Odds & Ends: Railroad Tycoon; Freeverse games; more

Railroad Tycoon II and Yamaha conflict? Norm Gilbert found Yamaha CD-RW Model CRW-2216s (SCSI) works great on every CD he has except Railroad Tycoon II. The symptom is that everything soon slows to a crawl and the game becomes unplayable. He adds: "The problem is not related to any extensions and it does not occur with other games that feature background music - such as Myst, Riven, 7th Guest, or Bad Mojo." Yamaha Tech Support confirmed the problem and they are investigating this.

Freeverse games glitch A reader discovered that Freeverse's Burning Monkey Solitaire 2 and 3D Klondike games both use the same Preferences file. One result is when one plays the new Burning Monkey 2, it will zero the statistics for 3D Klondike. Freeverse has confirmed this and said it will be fixed in their next update.

PowerBooks and Epson drivers and adapter: a follow-up Regarding the problem with Epson drivers, 8.6 and new PowerBooks (see previous item): A TIL article noted here before recommends removing the problematic Epson extensions. Perry Clark confirms that this works to allow printing. However, it still did not solve the startup problem with the USB-to-Parallel adapter.

iMac mouse vertically challenged? Carl Springer found that the mouse on his friend's new iMac 333MHz sometimes only tracks in a horizontal direction. Unplugging and replugging the mouse is a temporary work-around (till it happens again).

Font changes in Mac OS 8.6 Pete Peffer notes that Apple slightly enlarged some of the fonts included in Mac OS 8.6. The result was that the text in his Helix database no longer fit completely on a page. Helix Technical Support confirmed this. [We have previously noted changes to the Monaco font.]

Opening MP3 files MacInstruct explains how to open MP3 files that won't seem to open.