Heroes IV has been released for Windows and there is still no news of a Macintosh version. Some people are attempting remedy the situation by using an emulator called Virtual PC that lets you run various versions of Windows on your Macintosh and then playing Heroes IV through that. Sadly, it is not a simple process where you install everything and it will work. Some people are having limited success with this, and others are having no luck at all. Here I will be compiling any information I can gather on the subject and hopefully this can evolve into a step-by-step guide that other users can follow.

I was trying on a TiBook 667. It does have 16MB of DDR VRAM, so [the amount of video memory] shouldn't be the issue. The error message was actually a window with a hex dump. I could get the exact error, but it didn't point to anything specific, at least not without the source code and a good debugger.

I'm running OS X 10.1.3. I have 512MB RAM and am using Virtual PC 5.0.2.

I am not sure which version of Windows he was running through Virtual PC, nor do I know if it would make a difference.

I have gotten Heroes of might and magic IV to work in Virtual PC. VPC was using windows 95 and I have a 700mhz G4 iMac (the new one). I have 256 MB RAM and I am using VPC 5.0. I will update it to 5.0.2 and tell you if it works. I am running VPC in Mac OS X 10.1.4

This sounded great, but I was wondering why it seemed to work so well for him when the other person was getting a crash. Fortunately I recieved a more in-depth e-mail about his setup, and it required a good deal of mucking about to get it running:

I have been doing a lot in VPC with HOMM IV. I installed Windows 98 on VPC 5.0.2 and installed HOMM IV. A great success - performance was greatly increased. In Windows 95 / VPC 5.0 the game ran very slowly and many frames in hero movement / battle movement / attacks were left out. In Windows 98 / VPC 5.0.2 however, the game runs much more smoothly. There is some sound lag and things, but it runs comparably to my friends Wintel PC.

The problem is that about 90% of my map/campaigns give me a "~Map Name~ file is bad" error. I am working on fixing this. The way that I installed HOMM IV on VPC was as follows:

• I ripped the files from both CD's onto a folder on my Mac in OS X
• I used VPC folder sharing to install the game
• When I installed the game and patch I got some error message when starting the game, so I used a no-cd "heroes4.exe" file from some website.

I hope by either coping the folder to VPC before installing or re-ripping files to a directory / installing from the CD in VPC will fix the corrupted map files. I will try re-installing the game somehow and see if the map problem gets fixed. The only map that I can confirm that works is "Dog Days." The only thing that I can think of is that maybe maps over 8 characters are corrupted. I know when I'm using shared folders in VPC files/folders over 8 characters often get corrupted / unaccessible.

I think the error message he is talking about is the same error message Rodney was having, so one mystery is probably solved. The no-cd "patch" mentioned above comes from Tularean Forest on the March 30, 2002 update.

Here are a few pictures that might be helpful. Click any picture to enlarge it.

The two CDs have been ripped to the hard drive
Drive X: is a shared folder	Installing from the shared folder on the hard drive...

I hope to have more information and more complete instructions for running Heroes IV on Virtual PC in the near future. I do not have the money to buy Virtual PC myself, so I have to rely upon second hand information at the moment. If anybody out there is experimenting with this, please e-mail me anything you learn and hopefully this page will become a flawless guide to running Heroes IV through Virtual PC. Thanks for all your help!

Last Update: May 10, 2002

Copyright © 2000 - 2002 Rocco J Carello