx-host-20261012-r3.zip The Mac OS X host, revision 3: a Mach-O Carbon program that loads the game's own PEF code and stands in for the classic Toolbox. |
30.9 KB |
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