kmead

Happy to see another installment. The graphics look wonderful (someone got a new video card ), and the addition of multiturreted/sponson vehicles will be quite nice. The sand clouds will be a multi-edged sword: look at that approaching dust cloud beyond the dune there, wonder whats at the base of it? It will make for some nice surprises and spoil others will it be a column of trucks or a plattoon of tanks? Sad to see that it will still be non OSX capable, though we can always hope that Apple will take pity on us and fix Classic Rave. Glad I bought a dual boot machine last fall . I do find I play CM alot less than I did before as I reboot out of OSX only once in a great while :mad: At least I still have a laptop that is always OS9 only for CMBO and CMBB (a bit weak but there it is) at least for a while longer, lets hope it will work with CMAK. Good job on a quick follow up and keeping the revenue stream going!

If you have an ATI video card you will not see any fog as ATI cards/drivers do not support it. Its likely time to buy a new Geforce card...

Seanmac: Sadly, CMBO and CMBB will not run on your computer. All the new G4 Alumninum Powerbooks are OSX booting only and run OS9 in Classic Mode under X. CMBO and CMBB both need the computer booted into OS 9.2.2 or earlier, which your computer cannot do. This was a decision by Apple and has nothing to do with CM. This has been a sad wrinkle for all of us, including BFC, as we have all known that Apple was migrating away from OS9 for most of a year and the writing has been on the wall for several years. The CM series was written using RAVE as the 3D graphic description process. Apple abandoned Rave and moved to OpenGL (ultimately a better environment). At the time it was written, Apple had been touting Rave as the platform for Apple's future development for games along with Game Sprockets and several other technologies. BFC was caught flat footed when Apple moved away as they had already coded the graphics engine for CM using Rave. Under OS 9 (the booted version) the Rave extensions behave correctly, carrying out the needed instructions that allow CM to properly display the graphics that we all see on the Mac version. Unfortunately, due to changes in the version of Rave that Classic (OS 9.2.2 that runs under X in emulation) uses, the game will not display the graphics. So, you may rightly ask, who do I complain to? Well you might fault BFC for not rewriting a program that had already suffered from a very protracted development cycle. At the time they could not have known that Rave would be so poorly supported under Apple's new operating system (which was still supposed to be Copland as I recall). You could rightly fault Apple for a poorly executed transfer of Rave technology to the Classic interface. Either way we still have a problem that none of the affected parties are satisfied with, which is that some users are unable to run a desired piece of software. I personally have complained to Apple several times. If we could get the entire board's Mac population to email a complaint to Apple, maybe something might change. I don't see BFC as being at fault in this case as Apple has failed to implement Classic Rave correctly. Whats on the horizon? BFC is beginning work on the CM2 engine that will be the underlying basis of future versions of CM, and they have stated that it will be OSX compatible. Unfortunately, that particular horizon is pretty far away, as BFC has only one programmer (Charles, the brain in the glass bowl) working on it so it will be at least two years from now that we will get our next fix of CM. CM has so far been written on a Mac so we can (hopefully ) rest assured that the next iteration will be Mac friendly. [ March 03, 2003, 09:17 PM: Message edited by: kmead ]

I ran CMBO for a long time on a Rev B iMac. I ran OS8.6 and later OS9.1. I had a total of 196bm of physical ram in mine so I could assign 60+mb to CMBO. I never tried to run CMBB on it however.

Found this today, perhaps it would help: http://mirror.ati.com/support/products/mac/radeon8500/osx/radeon8500maceditionosxdrivers.html

Yes this is indeed strange. Since you have a separate system folder already created, could you try installing an old version of OpenGL and the ATI drivers? I would try 1.2.1 as that generation was pretty reliable. You have a fairly unusual video card (for a mac user), so maybe the drivers for that are now incompatible with CM?

Are you booting into OS9.22? or OSX? CM will not run under Classic under X. You need to boot into OS9 and run it with Classic Rave extension shut off in the extensions manager. On most Titanium powerbooks it should run, but on the latest ones with ATI 9000 graphics, there has been alot of trouble as Schrullenhaft has pointed out.

Indeed, hope springs eternal.

