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Apple Businesses Entertainment Games

The Evolution of Mac Gaming 141

Posted by Zonk from the more-than-just-old-bungie-games dept.
Next Generation has a piece up exploring where gaming is going on Max OS X. From the article: "Almost since the introduction of the Mac, Apple users have lamented the lack of game support provided to the platform as compared to its Wintel brethren. Sometimes that lack of support was due to hardware and input devices that weren't competitive with the PC, but the adoption of PC standards like AGP for graphics cards and USB support for 'proper' multi-button mice did away with those obstacles. But the largest reason usually has had to do with the size of the Mac market."
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The Evolution of Mac Gaming More

The Evolution of Mac Gaming

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  • Escape Velocity? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by HanClinto ( 621615 ) <hanclinto AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @04:42PM (#13334030)
    My friends always wanted to *emulate* macs for the purposes of gaming -- just the one game Escape Velocity. Heck, I *still* emulate a Mac just so I can play it from time to time (I know they have Nova for the PC, but I like the old ones better).

    Sure, Mac gaming pickings have always been a bit thin, but it felt like a tighter-knit community, and they still always had the quality, just not necessarily the quantity.

    • Re:Escape Velocity? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Momoru ( 837801 )
      I used to crank out my old Mac for that very same reason, but now you can play on Windows boxes: http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/ [ambrosiasw.com] . It's EV Nova, but its pretty much the same as the original, even a little better.
      • There are total conversions of EV Nova on the Ambrosia software website which use the graphics from the earlier games, including the menu screens, and emulate the gameplay. Quite fun, but a lot harder than EV Nova (which is relatively easy - particularly on the Polaris thread where you can buy ships that can easily destroy cruisers).

    • Re:Escape Velocity? (Score:3, Informative)

      by MaineCoon ( 12585 )
      The old versions are available as mods for Nova, which work on the PC as well.

    • NOOOOOOOO!!!! (Score:5, Funny)

      by ravenspear ( 756059 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @07:46PM (#13335462)
      Oh GOD NO! PLEASE NOOOO!!!!

      I can't recall the number of hours that I wasted playing that. I could have stopped whenever, but I just had to keep playing to afford the Kestrel.

      I had almost gotten over my addiction, and I had even completely forgotten about the game, UNTIL YOU JUST MENTIONED IT!

      BASTARD!
    • Thanks for the kind words. :)

      mcb <--- yeah, the EV guy

      • Rock on!

        Your user profile just got another fan entry. :)

        EV drove me to learn how to do graphics programming in high-school, I was working on a multiplayer version of EV called "Air Locked" that actually made it kindof far before I lost all of my source in a hard-drive incident. Through that experience I learned a ton about programming, and that has proven invaluable to me through the years.

        So in short, thanks for the inspiration! :)

  • Emulation (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Much like Slashdotters and their PSPs, the main games I play on my iBook are emulated! It makes a great portable Gameboy Advance, SNES, NES, or Sega Genesis. We all bought those old games at some point, and now you can use your new hardware as the ultimate gaming machine.

  • And why do we care... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DarkYoshi ( 895118 ) <elispiro@gmail.com> on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @04:50PM (#13334104)
    ...that "Pet Store Simulator" or something like that won't go on macs? Most of the games that I would bother buying can be installed on macs too (Blizzard RTSs) or have a Mac Edition which is the same thing but is made for macs. Any of the big games that I would like to play will end up on macs, so even though I'm on a WinTel PC right now, when I get my iBook or PowerBook, the gaming scene won't have changed too much for me.

  • How about video cards, smart guy? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by slughead ( 592713 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @04:51PM (#13334115) Homepage Journal
    But the largest reason usually has had to do with the size of the Mac market.

    What about the fact that most of the computers Apple ships come with a GeForce 5200 (iMac), Radeon 9200 (Mac Mini), or have crappy ATi laptop cards (iBook/PB) and are NOT UPGRADABLE? Not to mention the low RAM that comes standard.

    Sure, they ship the G5s with good cards.. sometimes.. but I dropped $3 grand to get my DP 2.5 with a 6800 Ultra in it.

