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.
Game windows from the English and the Chinese editions as they were built, on Mac OS X and on Mac OS 9. Click a picture for its full size.
A campaign played to its end (revision 4.1) 16 pictures
Revision 4.1 was found by playing the Power-Up Kit's 234 scenario as Cao Rui to the unification of China, screen by screen, on Mac OS X and then on Mac OS 9.
The map's city names (revisions 4.2 and 4.3) 14 pictures
The 47 city names on the strategic map repainted in English, set as the map sets its own names; then a pixel face with serifs.
The season mark, and no kana readings (revision 4.3) 6 pictures
The season's kanji replaced by a small moving picture: a sprout, the sun, falling leaves, a snowflake. The kana reading beside an officer's name is gone.
Names in Latin letters (revisions 4.4 and 4.5) 13 pictures
New officers and items named in Latin letters, 8 letters to a name and 12 to an item; then the button labels that had run to their edges, and the face editor in English.
What a second campaign turned up (revision 4.6) 22 pictures
A campaign won by battles was gone through picture by picture for faults, and a player on a real G4 sent one more. Revision 4.6 puts them right: a chart that was still paint, text the game puts together from pieces, words cut, cramped or misleading.
68K Macs, and what three playtests turned up (revision 4.7) 12 pictures
The English layer was built for KOEI's own 68K program, and a campaign and three playtests were played on an emulated Quadra 650. Revision 4.7 puts right what they turned up, on every system, and adds a disk for 68K Macs.
The Traditional Chinese edition (revisions 0.1 to 0.3) 13 pictures
The same game with the text, the font and the painted words of KOEI's Chinese edition for DOS. The first five pictures are from Mac OS 9, the next five from Mac OS X 10.4. Revision 0.2 draws 173 rarer characters that 0.1 left as a sign and a blank, and puts KOEI's Chinese city names on the map: six of them differ from the Japanese ones. Revision 0.3 lets a new officer or item be named by pinyin: 46 buttons, each from the syllable on it, and one by stroke count.
