Forums | MacLife

Sometimes bad ports require heavier duty equipment on the Mac side. Also, a lot of Macs came with cards that had almost no VRAM. Requiring an 8500 is an excellent way to guarantee having 32 MBs or more.

Plus, since Apple often shipped different revisions of the same computer with completely different video cards. It's not like they can say "iMac."

I was playing Bejeweled 2 during my lunch at work the other day.  A co-worker, who uses a PC, pointed out that her PC version of Bejeweled 2 was missing a couple of the graphics bells and whistles that was on the Mac version.

Who knows, graphics are still designed on Macs for games (I don't know how heavily, though), even if the game is never ported over the Mac.

Of course, then you have games like Doom III, when it was being programmed was already requiring video RAM that didn't even exist on any shipping video cards at that time, but did by the time it was released.

Richard D Miller wrote:

I had heard Mac version of games had more pizzaz. But I have never seen any facts on this.

"Pizzaz" is a bit general, but here are some details, based on games I worked on.

Alice: we resampled all the cutscenes (except for the ending) from the original source artwork so they look better. We also fixed the aspect ratio in these movies.

Civ3: The Mac port uses Quartz for anti-aliased text, so it looks much better than the PC version in this regard.

Centipede: Not sure where to begin. The Mac version had an entire new series of levels, improved graphical effects (including an added particle engine) and cutscenes that were resampled from the original data. We also wrote a Centipede arcade game emulator specifically for the Mac version - the PC version just had a pseudo-3D knock-off variant.

KOTOR: we resampled all the cutscenes from the original artwork into (IIRC) MPEG4.

There may be other examples, but those are the ones I can think of right now.

i got your pizzazz right here

Brad Oliver wrote:

Richard D Miller wrote:

I had heard Mac version of games had more pizzaz. But I have never seen any facts on this.

"Pizzaz" is a bit general, but here are some details, based on games I worked on.

[cutscene stuff]

There may be other examples, but those are the ones I can think of right now.

I believe it; Brad's mentioned the like before, & there's a fair amount of that I wish was on PC. For example, Armed and Dangerous can look great on PC (esp. compared to Xbox) with up to 8 textures/pixel, other 3D tweaks and running native widescreen by dint of simple letterboxing at up to 1600x1200, but the cutscenes are original Xbox and show major artifacting. Yuck.

"He only two year old..."

It is funny, but I have other favorites, especially since my father died of Alzheimer's shortly before.

"I never tire of that sound.""Yes, Stig... are these your pills? You're only supposed to take one a day, not the entire bottle." (sitar music, penguin hallucinations)

Not to mention Kato... "I see brown boxes in your future." (Pow) "Salted. Let's go."

Salted nuts, a bit British...