    So blame the market all you want, I'm sure that's a good portion of it. However, if those MacIntels use stanard PC gaming cards, I'm willing to wager an upswing in Mac gaming.
    • Did we forget something? The iBooks now come with 512 megs of RAM standard. 512 is fine with me right now, as I have 768 in my P4, and it runs better than well.
    • Oh nos! Apple laptops don't have upgradable video cards!!!1!

      Well, duh.

      Anybody who's likely to buy a $400 video card is probably going to buy a high-end tower to put it into. G5 towers ain't cheap, but they are really sweet rigs for the tiny assortment of games which actually run on Macs.

      For those buying a mini or an iMac, the cards they come with do about as well as any $50 card you would put in a cheap game PC. I play WoW on my mini all the time, and the graphics are good enough on my sickeningly-huge p
      • Anybody who's likely to buy a $400 video card is probably going to buy a high-end tower to put it into.

        You mean anybody who is buying a Mac, because they don't have a choice.

        A "Gamer" PC System can be quite low-spec and cheap, except for the video card. You can do quite well for $500 plus the card. For the most part, gamers don't purchase dual-proc systems, for example, but with Apple that's the only route.
        • You mean anybody who is buying a Mac, because they don't have a choice.

          A "Gamer" PC System can be quite low-spec and cheap, except for the video card. You can do quite well for $500 plus the card. For the most part, gamers don't purchase dual-proc systems, for example, but with Apple that's the only route.

          Only if you insist on new.

          If you really do want to do the old "weak CPU, strong video card" philosophy popular among gamers, you could easilly pick up a used single-CPU G5 tower from eBay. It still won't

    • Re:How about video cards, smart guy? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Lars T. ( 470328 ) <Lars.Traeger@COW ... minus herbivore> on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @12:50AM (#13336870) Journal
      There is more to gaming than 3D.

      • There is more to gaming than 3D.

        True, but less and less so as time goes on and 3D cards continue to approach ubiquity. A number of previously 2D games have made the move to 3D with their latest installments: The Sims, Roller Coaster Tycoon, the Civilization series will make the move to 3D with it's forthcoming installment, hell, even SimCity requires at least a modest 3D card with it's latest sequel.

        3D gaming has moved beyond the realm of the FPS, and soon it'll likely be difficult to find any game ou

    • It'll surprise you to see the FPS the radeon gets on the mini!
    • GeForce 5200 (iMac), Radeon 9200 (Mac Mini), or have crappy ATi laptop cards (iBook/PB) Thats still better than what, 80% of the PC market. Intel Macs are scary. Now Apple can relegate Macs back to the world of below-decent graphics for gaming. Of course, for the "I use Word and AIM all day long" crowd, this doesn't matter.

  • It Wasn't Until Win3.1 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsmith-mac ( 639075 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @04:52PM (#13334121)
    Almost since the introduction of the Mac, Apple users have lamented the lack of game support provided to the platform as compared to its Wintel brethren

    Umm, no. Mac gaming was alive and well throughout the 80's and in to the 90's. It wasn't until the utter PC/Wintel domination around the time that Win3.1(1993) came out that Mac gaming started to become noticably weaker. This is by no means a market that has always been weak.

    • I was about to say the same thing. Macs were widely regarded as the superior game platform until Doom came along as a PC-only app.

      The Doom deathmatch took nearly all gaming enthusiasts away from the Mac platform, and "PC gaming" has pretty much meant "Windows PC gaming" ever since.
      • Macs were widely regarded as the superior game platform until Doom came along as a PC-only app.

        Mac was no game machine even then. Amiga, Atari, c64 and even spectrum had better and more exiting games than Mac.
      • The Doom deathmatch took nearly all gaming enthusiasts away from the Mac platform, and "PC gaming" has pretty much meant "Windows PC gaming" ever since.

        I'm not sure what you mean.

        Doom was never a Windows program. In those days, we all ran DOS games. Windows was just around to suck resources in those days. As far as I can remember it NEVER was advantageous to run it under Windows.

    • Re:It Wasn't Until Win3.1 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by NutscrapeSucks ( 446616 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @10:38PM (#13336367)
      I'd say the peak was back farther than that. Probably the best period for Mac gaming was 1984-1988, when many Apple II devs ported their games. (Alas, most of these games were hardcoded to the 9" screen and broke when the MacII came out.)

