I've been holding off upgrading to OSX "Yosemite" for a couple of reasons. One is that I don't want to lose the Trains and Classic Trains collections. Two is worrying about what other software might break. Three is that I'm still miffed when Jobs yanked ZFS support from MacOS. One possible solution is Codeweavers Crossover for the Mac - though don't know for sure if it will run the Windoze version of the Kambach software.
There's an odd quirk about the collection software on the Mac - the software will spin its wheels if the computer has been up for a long period of time (meaning months). A reboot will take care of that.
- Erik
BaltACDIs there any possibility that they will play on a commercial DVD player for regular Television rather than through computer software?
It's been so long since I last loaded the Complete Collection from disc that I have forgotten what type of disc it uses.
No, you couldn't play back the disc in a consumer player and see the files -- they are specially encoded PDFs, and I haven't 'reverse engineered' the format to find out what they did. DVD-ROMs essentially use the higher storage density of the 'digital versatile disk' DVD media in a computer storage format, like a CD-ROM on steroids.
You wouldn't get much out of a data CD-ROM if you tried playing it back at 44.1kHz in a CD player, and you wouldn't see much from a data DVD if you played it back on a home-theatre setup.
Personally, I find it a bit difficult to imagine that it can be 'hard' to provide searchable page images under OS X on a Mac. It's been made artificially hard. While Kalmbach of course has the right to protect its intellectual property and content, the IT department went a little overboard in providing the clunky interface and shell, and in my opinion they owe us Mac owners quite a bit of upgrading for the $149 we have now essentially wasted.
Mind you, at this point I would happily settle for Kalmbach procuring rights to an installer for a version of OS X, even a limited one, that works with the program, and allowing Mac users to download that installer and create a bootable partition on one of their drives that could be set up as the startup disk for those times we want to look at the Complete Collection.
I don't own the DVD's in question.
Is there any possibility that they will play on a commercial DVD player for regular Television rather than through computer software?
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
The situation is badly compounded by crApple's unwillingness to provide installers for versions of OS X prior to 10.10, or (evidently) to provide any sort of workaround for owners of the DVDs.
Hi! I loved (past tense) this DVD. But now it will no longer work on my Mac. I don't have the option of not updating. Since these are all passworded PDFs, if I knew the user password, I could read them anyway. Any chance you could let people who bought this have the password? Thanks!
The two zip files fixed the problem on my Mac (MacBook Pro 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running Mac OS X 10.6.8)--for a week or so. Then yesterday morning I tried to run both the "Trains Complete Collection" and "Classic Trains" applications, and each freezes after displaying its "splash screen" (the photo of the signal bridge for the former, the photo of the CB&Q steam loco for the latter.) The horizontal red progress bar is stalled at about 1 mm of length. The applications never even get to the point of drawing the window full of thumbnail photos of magazine covers. Kalmbach customer service says basically, "It works for us". Anybody else seeing this problem?
I hadn't tried the DVD application on my Mac until after reading ecoli's post and noted the same problem. The FAQ on the Customer Service page list the new files, I downloaded the files, installed according to directions and the application works again (and seems a bit faster as well).
Couple of notes - the two files are large at about 65 MB each, so a fast connection is a lot less painful. The zip files are the MACOSX type, they unzip on other systems, but come out as two directories per zipfile as opposed to "one file".
Alas, the fear that these DVDs will become ususable due to technology changes has already come true in less than a year. On the Mac, both "70 Years of Trains" and "Classic Trains: The First 10 Years" stopped working in mid-October when Apple sent out a security update to the Mac operating system. The symptom is that when you click on the thumbnail image for an issue, the "busy" cursor appears, and then after a minute or so the application crashes with an illegal memory access. Kalmbach customer service advises that we watch the FAQ on the kalmbach.com web site for notice of a fix. Evidently the PC version is fine.
I found a bad scan if anyone is keeping track:
Issue #195307 page 21 and 22 are scanned incorrectly where pictures are cutoff from previous pages. It doesn't affect the readability, but the pictures aren't there.
