Ignatious J. Fathead

Regrettably, CMBB is a no-sale for me. The framerate on the demo is frustratingly low on my G4/450 and upgrading the video card may not improve the situation because most of the card manufacturers are no longer fully supporting MacOS9 (and why should they?). To make matters worse, by early next year, any new Mac with the horsepower to run CMBB won't run either version of CM because they'll no longer be able to boot into OS9. Too bad.

I'm not into the culture of these boards and have no idea what this response means.

They do spend a lot of time on their stomachs.

Are you familiar with extension conflict troubleshooting techniques? Start with the "OS 9 Base" set of extensions selected in Extensions Manager. If CM works properly at that point, go back to your original set, and disable non OS-9 extensions one at a time, restart, and test.

I'd be real surprised if ATI showed any enthusiasm for developing new drivers for Mac OS 9.

My observation here is that everyone is entitled to their own definition of futility. Personally, I get my kicks chasing around after Tigers with Stuarts, so draw your own conclusions. As for Apple and gaming, I plead a certain amount of ignorance -- CM is the only game I have either the time or the inclination to play these days, so I'm absolutely not big on the gaming scene. Still, I do know that a couple of game publishers, like MacPlay, seem to get by quite well without Apple's encouragement, so it can be done. In reality, if I were a truly avid gamer, I'd probably own a game box or a PC, because that's where the action is. (Yes, I'm entirely prepared to concede that the PC is the superior game machine, but I use my Macs primarily for making a living, so once again, draw your own conclusions.)

You might as well ask the same question about bugging Apple, but I don't see you objecting to that. I don't object to either, and I don't worry about "aggravating" companies whose products I buy. Sometimes it's the best way of keeping them apprised of your expectations as a customer.

By all means, complain to Apple. But as I read in another thread, Apple has updated RAVE support in 10.2, but CM still won't run in the Classic Environment. So -- at the risk of playing human mine detector here -- maybe this problem should not be placed entirely on Apple's shoulders. Might it not be appropriate to rattle CM's cage as well?

Look, I sincerely have no desire to start a flame-war over this, so if I can forestall one before it starts by withdrawing my previous statement, I will. To rephrase: It seemed to me that several posters in prior threads on this subject were arguing that the action Apple announced today would not occur until well into the future. I recall having my ears boxed pretty severely for arguing that it would probably happen sooner rather than later.

Some of us did, anyway. Others seemed to be living in a state of serious denial. Effectively, no Mac sold after the end of this year will run CM.

Don't worry about updating the iBook to 10.2 -- it won't prevent you from booting into OS9. I used to play CM on my G3/400 Powerbook, with the same Rage Mobility card as your iBook. The performance is passible. I certainly prefer playing it on the G4/450 Cube. Although the Cube has essentially the same Rage 128 card as the Powerbook, the overall performance is clearly better. I've considering upgrading the video card in the Cube, but I can't justify either the price or (even more importantly) adding a fan to the Cube.

Uh, sure, okay. :confused: Anyway, I want to thank Schrullenhaft for his detailed post. These points are all well understood (by me, anyway). I think most of us have some sense of how this situation came to pass, though perhaps we disagree on the probable future.

I was citing a post in this thread. He was speculating on the market share for CM on OSX, not the entire market share for CM for the Mac. So you are right -- the entire share is, by implication, larger. But not large enough to justify recoding CM for OSX, apparently. In fact CM's market share on OSX is actually zero since it doesn't run in OSX. BTW, I thought I was speaking quite clearly.

The latest scuttlebutt on booting into OS9 in the next version of OSX can be found in this eWeek. article.

All of this was discussed earlier, so there's no need to go over it again. None of it changes the basic facts, which are that CM is incompatible with OSX and probably will remain incompatible with OSX for at least a couple more years, according to the best available information. I've seen enough developers abandon the Mac over the years to know the dance steps. First, they stop updating the Mac version of the product because they "can't justify the investment," and it loses feature parity with the Windows version. Then, a few months or a year later, they drop the Mac version of the product entirely, claiming a "lack of demand." It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. Will this happen with CM? I hope to hell not. But once again, even the most diehard supporter has to admit, if the first OSX compatible version of CM doesn't arrive for two more years, that will be a full four years after OSX came on the market -- an eternity in technology years.