      In the late-80s/early-90s, the common knock against the Mac by PC users was that it was "cartoony". Apple wanted to promote a professional image, and actually discouraged Mac Game Development and made sure that the default Mac desktop was gray and boring.

      By the peak era of DOS gaming in 93-94, the Mac platform was already totally secondary, despite the fact it's marketshare was higher than ever. Windows gaming didn't really take off until 1996 or 97.
    • I had many fond memories of playing Oregon Trail on Apple //e computers in elementary school and Maelstrom in college.

      Thankfully, Apple //e emulators [xs4all.nl] are available today and the makers of Maelstrom have a free OS X version of Maelstrom as a free download from their site [ambrosiasw.com].

  • excuse me? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @04:56PM (#13334159) Homepage
    AGP and USB are hardly PC standards.

    Apple adopted AGP around the same time as Intel did (which was a moot point nonetheless, as A) Most 3D cards at the time were geared for D3D and not OpenGL, and B) The cards weren't compatible between platforms anyway)

    USB on the other hand, was adopted AND EMBRACED lightyears earlier by apple.

    And stop acting like there's always been this huge dispraity between PC and Mac games. Sure, the blockbuster games were mostly for the PC, but Apple's definitely had its share of awesome games (Escape Velocity immediately jumps to mind) -- the big distinction between the platforms was that 3d games took a long time to get off the ground for mac users.

    Also remember that Mac users up until a year or two ago, typically ran MUCH OLDER hardware than their intel counterparts. Where PC users typically upgrade every 2-3 years, apple users typically don't see a need to upgrade for twice that period of time. A G4 running OS9 was laughable overkill.

    OSX changed everything, making it infinitely easier for developers to support mac due to the unix core, friendly APIs, and (tada!) proper memory managment.

    Even today, apple's getting some great open source games, and it would seem that the trend now is for the cool indie/OSS games to be written on OSX and then ported over to Unix/Win32. Lux comes to mind here...

    • Re:excuse me? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Palshife ( 60519 )
      Judge me by my Name/UID, Mac gaming has been strong for a long time :)
      • Palshife, eh? DIE REBEL SCUM!




        "Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING."
        ...
        Yes. Yes it is... that was the point, stupid lameness filter... ruin my delivery.
    • By light years...
      1999 G4
      http://www.thescreamonline.com/technology/applehis tory/applehistory.html [thescreamonline.com]

      I think by 2000 most PCs had at least one USB port. Though Windows 95 didn't offer much support for USB, Windows 98 & Windows 2000 had support with an update.

      • Re:excuse me? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Tim Browse ( 9263 )
        Windows 95 had USB support in OSR2.1, which was released in 1996. It sucked in terms of reliability, but Windows 98's USB support was pretty solid. PCs had USB ports way before Macs (I think the Gateway PC I used at work in late '96 had USB ports - if not, then it was early 97).

        The Microsoft Natural Keyboard (Elite) was released in early 1998, and had a USB connector.

        But yeah, Apple were light years ahead of PCs with USB. I think I'm nearly fed up of correcting Mac fans on this now :-)

        • Re:excuse me? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Carthag ( 643047 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @06:44PM (#13334985) Homepage
          It doesn't really matter that Gateway had USB ports around 96/97 (USB 1.0 is from january 1996), the USB boom didn't start until 1998, which is coincidentally the same year that Apple released the iMac. Also: Platform wars are dumb. Use the best tool for the job.
          • Also: Platform wars are dumb. Use the best tool for the job.

            No kidding. That's why it bugs me when people tell me how great a platform is on the basis of half-truths. I prefer the truth.

        • Re:excuse me? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by ksheff ( 2406 )
          The USB standard was released in 1995. There was support in PC land, but it didn't really embrace USB until after the iMac. If you were a peripheral manufacturer and wanted some of Apple's tiny market share, you had to go USB. Even at the iMac introduction, the variety of USB peripherals sucked unless you wanted a keyboard or a mouse. Apple took the plunge and got everyone else who was standing on the edge just sticking their toes in the water to jump in after them. Why do new PC desktops and 3rd party
          • I still have a parallel port printer, and my palm pilot still plugs into my serial port, and both my keyboard and mouse are still ps/2. They all work perfectly, and have for some time. Granted, most of the newer devices I buy are USB, but there is something to be said for legacy support. My printer still works great, my palm pilot still keeps my schedule, and the nice keyboard and mouse that I bought will wear out rather than becoming useless due to incompatability with a new machine. It's a similar questi
            • I have all those things too and they are working just fine with a computer I built in 1998. However, how many new printers and PDAs use those ports and how many people actually use those ports on their new machines? I would guess a lot less now than in 2000. I just find it odd that it seems like the phase out of DB-25 serial to the DB-9 connector occurred over a shorter period of time than it's taking to get rid of the ps/2, parallel & DB-9 serial ports. Especially since keyboards & mice were so

