Hi Phil,

> After years of whining about not being able to use Guide with my Mac
> I finally took Bill's advice and set up Wine. (Well, actually I
> downloaded "Crossover" which set up Wine for me.)

Crossover should also help if you want to run certain other Windows
apps. Guide should work Just Fine, but that's partly because the
developer (i.e., me) ran it under Wine, saw problems, and fixed
them. Most of the problems really were bugs in my code, not Wine.
They simply hadn't manifested themselves previously... at least, not
for me; in cleaning up these bugs, I probably made the program more
stable in "real" Windows, too.

> it all seems to work fine except for one thing: The program won't
> launch unless the Guide(8) install disk is in the drive.

A couple of things to try. The first thing I'd suggest is getting
the current Guide 9 software from :

http://www.projectpluto.com/new.htm

This includes a variety of fixes, and will quite likely cause the
problem to go away. Note that while it's a Guide 9 update, there is
a way to use it with your Guide 8 disks. I'd recommend doing this in
any case. The last update to Guide 8 was some time ago. Quite a few
things are "broken" unless you use the current Guide 9 software; most
noticeably, the old software will look for asteroid/comet data at a
URL that no longer exists.

I do know that some people reported exactly this issue (and not
just when using Wine), and saw that it went away with the update.

If you try the update and Guide still wants the CD, then run Guide
with the external drive plugged in, click on Extras... Install to
Hard Drive, and make sure that it shows a list of items with some of
them checked. Then change at least one of them. (If you don't
change something, Guide will say, "Huh! No changes required; I
won't actually do anything!")

If at least one change made, Guide will check for missing files
and copy them from the disk. You may then find the program runs
correctly.

> [Crossover tech support] thought the problem could be caused by
> a copy protection mechanism...

A reasonable guess, and some programs require the disk to be in
the drive for just that reason. But as you thought, it's not
something I would do.

> He also implied there is a workaround but "because of the DMCA I can't
> give any advice on how to bypass that".

I expect that yes, you can break any form of copy protection, though
not necessarily in a legal manner. But again, it's not an issue with Guide.

If all that still fails, I'd suggest you e-mail me the 'startup.mar'
file Juan Carlos mentioned. It should be in the folder in which Guide
is installed. I will (a) check it to see if I can puzzle out what's
wrong and (b) send it back with line 18 modified suitably.

-- Bill