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RedShift 1.2

In 1994, RedShift was the world's most popular multimedia astronomy program on the planet. It still holds up pretty good today. With RedShift you can explore the Solar System and beyond, and simulate astronomical events over a 15,000 year period, and much more. You can pause any animation and click anything (stars, nebulae, planets, moons etc) to pull up info on that object. Much of the text has hyperlinks leading to even more info and perhaps even better RedShift contains a complete online Penguin Dictionary of Astronomy.

What possibly lets it down somewhat is the postage stamp sized QuickTime .movs which thankfully are only a very small part of this otherwise stellar multimedia experience. It was 1994 when this was released after all and QuickTime was then in its infancy. What I do like about RedShift is the way it fills your screen no matter the screen resolution of your display. There is no audio with this but it does not seem to matter considering the wealth of info at hand.

This copy of RedShift was a giveaway promo on MacFormat magazine issue 52, July 1997.

MacFormat issued this CD as HFS. However the CD contents contain Windows executables as well. So I have re-mastered the CD as ISO-9660 (with Macintosh long filename support). All of the files that were on the original are intact and it now runs in both Windows and Macintosh OS's (which the MacFormat issue could not do).

MD5 checksum: 45e9323c227168d1bf65d391ace841c6 *RedShift.iso

[See Also]: RedShift 2 and RedShift 3

Compatibility
Architecture: 68k PPC

Macintosh 68030 or 68040 CPU or any PPC Mac or Mac compatible. Will not run on Mini vMac.

RedShift runs directly from the CD. On a fast Mac this is good enough but on a slower Mac or Basilisk II or SheepShaver, the RedShift program (FAT) can be copied to your hard drive - the CD or .ISO is still required to be mounted for the program to access (600 MB of data).

There are also folders containing the 68k & PPC only versions of RedShift which you can use if you prefer. If the icons you see are initially "generic", by copying the application to your desktop and rebuilding the desktop will restore the proper icons.

Its recommended in the "ReadMe" that if you copy the program to your drive, that you should also copy the five sample settings files to the same location. In the root level of the CD these sample settings files are: "Focus on Phobos, Focus on Mimas, Earth and Moon, Saturn with big moons, and Jupiter with big moons". Double-clicking any of the samples will launch the program into an animated demo and is a good way to start exploring RedShift.

Note: RedShift is optimised to run in 256 colors, although 1000's of colors seems OK, but if your display is set to millions, then RedShift runs its animations in 8 bit gray-scale and this is not so good. The PPC app will alert and offer to change your settings to 256 colors but the 68k app does not, so you need to be aware of this, if you run this on a 68k Mac or Basilisk.

On Basilisk II the animation is fairly choppy, not so bad on Sheepshaver but still choppy. Much better on the real deal.

Even choppier, but works. You can mount a CD of this and share it over a network (AppleTalk over TCP/IP).

You can also mount this ISO image onto your desktop without burning to CD. It mounts fine by dragging the .ISO image onto an icon of Disk Copy 6.1 or newer (or with the Virtual CD/DVD Utility). You must also have installed the System Extensions mentioned below for this particular ISO-9660 .ISO OR CD to mount (these Extensions are usually installed with Mac OS 7.5 or newer by default).

System Requirements:
Mac System Software 7.0 to Mac OS 9.2.2
Extensions:
QuickTime 1.5 or newer (2.5 on CD)
Apple CD-ROM (or newer CD/DVD driver)
Foreign File Access
High Sierra File Access
ISO 9660 File Access

Windows OS:
Windows 3.1 to Windows XP (set to Win 95 compatibility mode)
QuickTime 1.1 or newer (1.1 on CD)

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