              • Re:excuse me? (Score:3, Interesting)

                by el_womble ( 779715 )
                Especially as DB-9 and DB-25 were so homebrew hardware friendly. USB cost a hell of a lot more to develope for than RS-232. OK it sucks for data transfer, but its great for sending control signals. Great projects like an automatic coffee machine etc would be very expensive if there was no RS-232. OK, they're not going to set the world alight, but its one more avenue of computer science that is made less accessible.

        • Hah, I remember that. The USB support in Windows 95 OSR2.1 was completely worthless. Basically it was just drivers for the USB host. There wasn't even a HID driver, and no hardware manufacturer bothered to write 95-compatible drivers for their USB hardware.
    • AGP and USB are hardly PC standards.

      Both AGP and USB are Intel-developed standards that are licenced royalty free to anyone who wants them. Obviously, Intel had PC-compatibles in mind when they were designing these standards.

  • Release gap (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aardwolf64 ( 160070 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @04:57PM (#13334163) Homepage
    The issue isn't that the good games aren't available. They eventually make it over, and they must be making money (or they wouldn't keep porting them.) The major issue that I see is that Mac users don't get the good games until at least a year after the PC release (like Neverwinter Nights, to name just one.)

    I can understand not wanting to gamble on the Macintosh version before it is known if a new game will be a hit, but give me a break! Games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic were hits looooong before they were ported to the Mac.

    In my opinion, the best we Mac users can hope for with mainstream games in the near future is shorter porting time with the switch to Intel processors looming.

  • Bolo (Score:3)

    by LennyDotCom ( 26658 ) <Lenny@lenny.com> on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @04:57PM (#13334172) Homepage Journal
    Anbody remember Bolo? It was a Mac game invoving tanks that you could play over the internet. I remember playing it in 95. It was pretty cool. Does anyone know of a PC game prior that was net payable?
    • I remember playing the original Apple ][ version back in the early 80's.

      I also remember reading the original book by Keith Laumer.

      "The Dinochrome Brigade Salutes You!"

    • what? no link [nicholaspyers.com]?
    • 95 is about 6-7 years after the first graphic multiplayer game was released for all major platforms (at the time).

      Air Warrior was a world war II air combat simulator that ran on Macs, EGA/VGA PCs, Atari STs, and Commodore Amigas starting around 1988. At the time it ran on the GEnie network and all of the platforms played together in one virtual world.

      Air Warrior ran in various incarnations, slowly losing support for STs, then EGA PCs, then Amigas, then DOS machines, and finally Macs. The last version (W

    • Hey, thanks! I remember playing this game in high school but had completely forgotten the name. We always just called it "tank wars," which is, of course, numerous other games. Oh man, we had so much fun playing this on fridays!

  • since the inception? I think not. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MyDixieWrecked ( 548719 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @05:17PM (#13334345) Homepage Journal
    Almost since the introduction of the Mac, Apple users have lamented the lack of game support provided to the platform as compared to its Wintel brethren.

    wtf are they talking about?!?! I remember way back when... before win95. Before the pentiums. Mac gaming was where it was at. When I had my 486, I used to envy the macs and commodors and amigas.

    Prince of persia is a prime example of the lack of sound and graphics support the PC world had at the time. The only decent games of taht time period were doom and wolfenstein3d.

    Macs had digital sound built in. no need for that soundblaster add-in card for real sound and music over the bleeps and clicks of the PC speaker. Macs also, generally, had more VRAM, too, so they generally had much more complex graphics.

    hmph.

    • Re:since the inception? I think not. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by alan_dershowitz ( 586542 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @09:49PM (#13336148)
      The only decent games of taht time period were doom and wolfenstein3d.