I can think of one immediately that talks about them a bit from David P. Morgan back in the mid 50s.
I typed the word Turbine in the search facility and got 16 hits but only 2 or 3 seem to refer to the UP machines.
Hi,
I'm interested in getting one but just want to confirm were there any articles on UP's turbines?
Thanks
Just printed out something using an iMac running 10.6.6.
The wheel spun a bit longer than I expected, but it printed out fine on a B&W laser printer.
Bob Keller
An update to my earlier message: I reinstalled by following the improved installation instructions on the Kalmbach web site, and the application read disk 2 automatically.
But the "print" icon still doesn't work (13 inch unibody Mac laptop, MacOS 10.6.6.) The usual dialog box for printing appears, and when I press any of the appropriate buttons (to print, preview, or generate a PDF) the dialog box disappears and nothing happens. I've tried two different printers, and in any case, I would expect to be able to generate a PDF or postscript file even if no printer is installed. The response from Kalmbach is that thousands of people have been able to print, so something must be wrong with my configuration, followed by some advice that applies only to Microsoft Windows PCs. I wonder whether any of those "thousands" have been using MacOS 10.6 rather than a Windows PC.
So, my question: has anybody reading this been able to print on a Mac, and if so, which Mac and which OS version?
(And yes, given the bumps people have encountered with installation, scrolling, and printing, one does wonder whether the Trains application will continue to work with future operating systems. If you have virtual machine software, it might be a good idea to set up a copy of the application running inside a virtual image of one of today's operating systems, so you can run it that way if it stops working under Windows 2020 or MacOS 20; VMWare, for example, will probably continue to work for many OS upgrades to come.)
A valid concern. We have watched computer media go from punch cards to magnetic tape to Very large Disk packs to 8 inch floppies to 5 1/4 inch floppies to E-Proms to Zip drives to 3 1/2 inch floppies to CDs to DVDs to dual layer DVDs to Flash drives to Blu-Ray discs. One has to wonder where it will go next. Will there be a way for old data to migrate to whatever is next?
Dave
Lackawanna Route of the Phoebe Snow
Indeed. But some other requests re Trains.
1) what are we going to do with future editions? Now I have 75 years on disc am I going to have to start keeping paper copies again? I'd rather like a subscription option to get another DVD at the end of each year that ADDS to the existing collection.
2) Looking waaaay ahead I have programs and data from Windows 3.11 that no longer work on Vista or Windows 7. I hope I'll still be able to use my trains DVD when I upgrade to Windows 8, 9, 10, 11........
If Kalmbach does this with MR mag, including track plans, count me in!
To update my situation, with Megan's help I reinstalled the program and the "favorites" patch, and everything works ! Appreciate the quick and conscientious response to my apparently unique situation.
Thank you sir, patch seems to work with Windows 7.
--Reed
I'm not sure how Kalmbach expects us to discover these things, since a search for "DVD fix" on trainsmag.com yields 0 results. Here's the link for the patch:
http://www.kalmbach.com/Contact%20Us/FAQ/2011/01/The%2070%20Years%20of%20Trains%20on%20DVD%20-%20Application%20Fix.aspx
There are also improved instructions for installation:
http://www.kalmbach.com/Contact%20Us/FAQ/2010/12/The%2070%20Years%20of%20Trains%20on%20DVD.aspxIn
In case the links embedded in this message don't work for some reason, you can find them by going to www.kalmbach.com, scrolling to the bottom of the page, and clicking on the "FAQ" link.
How do we go about getting a copy of the favorites patch along with any other software fixes in the works?
Just installed the patch to fix the "favories" function. Now I am locked out of the entire program except for the opening picture. Not good!
I initially installed the program on a USB external hard drive and had the same problem of no cover thumbnails beyond the early 60's. I compared the file count in the Thumbnails folder of the DVD and found that considerably less than the 64,500 files had been installed. I uninstalled the program then reinstalled on the internal hard drive and all of the thumbnails were installed. My OS is Windows XP SP3.
