Hybrid Disc Problems with Toast and Director

We’ve been using Toast to burn Hybrid CDs since 1994. When I first purchased the new version I was a bit upset that they took out the ability to burn old-style hybrid CDs. However, they didn’t remove the functionality, they just turned it off. Go into the preferences and enable “Show legacy formats and settings” and it will behave just like it did before. Well, almost. Now it has some really annoying animation, but otherwise it works the same. One other difference was a bit harder to track down and fix.

All of our software current software titles were made with Macromedia Director and with the introduction of OSX Lion they no longer work. The transition to Adobe Director 11.5 has been relatively painless except for some old Flash code in Actionscript 1.0 that hasn’t updated nicely to ActionScript 2.0.

However, when we gave the discs to some people in the office to test they got two errors. When they tried to run program from the disc, an application alert came up telling them “This application requires Adobe Shockwave 11, which can not be found. Click to download it.” If they try to copy it to the hard drive, they get a different error. “The alias “Gamename” cannot be copied to the destination, perhaps because the destination does not support this type of alias.” Our development machines don’t give any errors—even the alias one.

It turns out that the problem is in the way Toast handles (or rather doesn’t handle) aliases in the app bundle.

The app bundle looks like this

Hybrid CD Error

If you follow the aliases you’ll find that
DPLib ==> /Contents/Frameworks/DPLib.framework/Versions/A/DPLib
Resources ==> /Contents/Frameworks/DPLib.framework/Versions/A/Resources

Replace the aliases with the source files, and do the same thing in IMLLib.framework and ProjLib.framework. As near as we can tell the Current alias isn’t necessary and can be deleted from all three locations.

Once you have all your aliases replaces and successfully burned a test CD, make a copy of the Frameworks folder. You can replace the Frameworks folder in new apps with the one that you have working.

The solution was tested on OSX 10.3.9, 10.4.11, 10.5.8, and 10.6.8. We haven’t had access to a Lion machine yet.

3 thoughts on “Hybrid Disc Problems with Toast and Director”

  1. Hi, Is this solution still working for you? I’m pulling my hair out trying to get a hybrid disc to work since Hybrids are the only one’s that support CD-ROM XA mode for enhanced CD.

    When I try your solution I get a “Director Player Error. Unable to load movie playlist. Does the .INI file exist… etc”

    It’s working fine off HD just as soon as it’s on a CD it doesn’t work.

    Any ideas?

  2. Since I posted that response, several customers have used the CDs on Lion. So our solution works. I’m not familiar with CD-ROM XA though so I don’t know what’s different.

    Try downloading the ABC app from our website and copy the Frameworks folder into your app.
    Get it from this link,
    ABC for Macintosh OSX Lion.

    or this page.

    UPdate: 2011-11-11
    Director ini error
    I got this error when trying to play a Director game from disc just after burning.

    I can’t duplicate it though. I still had Toast running and the original DMG was mounted, so I’m thinking that the OS got confused somehow.
    In any case, it doesn’t give me the error now on my laptop or on an Intel Mac Mini we have for testing.

  3. Thanks so much for sharing this fix – we’ve been tearing our hair out over the last couple of days trying to resolve this issue when I stumbled across your posting.

    I downloaded the ABC app and replaced the Framework in our projector with the one from ABC and it works prefectly without the Shockwave dialogue appearing on a hybrid disk burnt with Toast.

    We’re going to try and replace the Frameworks on our PC (within Cross Platform Resources) and see if we can reliably publish Intel Mac projectors without needing to manually replace the Framework for hybrid CD’s.

    Thanks again!
    Suzanne

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