      I remember back then too. So...What about all the original Space Quest and Kings Quest games, the Ultima series, Might and Magic, Sam and Max, Elite, Diablo, Wing Commander series, and about a billion others that I can't even remember off the top of my head? There were a shitload of good games over the years for DOS alone, way before Win95.

      The SINGLE, solitary mac only game I can think of that anybody gave a crap about was Marathon. Mac ports of ANYTHING were few and far between.

      I wasn't a macintosh owner back then, but seriously, I never heard anybody anywhere say they had to get a macintosh to get the best games. The games I saw on macintosh generally were stinky shareware puzzle games or (the excellent) sim city.

      • oh yeah, I forgot about wing commander and all the quest games (kings, space, police and leisuresuit larry).

        shit... ok. my memory is skewed or something.

        but I have these distinct memories of being in the back of the bookstore in the mall in the computer section looking at comodore (sp?) and amiga and apple games wishing I could play them.

        btw, diablo came out at the same time for mac and PC, or at least very close proximity. I was playing it during hte same time that all my PC friends were heavy into it, so
  • More great Mac games http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/ [spiderwebsoftware.com] Geneforge 3 is actiually pretty good. I found this companies games back when I was runing Linux. There is also freeciv, and absoute backgammon. What else would I want?

  • Who uses Macs? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dal20402 ( 895630 ) * <dal20402@NOsPam.mac.com> on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @05:32PM (#13334452) Journal
    "0mg 1337 g4M0rZ" aren't attracted to the Mac in the first place, because the games are on Windows. And, really, they drive the market for new games, so it's only sensible to market games (especially, as TFA notes, niche games) to them: in other words, Windows.

    So Mac gamers are people who use their Macs for other reasons (all those reasons we endlessly hear about) and happen to want to play some games. This audience will never support more than derivative games and a few struggling indie publishers -- which is exactly the situation now.

    Having said that, Apple desperately needs to fix its OpenGL problems to make game writing/porting easier.

    ObligatoryNostalgiaAside: I remember playing endless games of NetTrek on my middle school's Mac Pluses. Networked gaming in 1987! And I still fire up mini vMac (yes, I have a Plus case in the basement) to play Dungeon of Doom once in a while.

    • Re:Who uses Macs? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by EggyToast ( 858951 )
      I do also wonder if the highly modular nature of the x86 market helps the "get a new video card every year" mentality that subsequently helps drive games that, while not exactly pushing better gameplay or newer stories, at least pushes the graphics.

      Most people are happy working on a mac without ever really getting into its guts. That's a far cry from the "rebuild a PC every year" crowd who pushes for hardware advancements, sometimes simply because they feel like upgrading. I should know; I was in the sa

  • Intel switch maybe good for OpenGL? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @05:59PM (#13334673)
    So I was thinking that once the Intel transition is finished, a game written with OpenGL will be very easy to port for the Mac. This looks to me like a very good reason to develop new games with OpenGL: a near-automatic 3% increase in customer base, probably more than a 3% increase in game sales (less competition in the Mac market).

    Either that, or the automatic porting tools for translating DirectX calls to OpenGL will get so good that even porting DirectX games to the Mac will be easy and sacrifice little in performance. Either way, this means more games for Mac, and this will be good for Linux on x86, because a game for OSX86 will probably not be too hard to run on Linux with Transgaming translation or some Mac/Linux equivalent.

    • Re:Intel switch maybe good for OpenGL? (Score:5, Informative)

      by MouseR ( 3264 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @09:49PM (#13336145) Homepage
      Problem is that MicroSoft is doing everything it can to move developers off OpenGL and into DirectX. In Vista, OpenGL is actually impaired and emulated from DirectX.

      So performance-inclined developers will be tempted to develop for DirectX wich isn't available (or wanted) on Mac OS X.

      It's just another MS move in attempt to lock-out gaming from Mac OS X.

      I bet they're nerver about mactel too.
      • What happens to all the CAD/CAM vendors who ported their software from Unix to Windows? I thought Microsoft decided to support OpenGL in order to encourage that migration?
        • OpenGL support in Windows predates OS X as far as I know. So this decision was a good one for MS.

          But now, MS might be seeing Open GL as a double-edged sword. Like any standard it doesn't control, MS now want to lock their incredible user/developer base to their own system by forcing a migration to things they do control.

