Forums | MacLife

Yes, I'm sure Halo, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty and others of that (recent) ilk will have the requisite 'fat' binaries released; it's apparently not that hard. Older games are another matter, including most OS9 games.

Yeah I think this is the last nail in the coffin for OS 9 games that haven't moved to OS X.

Well that assumes you have the windows version and you install windows (it apparently works on dev boxes but who knows about retail machines).

A mac representative specifically stated that apple would not support windows, but they would do nothing to preclude people from putting windows on a mac.  Basically, unless Windows does something to make it impossible (I doubt they will, as they don't care who's hardware its running on) there will nothing difficult about partitioning your HD, and throwing windows on one side just for games. 

Personally I have to have a laptop to work on.  Thus I will always need 2 computers, and at the price of building a nice gaming machine ($200 each year on average keeps it playing every game that comes out) I'm not sure why people want to use their macs to game.  Get a nice laptop or mac mini for everything but games, then find a techie friend and build a PC for gaming.  Make sure not to have any email clients, and never download anything but patches for games.  Keep a copy of mozilla for this, but other than that delete all browsers, and never surf the web on it.  In this environment you should be able to keep all spyware, and nasties from your gaming comp and it works pretty nicely.

Target

Sorry about that off target tangent.  I went a little crazy.

He is a marketer, they have a way with words. If he doesn't actually say you can install windows easy but Apple won't support it, we don't know if that will be the case with the retail macs. All he said was that Apple won't support it.

I know what your saying, but he stated very plainly that Apple won't do anything to preclude putting windows on a mac.  Microsoft certainly isn't going to preclude it, so who will?

Target

TargetX wrote:

I know what your saying, but he stated very plainly that Apple won't do anything to preclude putting windows on a mac.  Microsoft certainly isn't going to preclude it, so who will?

Target

The hardware? We don't know what Apple plans on putting in it. Yeah it is going to be an x86 chip of one sort or another but we don't know anything else. Looking at the dev boxes isn't entirely accurate.

Anyway, yes I am sure someone will get windows running on mac hardware just like someone will eventually get OS X running on a dell or whatnot. It doesn't mean everyone is going to be doing it.

NAG wrote:

More info if you scroll down a bit.

Worth posting. A bit lengthy and techy, but encouraging.


"Other stuff:
The WWDC talk went pretty well. Glenda is clearly better at this than I am,
since Feeding Frenzy's simple sound effects kept distracting me during my
talk, but Glenda not only wasn't distracted by Doom 3, she played the game
and had headphones on and didn't miss a beat during her speech. I was
impressed, personally.

Then the audience abused the poor Apple engineers during the Q&A, but I
think a lot of good information got out there, overall.

Speaking of good information, there was actually several games-specific
sessions at WWDC this year, which is really a dramatic change for the better.
Most of these talks were filled, even though there weren't really that many
full-time developers there...which is probably something Apple should
consider relevant.

The Subversion session was packed. There was a line of people waiting to get
in, including me, who got turned away. I consider this a good sign that maybe
we actually will get rid of CVS someday.

Otherwise, I pretty much chained myself to an Intel-based Mac in the
Universal Binary Lab. Here's my basic impressions at this point, and then
I swear I'll shut up about the topic for at least a few months.

- It's pretty clear that this is not ready to ship to the public as a
   Complete Retail Thing, for obvious reasons that will be addressed in the
   next few months, I'm sure. As such, I'll omit specific benchmark numbers
   and highlight that anything that looks rough actually IS rough at this
   point, and shouldn't be held against anyone.

- Rosetta isn't as bad as I anticipated. In fact, it's pretty darned good.
   For everything but games, you probably wouldn't even know you were running
   it. I'd even go as far to say that if you have a game that isn't absolutely
   dependent on framerate, you probably wouldn't even know you were running
   a PowerPC app. There are some bits in it that are still buggy, but in
   terms of raw performance, even fairly CPU-intensive things performed better
   than I expected. Granted, we're using 3.6GHz, Hyperthreaded Pentium 4s,
   if they ship a Mac Mini with a 400MHz Celeron or something like that, then
   I might be singing a different tune, but there's more potential to Rosetta
   across the board than my original flinch reaction granted.