Is there or will there be a way to transfer the password protected PDFs onto a tablet (esp. the iPad) without having to install the application around them? Or will there be an app for the iPad in which the PDFs can be read? I bought the DVDs but I'm a little disappointed that they are chained to less convenient means of accessing them.
Joerg
hI. i too had problems with Vista. I finally figured it out by dinking around. I found that I had to re-start my computer for the short-cut symbol to change to the Trains red "T". I have emailed Trains about some suggestions for future runs of the DVD,. I also would like them to fix it so that you could rotate the pages as needed and wanted.
With that said, it's an awesome collection of railroad history and information, and I am enjoying the heck out of the DVD collection. From what I hear the response has far surpassed their expectations! Hope that they will do the same thing with Classic Trains Magazine too.,
filmteknik I have the following issue: Open the program and after the splash screen I'm taken to the search page which shows 844 results (as though I've searched and the entire collection matched). I presume that's how it's supposed to work. I see thumbnails of covers. If I pull the slider down I cannot see cover thumbnails beyond early 60's. If I pull the slider farther down the thumbs do not change but if I mouse over them the info next to the cursor reveals that I am actually hovering over some newer issue, up to and including Dec. 2010 or Web Extras, if I go all the way. In other words, the thumbnail no longer matches the link. Then when I double-click to open such an issue, I can see pages but if I go back to thumbnail view instead of seeing thumbnails of individual pages I see a screen with blanks where the thumbnails are supposed to go. I can mouse around and the legend indicates what the page will be if I click on it but no thumbs. So far as I know the installation went normally and both seem to fully load. Somehow the thumbnails for later issues just aren't there. I will delete and try again but I do not have high hopes since I had the same / similar result trying it on my laptop. This machine is XP Home, SP2. Laptop is XP Pro ( Not sure of SP but probably 2). I'm not sure what else to do.
I have the following issue:
Open the program and after the splash screen I'm taken to the search page which shows 844 results (as though I've searched and the entire collection matched). I presume that's how it's supposed to work. I see thumbnails of covers. If I pull the slider down I cannot see cover thumbnails beyond early 60's. If I pull the slider farther down the thumbs do not change but if I mouse over them the info next to the cursor reveals that I am actually hovering over some newer issue, up to and including Dec. 2010 or Web Extras, if I go all the way. In other words, the thumbnail no longer matches the link.
Then when I double-click to open such an issue, I can see pages but if I go back to thumbnail view instead of seeing thumbnails of individual pages I see a screen with blanks where the thumbnails are supposed to go. I can mouse around and the legend indicates what the page will be if I click on it but no thumbs.
So far as I know the installation went normally and both seem to fully load. Somehow the thumbnails for later issues just aren't there. I will delete and try again but I do not have high hopes since I had the same / similar result trying it on my laptop. This machine is XP Home, SP2. Laptop is XP Pro ( Not sure of SP but probably 2).
I'm not sure what else to do.
That's the same way mine opens up, since it displays all the issues, I was guessing this is how it was designed. I can browse all issues in or out of sequence, or find individual issues if the new Trains on-line index refers to them.
It sounds like the second disk didn't load properly. I can get the thumbnails up for all issues through December 2010 and they do match.
The one issue I found with the search feature is if you have a magazine that was scanned with multiple page spreads, the scanned page number does not match up with the actual page number, which is used in the index. For example, I did a search for "east broad top" and one of the issues was 200910 (October 2009) page 42. When you double click on it, you get an article titled "Midnight at Durango," however, the page number on the screen is 48. If you back up to the actual page 42 in this issue, you find the article "One with the Railroad" about Stanley Hall and the East Broad Top, which is scanned page 38. Annoying, but you can easily compensate if you're aware of it.
I'm loving This and having no problems with it, except for the sleepless nights reading back issues ;-)
My question is will we be able to add new issues to this online collection? either monthly or yearly?
Bob
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