          OpenGL/DirectX isn't the only example of that. Java/C# and the PDF -like thing they're doing (forgot the name) come to mind.

          Now that OpenGL is good on Mac OS X, it's time for MS to move away
    • Ummm. You know OpenGL is platform independent, right? The whole point of it was that you could compile the same sources on your Sun, SGI, or whatever workstation, or even a PC. If a game is written in OpenGL, the OpenGL code will run on both Mac and PC (and Solaris and Linux and IRIX and...). It's the window set-up code that's non-protable, and sometimes some of the other code - although if you're using OpenAL, OpenPlay and SDL then the entire game can be portable.

      The problem is that it's a lot easier

    • Why would games be easy to port because they are on the same architecture? The operating system is completely different. I don't think it will be any easier than porting an OpenGL app to current Macs.

      Obviously, this easy porting hasn't panned out for x86 Linux.. Even though it runs on the same architecture, very few games are ported to Linux.
  • With Mac's running on Intel we may see the poor performance of Windows' OpenGL performance highlighted. Earlier on slashdot was a report on the poor performance of OpenGL on Windows due to the fact that Windows translates OpenGL to DirectX on the fly.

    Could motivate M$ to improve their OpenGL support, which would be good for Apple.

    • That was for a future version of Windows... (Score:5, Informative)

      by CreateWindowEx ( 630955 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @08:53PM (#13335855)
      Current generation OpenGL drivers do not translate calls to DirectX. In fact, under Windows OpenGL calls go straight to the graphics driver without much Microsoft code being involved, which means that the overhead can be much less, although it also makes the drivers more work to write and maintain. There used to be a MS-supplied "Mini-client driver" which allowed smaller vendors to more easily add OpenGL support, but MS dropped support of this a while ago.

      However, Microsoft has definitely been discouraging use of OpenGL on Windows for quite a while, and while I don't believe Microsoft is actually artificially degrading OpenGL performance in any way on their current operating systems, this effort probably has led to the hardware vendors devoting less time and energy to developing OpenGL drivers.

      John Carmack has always acted as a force keeping OpenGL alive on the PC by coding his games (and thus also the games that use his engine) for OpenGL instead of Direct3D; however, the current reports are that id is now doing dual Xbox360/PC development of their next-generation engine. Unless Microsoft is releasing an OpenGL library for Xbox360 (highly unlikely), this probably means that he is switching over to D3D.

      Since Apple tends to ship their consumer machines with non-upgradeable, lower-end 3D cards, any 3D game on the Mac is likely to be GPU-limited anyways, so using an OpenGL-to-DirectX conversion library may not be that much of a performance hit.

      • As the subject stated, the poster was referring to is Windows Vista (nee Longhorn), which will have an internal compositor similar to OSX's Quartz layer. This compositor will take OpenGL calls and convert them into DirectX, but will only support OpenGL 1.3 or earlier and it's Microsoft's intention that that will be the last OpenGL support in OS (so it will never support shaders). This means that OpenGL in Windowed mode (composited) will be less feature rich and slower than OpenGL in fullscreen mode and as
    • With Mac's running on Intel we may see the poor performance of Windows' OpenGL performance highlighted.

      Trolltastic. Go read the rationales for why Doom3 runs so slowly on Macs. A big reason is Apple's poor OpenGL performance.

      If OSX is ported to Intel as-is, it will be completely slaughtered by ATI and NVidia's highly optimized Windows drivers. Hopefully Apple can convince them to them to port their game-specific optimizations to OS X.

  • For those whom the above threads bring back memori (Score:4, Informative)

    by FirienFirien ( 857374 ) on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @06:47PM (#13335015) Homepage
    The Home of the Underdogs site [the-underdogs.org] has a *massive* list of games (810 at time of writing the article) for older systems and Classic. It's an abandonware site - you won't find Escape Velocity, since Ambrosia still parent that (fetch that from the Ambrosia website [ambrosiasw.com] instead) but you'll find a heck of a lot of other cool stuff. And you'll get some startling revelations such as, for example, a game like Populous 2 - granted not hugely complicated, but there's a heck of a lot of stuff in there - takes a mere 2.6MB of space, which compresses to 1.6MB. Most items are bigger than that these days. The save file is a whopping 238 bytes. Wow.