I have run CMBB successfully on a 400mhz Slot loading DV iMac. The 8mb of vram is marginal, but allows 800x600 resolution. Stay away from large battles.

Tar: I am pretty sure that I covered each of your points already. Including, added sales from Mac users buying for 10. I suspect you over estimate the Mac wargamer market, of course I could be underestimating it as well . As a point of interest, the programmer is Charles and not Matt. Matt has many other responsibilities that are equally important. I chose 6 months as I thought it would be a reasonable time frame for one person to go through all the code and testing. Having been here a while, the time from Beta to Gold Demo was @6 months and the time to release after that was an additional 3. That was for polishing up the already finished program. Maybe Steve will wiegh in on this, but in any case, I am pretty sure that this issue has been closed.

Yup its a nice argument, and the same one we had a year and a half ago when it became clear that CMBO would not run under X natively. At that time it was nearly unanimous that we would all pay for the privelage to have CM work under X in some way, as a Classic or native app. The thing you need to understand, and Schrullenhaft tried to make clear, is that there is a economic issue here. CMBO and CMBB were coded/programmed by one man. One. That means if he is working on this then he is not working on anything else. This is a business, and you have to pay the bills, with the success of the CM series, BFC had to add staff which means the basic number of dollars to keep every body in beer and pretzels has gone up by 2.5 (2 staff to 5). To get the money you need to sell product, in this case you have a bifurcated market that is dominated by one platform. In this case it is MSW with Mac OS coming in a very distant second. Lets say CMBB sells 100k units and to be charitable, 15k or so are sold to Mac users. (BFC has never stated what the real proportion is so this is just for argument sake.) So, lets say they decide to redo the Mac version for better compatibility and it takes 6 months of Charles's time. When it comes out, 10k of the installed base decides to upgrade (the other third no longer play and or resent the idea of paying for an upgrade) then over the next 2.5 years they sell an additional 15k copies to new Mac OS users, for a total of 25k copies sold that are Mac OSX compatible. (Remember, the wargame simulation market is quite limited and BFC's distribution method is somewhat less efficient than some others ie you have to have internet to get it in the US and most of the world. In addition the CM series is gettng old and new products are coming on the market all the time.) So lets say that BFC nets 30 bucks per copy for a net income on the OSX version of 450k dollars, a nice chunk of change, that then is divided among the employees of BFC in the form of salaries or whatever the enumeration is. In the mean time MSW sales continue, but are levelling off as other products come available and so lets say from the day Mac development begins to CMER intro, another 100k units are moved. At CMER introduction with great accolades sells 200k MSW units and 20k Mac units (not all users buy again) for a total of 6.6m in the first year) three years from now. OK here is the interesting part, imagine not doing a MacOSX version. So, over the intervening 2.5 years a smaller and smaller percentage of Mac users buy CM products (which truly is a shame) but its reality as OS9 bootable computers are no longer available new so few people buy an unsupported product. So they sell only another 5k units to Mac users. In this case when its intro'd CMER sells a bit better to MSW users 210k, as there is more latent buzz from CMBB. Mac sales, for many reasons are only 15k units (lack of previous OSX version, declining MacOS market share, small wargame market etc.) So we have a difference of 20k Mac units sold but a gain of 10k MSW sales for a total net loss of 10k units sold. This 300k dollars is the opportunity cost of not doing a Mac OSX version. In all likelyhood there would be considerable pull through sales of old CM products which would likely more than offset the cost of not doing a Mac version. So for a 6 month delay in the development of a new product they do have some income, but it delays the introduction of CM Eritrea to Rome by 6-8 months. As it is likely that there will really be almost no difference in total income whether they do a X version or not, I can assure you they would much rather have the 6m or so dollars 6 months sooner for CMER and the next iterations of CM that would likely be able to follow much quicker than CMBB did CMBO. I am just as disappointed as you all are that we will never have CMBO or CMBB under X (unless the Apple gods make a remarkable change). I have owned an Apple computer of one type or another since1983, so I really want it as I find myself playing X compatible games much more than I do CM with its attendant reboot to OS9. My apologies for any logic faults or errors in my long winded arguement, I am not an economics, marketing or other soulless professional, it was just to roughly illustrate the point of why there will be no X version. [ February 22, 2003, 09:33 AM: Message edited by: kmead ]

