MouseBert

Has anyone here tried one of the WINE projects to run Windows CM appls on a Intel based Macs under MacOS X? If so, how well does it work, or not work? http://www.codeweavers.com/products/download_trial_macosx/

In OS X, if you have a two-button mouse with a scroll wheel, right click on the file and choose archive, or control-left click if you have the standard mouse. Of course this still leaves you with the turn.txt.zip problem noted earlier.

I always understood that CM I was not going to be ported, but I am still wondering about CM II. Any news?

Run MacOS 9 on an Intel Mac

It works fine on my 20 inch screen on my 4+ year old Mac, and that is under OS 9. I am not sure the max res I got (1600 x 1024) since I have not played it in a while, but it looks great.

The Boot Camp appl makes Intel based Macs into a dual boot system with 2 partitions on the HD, MacOS X(HFS extended) and WinXP(NTFS) not FAT32. Currently there is little compatibility. MacOS X ability to use NTFS is limited and XP can’t mount HFS ext, or so I am told. There may be appls, like DAVE that will permit mounting both partitions simultaneously; the good news about this that XP malware can’t screw up your Mac partition. The bad news is you cannot share files like MS Word files without some effort, like having it on a USB memory stick formatted in FAT. Now, to answer your question, any XP compatible program should work because it is running as an XP computer. Boot Camp is supplying the drivers, if what I read is correct. I don’t have an Intel-based Mac, so I cannot test it. Maybe someone can take their PC copy to a store that sells Macs and try it, or even better BTS might try it and see if it works.

I haven't seen anything recently about the migration of CM to MacOS X and I was wondering about its status. I see that DropTeam requires at least a 1.2GHz G4, 50% faster than the 800 MHz I am currently using. It appears that a major clock speed increase is needed to support the upcoming releases. If I were a developer, the dropping of full RAVE support and now the switch to Intel would frustrate me. (It must be a lot easier to write for an OS that does change over 5 to 6 years, versus all the changes Apple pulls.) Given the current news about Boot Camp and VMWare , I wonder if MacOS X native support is economically viable. It looks like I am going to have to upgrade to play and the a Intel Mac can run the game under XP, so what is the advantage for BTS to continue development for PPC MacOS X or even Intel Macs? I am hoping that BTS has some good reasons to continue with development – like “Mac users don’t suck up our time with support issues.”

Are there plans to add UPnP to CM2 or patch CM1 to support it? My updated firewall device is a pain to configure port forwarding, but it supports UPnP. So adding it to CM would make setting up a TCP game much easier, at least for me. From the configuration page of the FW: Wikipedia UPnP

Can we get a hint of what will be the Mac's minimum and preferred system configuration? In other word, will my aging 867 MHz PPC G4 w/ GeForce2 TwinView 64 MB vram be enough?

Why three? 1. A “Universal Binary“ for both Mac platforms (PPC and Intel) and 2. A Windows version for the others. </font>

Unless Battlefront is very fortuitous, I cannot see how this will not slow down the Mac release. To begin with, they now have to get the new hardware and it will be like developing for 3 platforms instead of two. The endian problem may be less because of the simultaneous Windows development. Specialized code that is endian dependent but not OS dependent might be directly imported. If I were they, I would be asking is it really worth putting any more effort into a G4 or G5 version that will have a life expectancy of just over a year and who is going to beta test an application when there is no hardware available yet? With all this effort to move it to an Intel based unix system, why not go all the way and support linux?

I would like to see more than 2 player on-line games with a command structure; something like players assigned HQs with their respective units. The problem with AI is that it is very complicated. If the developers put in a system that can be tweaked easily may be the best we can hope for. Programming common sense is hard. The idea of everyone drive down the road really fast and don't run into each other is easy to conceive but hard to implement.

Sorry, I missed that in my search. I was under the wrong impression that it was this year. Thanks for the info.

Since we are now well into 2005 now and impatiently waiting for the Mac OS X version, are you willing to give an ETA in which quarter it is likely to be released? How are you set for beta testers? I kind of like the idea of using your model of locked demos for distribution of betas; that way distribution would be inexpensive and convient. Do you have an official form for applying for beta testing? (Also, I liked the idea of duel use disk (Windows/Mac OS). I know space is a premium, but I personally would pay a few bucks more for it to be on DVD ROM.) Regards, MouseBert

It would be nice if CMX2 was backward compatible to allow the current CM scenarios to be played. I wonder what the chances of that occurring?

You should be able to track down someone who has a bunch of old Macs and systems going back to OS 7. (hint)

Can it boot MacOS 9? If not you have to run RAVE under emmulation which is really really slow. Now Apple may have updated it, but I have not heard that.

Re: Choppiness It went away after I deleted the pref files for CM. I don't know it this solved it or is a coincidence.

I am sure this has been stated somewhere, but I have not been successful in locating the information. My apologies. Does the CMBB CD have both the Macintosh and Windows versions on it like the CMBO CD? This is important to me because I expect to ordering a few as gifts and I really don't want to flip back and forth if I don't have to. Thank MouseBert

AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH No, not impressive at all. The only time you get that effect (which is called strobing, for reasons that will become clear) is when the environment is lit by electric light. In daylight, you don't get that effect. Look at spoked hubcaps foe an example you're likely to find nearby. In daylight, they don't do that. At night, they do. Streetlights, like other electric lights, aren't actually on all the time. The oscillate very quickly between on and off, 60 times a second (in North America). Our eyes can't detect that. Remember strobe lights in discos? Remember how they appeared to slow people so that everybody looked to be in slow motion even though everyone was still moving at real time? This electric oscillation does the same thing at a much faster rate. Depending on the speed of hubcap rotation, the spokes can look like they are moving forward, backward, or staying still. The same thing can happen when see a hubcap on TV or in the movies, becuase those media also strobe - at 24 times a second in the case of film. </font>

There seems to be an awful lot of panic on what Apple Inc. might do with MacOS 9 booting. If there is an underhanded ROM upgrade that allows only 9.0 running under X, then I would bet that the likes of Ryan Remple would find away to modify the OpenFirmware, which is FORTH, to bypass that, like he did with MacOS X and my old PowerWave PPC from PowerComputing.

There are several factors. If you are using a Cable Modem(CM) of DSL, directly into your computer, it may be straight forward, IIRC the CM may switch while a dial-in will certainly change. If you are using a router and NAT(network address translation) and DHCP, the IP the computer sees will change and will not be the same as your internet IP. That can be a problem for TCP games. There are several previous threads on this already. To check your internet IP go to: http://www.whatismyip.com/

Optimizing a Macintosh for CMBO is similar to putting together a stereo system. The analog is that the graphics card being the speakers. My suggestions of importance are: Graphics card: ATI or nVidia (The old VooDoo 5 cards do not have adequate RAVE drivers. )IIRC CMBB will have the same Mac code and there will not be a MacOS X upgrade until a future version. Graphic card memory - vram. I personally think 8 megs is cutting it tight. Ram: Enough to run and avoid virtual memory CPU speed: more noticeable in really big scenarios and almost unimportant in TCP games when the other person has a really fast processor. Bus Speed: no upgrade here. Hard disk speed: I think this is marginal unless you are running of something really slow like a USB drive. Check http://www.macsurfer.com and http://dealmac.com and if you have plenty of time, look for what you want on ebay. (Except ram which seem to go almost at list price.)