    Anyway, a good list of games that bring back memories. Enjoy!

  • great... but (Score:2, Interesting)

    by chrisxkelley ( 879631 )
    i love gaming, it's fun, and its a great thing to do with friends, however- are mac gamers really that crippled? I mean, every fps shooter is basically multiplayer deathmatch, then single player shoot-em-up with a similar storyline to the rest of them. I play starcraft, unreal tournament 2004, call of duty, and doom 3. all on a mac. they run great and its alll you need. starcraft, well is just starcraft, the legendary strategy game from the late 90's, call of duty, ut2k4, and d3 are all great fps shooters.

  • Former Mac Game Developer (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16, 2005 @07:30PM (#13335337)
    I used to do Mac game development - I did the ports of a couple of the larger commercial titles on the Mac in 2001-2002.

    It generally paid very poorly, and support from Apple was iffy.

    If I was to do a financial break down of units sold vs what the average Mac development company got paid for a port, it was probably along the lines of about $1 per unit sold. 50,000 units sold was a big hit (not often achieved; 20,000 was more realistic), and it was not unusual for a game to take an engineer 6 to 12 months to complete.

    One of the more prominent commercial Mac game publishers tried to drive down the cost of development by using the bids of wanna-be developers with no experience to drive down the bids of the experienced companies.

    I've since moved on to console work at a major publisher/developer, and for once enjoy job security, great working conditions, and good pay (steady pay, at that).

  • Wine For Mac x86 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nukem996 ( 624036 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @12:31AM (#13336818)
    With Mac x86 on the horizon I definitly see someone porting wine or Transgaming selling cedega for Mac x86. I wouldnt be surprised if it was included in the Mac x86 release, its Applest best way to best way to gain market share from M$.
  • Believe it or not, one of the big things that made me drool for a mac was Mechwarrior II. A special version was written for the mac to take advantage of some badass video card (Rave I think it was called). I saw it on my friends computer, thought about my crappy DOS-version graphics, and said "I MUST HAVE ONE!". It was beautiful. 10 years ago, if a game publisher wanted to, they could make a mac version that would blow the DOS/Win95 version out of the water. I imagine it stopped paying off to do so.

    Obv

  • iDevGames.com (Score:5, Informative)

    by 5plicer ( 886415 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @12:45AM (#13336855)

    To those interested in developing games for Mac, you should stop by the iDevGames forum [idevgames.com] sometime ;)

    Another similar site (which many of the iDevGames members also visit) is CreateMacGames.org [createmacgames.org].

  • Max OS X? >Must upgrade!

  • 99% of games I play are flash (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tod_miller ( 792541 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @04:00AM (#13337368) Journal
    Check out 'N' a great flash game. The proble with flash is reusability of the modules, and the hackability of it.

    Looking at teagames.com and http://www.rit.edu/~jhb4598/jblog [rit.edu] Java quake 3 map renderer (with rail gun) that runs at ~89fps on my stock dell POShit.

    Despite diverging proprietary systems, the dominance of flash and java in web and mobile gaming will ultimately (as technology grows) give us cross platform gaming. If Java can do cross platform quake 3 now, in 3 years will Java do cross platform Doom3 or Offset engine?

    Cross platform - its what you want!

    Play N today, it is supeerrrr333t, and they are putting out tutorials as their prime objective.

    Teagames hasn't tutorials yet, if you want, nag them to put some tutorials out!

    Thats all!

    Tod the guy playing slashdot and reading flash games... switch that... while getting paid!
    • With things like JOGL, JOAL, etc, cross platform Java games are becoming a real option I believe. Sure, they aren't going to be up to the standards of the latest greatest 100 man yeaer computer games, but that's probably only because they haven't had 100 man years of work spent on them. With OpenGL and OpenAL, and various other technologies doing all the work, the language you write the game logic in is becoming less important.

      The Light Weight Java Games Library is also a nice thing, especially as it is pla
  • If gaming could return to the Mac, I could go without buying another Windows PC, EVER! Of course, I do more console gaming and we've already got Unreal Tournament GOTY running on Debian at work. What else could I ask for?

  • Nowhere (Score:3, Informative)

    by tji ( 74570 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @09:52AM (#13339149)
    Am I the only one that thinks gaming is going nowhere on the Mac platform?