The Classic Rave extension is reinstalled each time OSX uses the Classic folder. My suggestion is to maintain two versions of 9, one for use with Classic (blessed in the System Preferences Classic pane ) and a separate one for booting directly into 9. The direct boot version of 9 I have trimmed down to get rid of extraneous extensions and control panels. So far this has worked well for me. I removed Classic Rave from that folder completely. OS10.2.4 updated resources for the video drivers including the ATI8500. What version of OSX are you running? In terms of your CMBB install try doing your install like this: first copy the contents of the CMBB CD to a folder on your hard drive. Then run the installer from that folder, believe it or not it will run much faster and in my experience will be a much more reliable install. There are a huge number of files, and if even a few are wonky, you can run into problems. Good luck and let us know how it turns out.

Huh, now that you mention it mine's the same. Dah, whoops! It is 1.02 but it still says 1.01.

Well, after additional testing, the problem has mysteriously cleared up, with me making no discernable changes to my computer. I guess it can be put down to typical aberrant computer behavior. I have run both CMBO and CMBB and both now behave as they are supposed to. Hooray! Now I just wish that the time while the computer is computing the turn and the computer player it wouldn't have the screen go black. I believe that its a function of the video card in this computer versus the video card in my last one. (ATI Rage 8mb in my iMac DV and a Nvidia GeForce4MX in this one). So all is once again well in Karl's Mac land. Many thanks for the replies.

Well, I just installed CMBB 1.2 and now I appear to have a problem. When I run CMBB, all the machine gun and other weapon sounds (firing and explosions) engine sounds, and the command sounds are massively garbled . In effect all the sounds sort of sound like Chigger chigger chigger at a low volume. The birds in the background sound just fine. I recently installed Mac OS10.2.4 and also Quicktime 6.1. I haven't run CMBB in a while so I don't know if this an issue with Quicktime, OS10.2.4 or CMBB. OS10.2.4 makes changes to OS9 as well (for its Classic use) Normally I don't do updates in groups so I can divine what is causing what, but this time I goofed. So, has anyone else seen this? I suppose I can check by installing OS 9 separately as I have a few other harddrives and I could easily make a separate System for just running CM, but would like to avoid the hassle. I will be attempting a few other things before I go there so if anyone has any ideas I would appreciate the feedback. Thanks

Sadly, I must announce no change in the ability of Classic to run CM of any sort while booted in OS10. I tried CM Beta Demo, CM Gold Demo, CMBO, CMBB. :mad: thanks again, Apple, for going the extra distance to allow one of the best items Made on a Mac to run on a Mac.

It should run just fine. There was a thread in the general forum a couple of monsths ago that was about just this subject. I would search for it and email the gentleman that bought one to see how he feels about his purchase. I would buy the 14", as the larger size of the screen makes it much more pleasant to use for all tasks. Get the maximum amount of memory, not from Apple, you can buy it locally or by mail much cheaper (Ramseeker.com) as it is not proprietary. Enjoy.

There are still lots of the last generation of Macs out there that are still new and deliver nearly the same performance. A 1.25 dual processor would be plenty fast for all but a MSW user. My dual 867 is just fine for all but the most rigorous rendering in Maya (a video card issue). Ulitmately the Classic issue is not speed but the support of the Rage API that CM is written to, Apple has not seen fit to provide all the calls used by the late versions (OS9) that CM uses. Therefore it tries to render it in software mode, 640 x 480, which is not enough to run CMBB which needs 800 x 600. Truly a sad state of affairs, thanks Apple. :mad:

An update on my info from above from the Mac OS Rumors site: *The next update on deck appears to be the iMac and eMac lines, but there is much continued doubt as to when Apple will be able to clear out existing supplies of both models. The predicted specs continue to center around 1GHz processors for the high-end iMac (900MHz is probable for the eMac), Firewire 800, 4X Superdrives, Airport Extreme and Bluetooth support, and a move to 17-inch displays for most iMac models. Timing, as described above, is not very clear -- but presently we are looking at the 6-8 week timeframe. *An OS X 10.2.4 Update (codename "Jaguar Pink") is now in mid-testing, and will be released near the end of the month. It will be primarily a collection of bug fixes and hardware support updates for the new Powerbooks and PowerMacs, but will also apparently include new drivers for both ATi and nVIDIA graphics cards, system audio layer functionality improvements, and new optimizations to OS X's CoreGraphics engine. One can only hope that there is some effect on CMBB useability with the new drivers for Nvidia and ATI.