- I spent almost the entire conference porting things to x86 MacOS, and when
   they kicked me out at the end of the day, I went back to my hotel and
   worked on converting things to gcc4 on my Powerbook in preparation for the
   next day. I'm very tired, now. Here's where I am at the moment...

   Unreal Tournament 2004: Runs. I had a little more difficulty with this
   than I anticipated; I knew exactly what to change to make it x86-friendly,
   but moving to gcc4 bit me in a few places, including one place where I
   stalled out for over 12 hours trying to coerce the compiler to not crash.
   Eventually, I got this resolved with the help of an Apple engineer who's
   name I didn't catch, but if I figure it out, I'm sending him a Christmas
   card this year. Probably about 300 lines of changes, counting the Karma
   physics libraries, since that needed a recompile too. Still, three days
   qualifies as a success story for this work, as far as I'm concerned. Even
   though the game is playable, this needs more work still...but the exact day
   Intel-Macs hit the retail stores, I fully expect to ship a patch to
   support these machines.

   Duke Nukem 3D: Runs. I wanted something CPU-intensive that didn't require
   a powerful video subsystem so I could compare against Rosetta, and this was
   a perfect fit. Unlike most games now, this one renders the entire 3D scene,
   pixel-by-pixel, to a block of memory, and then copies it to the screen, so
   the entire renderer gets basically zero benefit from the GPU and relies
   entirely on the CPU. Granted, it ran acceptably on a 386/33MHz in the DOS
   era, but that isn't relevant, since we're running at a much higher
   resolution, and we can always note a higher framerate. Since this thing's
   been ported to more platforms than "Hello World" at this point, there
   wasn't a whole lot of effort involved. We had #ifdef PLATFORM_MACOSX where
   we really wanted to check for a PowerPC in a few places, which I cleaned
   up, and one or two gcc4 things, but nothing too painful. Fairly impressive,
   since most people consider the Build Engine to be the most successful
   collection of violations to the ANSI C Standard ever. Performance was
   _extremely_ good compared to, say, my 1.25GHz Powerbook. Orders of
   magnitude faster. Rosetta's run was actually almost exactly neck-and-neck
   with my Powerbook. None of this was scientific, I was just running around
   watching the framerate counter in the corner...but when it's got an extra
   digit on the PC, you know one's definitely beating the other. These changes
   are all going into CVS, since all the Duke sources are GPL'd, then you can
   build your own Universal Binary directly. 

   Feeding Frenzy: Runs. This one needed a GL_UNSIGNED_INT_8_8_8_8_REV swapped
   out with a GL_UNSIGNED_INT_8_8_8_8 to fix the texture colors (my bug, not
   Apple's), and a few gcc4 things, and poof, running great. Granted, since
   I moved this to OpenGL and no longer use the original software renderer, I
   can't use all the SSE code that originally existed in the Windows version,
   but then again, moving to OpenGL gets me thousands of frames per second on
   a Blueberry iMac, so I guess I can live with that. What's interesting is
   that moving to gcc4 actually caught a really serious bug that I could never
   track down before...Microsoft's C runtime gives you an "abs" function for
   calculating Absolute Value, but it takes a float and returns a float. Apple
   (and the rest of the world) uses an "int" here, so you suddenly get whole
   numbers where you expected a fraction to come back. gcc4, unlike gcc3,
   catches this, alerting me to switch these to "fabs" as they should be, so
   that's one less problem that'll be nagging me when I try to sleep nights in
   the future.

   Torque Game Engine: Runs. Needed minor patches in a few places where it
   says "mac" but means "bigendian cpu" and one (and, really, I think, only
   one) thing needed tweaking for gcc4...even in a more or less foreign
   codebase, this all took me literally minutes to find and fix. What took
   longer was the realization that compiled TorqueScript is byte-order
   dependent with the platform that built it, so you have to delete all your
   .dso files and restart the game to stop Bad Things from happening. Once I
   did that, I was good to go, and watching the Orc Town demo rendering
   perfectly and at a comparable framerate to my Powerbook, which has better
   video hardware than the devboxes.

   Various open source things: SDL, SDL_sound, SDL_mixer, Ogg Vorbis, zlib,
   libjpeg, etc...all compiled and ran without any changes. Not a single line.
   Take that as a ringing endorsement of free software if you like.

--ryan."

The above is more a general commentary, CB post. This is Games.