    The intersection between hardcore gamers and Mac users is very small.. If gaming is important to you, you probably wouldn't choose a Mac as your platform.

    With the console game platforms becoming even more powerful, I think more people in general will use them for all their gaming needs, and not use PC's (which may be a good thing for Apple, it makes PC gaming less relevant).

    Of course, there will always be a handful of games for the Mac. But, I see no reason why that will change in the near future, regardless of PowerPC vs x86, OpenGL vs DirectX, etc.
    • The way I see it, it's a difficult draw to get new people into gaming on Windows, let alone other operating systems. The focus is on multiplayer, with sometimes expensive video card requirements for an optimum experience.

      Will that attract people who prefer to play consoles? Will the focus on multiplayer FPS and MMORPGs really draw in new blood?

      I think it's going to be a hard sell. If mac gaming would essentially pull from the exact same market, then I think they're in for trouble. If mac gaming will

  • There's Warcraft, and.....um.....Photoshop (Score:4, Funny)

    by r_benchley ( 658776 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2005 @02:27PM (#13341793)
    Does anyone Remember the fake "Switch" ad that highlighted the dearth of games on the Mac? I'm a huge Mac fanatic, but I laughed my ass off when I saw that ad. http://www.ugo.com/channels/games/features/switch/ media/switch.mov [ugo.com]
  • Those two words, to me represent the biggest tragedy for the Mac gaming world. Games like Myth and Marathon and their sequels were like Doom and Warcraft for people with brains. These guys always had stuff that was way ahead of other game makers and they always developed for the Mac first. Halo was even announced when they were still a Mac-developing company (based in Chicago, I think) if I remember correctly. When I heard the news that Bungie had been bought by none other than MS, moved HQ to Redmond a

  • Macs lost out on gaming (Score:3, Informative)

    by el_womble ( 779715 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @08:14AM (#13346693) Homepage
    when gaming became an industry. Microsoft, and this pains me to say this, were REALLY on the ball when they started to develop DirectX. OK, the first few versions were baaaad, but it proved to developers that windows wanted to concidered a serious contender when it came to games.

    I know 3D graphics don't automagically make games better, but it does mean that people are prepared to pay more money because they are buying an experience, not a game. I bought a Voodoo 2 in 1997. Everyone thought I was mad, even I didn't fully understand what it would do for the game, all I thought it did was give me more FPS (this was important as I was only getting 16 FPS in Quake 2). It was like see the difference between a paint by numbers Mona Lisa and the real thing - I was hooked. Now thats not a great example, as Quake 2 used glide, but if I hadn't bought that card for Quake, I would never have bought Half-life, Deus-Ex or probably my X-Box.

    The real point was that all of a sudden my PC became my console. Even though I used my PC for coursework etc, that was just something it did, what I needed it for was games. It was the other way around with Macs, and still is.

    I gave up on PCs two years ago - mainly because I got bored of FPS not progressing, and the 6 monthly upgrade cycle was killing my pocket - and getting me into trouble. All I really needed was a computer to work on, and a console to play on.

    Clearly there will always be a market for PC games, but I would expect it to shrink. If your spending $1500 on a new computer, then your spending $1100 on a games machine, and $400 on a work computer. That wasn't the case 5 years ago, it was far more like $1500 for a new computer, and you need every ounce of power just to get Office working properly. This means the even if windows continues to dominate, the percentage of high-end PC games is going start to shrink very quickly - and the PC games market with it. For that reason I don't think Macs will ever be a serious game platform.

  • Apple snubbed games, now gamers snub Apple (Score:3, Insightful)

    by loyoyo ( 636211 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @12:26PM (#13348965)
    A big problem: although there were great 80's Mac games, Apple did not support game developers and publishers because Macs are for "serious" and "professional" purposes such as office and school use, film, art, graphics, music. Macs are for professionals who make content for the entertainment industry, NOT for frivolous entertainment such as games. Then cheap dual processor wintel boxes became weapons of choice for 3D game artists. Microsoft brass and staff saw opportunity in games and fostered the industry. Apple brass didn't want their cute designer Macs to be perceived as toys, hence they refused to support games.
    Avid and hardcore gamers in the market for a computer will buy Wintel, not Apple because you can't play most games on a Mac. I won't consider buying a Mac until all games are supported.

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