Yes unfortunately the ATI 9000 chip set drivers are not up to the job of running CM. Apple is also having some troubles with this chipset with Keynote and is expected to make some changes to Apple code to fix that problem. Whether or not it fixes anything for CM is a bad crap shoot. Now if you would send your G4 Powerbook to Charles for a few weeks, maybe he could figure out how to massage the code for the chipset for everyone.... Just a thought

As I understand it this is the situation: All currently shipping iMacs are OS9 bootable. All currently shipping iBooks are OS9 bootable. 15" Titanium G4 Powerbooks should be OS9 bootable. All in stock G4 MDD towers built before January 28 are OS9 bootable. There are G4 MDD towers being built to education order only, that are to the pre January 28 board/feature specification that will boot into OS9 All Aluminum G4 Powerbooks are OSX bootable only. This would be the 12" and 17". A new aluminum G4 15" Powerbook will be replacing the current 15" Titanium will also be OSX only bootable. The new MDD G4 towers with Bluetooth Airport Extreme and 800M Firewire are OSX only bootable. The next product due for a revision will be the iMacs in early February and as well as a number of feature boosts, they will be OSX only bootable. The iBooks probably have a few more months. The way that Apple makes OSX only booting possible is in the rom image that is written to the hd with the original software install and a new strain of OSX. The processors are unchanged, but many features have been added that have no drivers in the earlier OSX and earlier rom image. I am sure a very smart programmer could make a new machine boot into 9, but ultimately to what end? There are lots of hot macs around that can boot into 9 that you can still buy that have similar speed and features as the new ones so I suspect that hack will go unsolved. There will be a new version of OSX in the next month or so, 10.2.4, that will fix a number of issues, and no it will not prevent a currently OS9 bootable Mac from continuing to do so. So if you value OS 9 booting, run down to your favorite local VAR and pick up the hottest discontinued mac you can afford or wait a couple of months and pick up one off of Ebay. CompUSA will likely have a few on hand for a while.

Happily, my 3 month old Mirrored Drive Door, dual processor 867 with G4MX video card runs the game just fine. Without a doubt it would be really great if we could snap our fingers and Apple would make Rave work in OSX and that BFC would do what it needed to do to run under OpenGL. Sadly that won't happen. Given that most windows laptops have never satisfactorily run CM we have been lucky with our Apples. I am certain that BFC would truly love to make it come true and are indeed working on it with the next engine. Given the size of the staff we will just have to wait. ATI is trying to give you a excellent business machine that runs modern applications for the modern OS, not an older game that uses what is now a very dated engine. Should Apple, Nvidia and ATI work harder to ensure better compatibility with older software, yeah they should. This is not the only product I have trouble with under X and Classic mode, I have hundreds of pieces of childrens software that is of very limited use on a machine that only gets booted into 9.2.2 when I want to run CM. Ultimately this was bound to happen, backward compatibility cannot feasably go on forever, anyone got a 8track? how about a cassette? Pretty soon a music CD will be a dinosaur as well, such is life.

So, did you do a clean install as I suggested?

ATI on a Mac does offer fog and smoke graphics. Unfortunately, ATI has not seen fit to include that functionality in their MSW drivers.

Since you are a CMBO user I know this is redundant and something you already know. First CM does not run under OSX and Classic. When running under OS 9.2.2 you need to disable the Classic Rave Extension at startup. Many of us have suffered poor initial installs. My solution to a partial install, which this sounds like, was to copy the CD to your hard drive and run the install from there. This install technique took much less time and gave me a complete install on the first try. Exactly what machine are you running this on? HD space, actual physical ram, and what video card with how much memory? You should update to 9.2.2 if you haven't already. There is the possibility that you have a defective disk, if you are unable to get a good install then I would think that is a possibility.