Ultradave

Thanks - I'll keep your email. Played a lot of PBEM with CMBO and really enjoyed it. I will be in touch in a week or so if that's ok - kind of hectic right now. Dave

Yes, both are white background

Two pdf files - one for the v2 game engine (BW), one for FI specific (Color), both are pdf files landscape, 2 pages per landscape page. Should print fine (although I haven't tried) Dave

It runs really well on my 15" MacBook Pro. Great graphics and very smooth. Just finished getting my $## handed to me in my first scenario - it's one of the demos - take the town center and church. I played non-turn based (continuous - whatever that's called :-) ) Took the church (sort of - ran out of time), but took way too many casualties trying to go building to building. Lost both my Stuarts (note to self - there is no where near as much concealment here as in Normandy :-) ). I did knock out 3 enemy armored cars, but lost twice as many soldiers. End result - neither side achieved any victory conditions (I ran into the church at 10 sec over time). Minor tactical defeat for the US. Dave

It's kind of a running joke that McAfee itself is the virus by not letting you actually accomplish anything. I have Trend Micro (required to connect my Mac to the university computer system) and it hasn't behaved as the descriptions here of McAfee. No problems downloading from GamersHell and using Chrome with Adblocker I'm not annoyed. Dave (highly satisfied customer).

Even though I have yet to scratch the surface of everything that CMBN has to offer, after playing one demo scenario I was hooked and purchased FI. Happy to report that downloading and licensing on my MacBook Pro was a snap and it looks and runs beautifully. Something more to divert me from studying like I should :-) (I took early retirement and am going back to school - sometimes I think I should have left it at the early retirement - working harder than I have in years) Anyway - thank to the Battlefront team for putting out yet another great game/simulation. I played many many hours of CMBO until I could no longer play it on newer Macs. Having Mac versions again is great! Dave PS - oh, yes, I just LOVE the 82d Abn shoulder patches. (as a former Cpt, 2/321st FA, 82d Abn Division, I may be just slightly biased :-) )

"Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" (imagine Clint Eastwood facing the gang members in Gran Torino)

Macs are also popular with those of us in the scientific computing community who use a lot of Unix programs that can be recompiled on a Mac (because behind the scenes it is pretty much BSD/Unix with Mac graphics and desktop layered on top.) This isn't too much different an environment than most Linux distributions, which are similar to Unix with a desktop environment on top. I have a new MacBook Pro - replaced the old one - about the same specs as yours except a 750GB hard drive. I play selective games, so the lack of the huge variety of PC games didn't bother me. Your specs will run CM just fine on the Mac or on your Windows partition. I used Parallels Desktop and W Vista and PC games run just fine. Dave

On a Mac if you have Spaces running, you can Command-arrow to the next space and have your email/skype/chat or whatever else running there. When you Command-reversearrow back to the CM Space, you won't see it, but just click on it in the Dock and it will reappear. This is with Lion on a MacBook Pro, but Spaces has been around for a while - it's just more automatic now.

Not just Dad's model trains... I do that too. And if you want some fun train simulation for something a little lighter, try Auran's Trainz (don't mean to hijack the thread here). So for something CM related, I know exactly what is meant by the cliff hanger aspect. I have yet to play any PBEM with BN, but played many many CMBO PBEM games in the past. There were many times where games were hanging in the balance or I was waiting to see how my assault or my opponent's would turn out. Or if he stumbled across that carefully laid trap :-) I need to get back into PBEM. Moving home from England today after 3 years there courtesy of work. Now that I'll be more settled at home I'll have to get up a few PBEM games. Already registered at A Few Good Men

Others have mentioned, but I like the subtle contours of the ground that really allow you to make a covered approach, find a hull down position to cover from. The process of checking the ground and looking for those avenues and positions is very close to real life. Get down low in the view at 2 or 1 and you can suddenly see that what looked pretty flat is full of minor little rises, small depressions and such that are valuable. Great stuff.

YES!! Let me offer my thanks again for bringing CM back to the Mac. I can run most PC games using Parallels and W Vista but still much prefer running Mac native. Still waiting 1-2 weeks (ha-ha) for the announcement of the Mac big huge package version Shock Force. Dave

Really I'm old enough that I don't think things had changed that much since WW2. I'm not old enough to know first hand, though. :-) We had more observers than in WW2. A 2 man FO team (observer and radio) with every infantry plt and a 3 man hq team with the Co CO. But the techniques and equipment hadn't advanced that much. For the FOs, 20 something pound radios, binos, grease pencil and a map, and "charts and darts" and slide rules in the fire direction center. The rest of the Army had computers but we couldn't jump with any of that so everything we did was the old way.

By job title sure, but everyone in an FO team knows how to call fire and in an emergency (like the whole FO team is KIA and GIJoe picks up the working radio screaming for help), every mortar and artillery firing unit is taught how to talk an untrained observer through a mission over the radio. That includes first making sure it's a good guy on the other end of the radio :-) Dave - formerly (more years ago than I care to admit, and before everything became computerized) Fire Direction Officer of B Btry, 2/321st FA(Abn), 82d Abn Div.

Several bouts of repair permissions, several session with Onyx to clean, and one run through of repair disk did nothing to fix things, but now the OS X update has magically made things work, so it looks like they did fix a bunch of permission problems. Oddly, this was the only program I had any problems with. Whatever it was it happened to touch something that needed fixing by Apple. Anyway, happily blowing things up now :-)

My MacBook Pro was not running Commonwealth Forces. I could license it but it refused to start up, despite troubleshooting by the crew at Battlefront. Today, there was a Mac OS X Lion update to 10.7.4 and glory be, I started up CW to see if it made a difference and it works perfectly. Maybe it was only me and there was something flaky about my new laptop (hard to believe since it's only a few months old) if there is anyone else out there with a Mac that refuses to handle CW you may have better luck after the system update. Dave

Former Airborne Field Artillery here. I can't imagine driving around in a vehicle just waiting to get hit by something. My roommate went Armor though and couldn't imagine doing anything else :-) To each their own.

There is a book "All American, All the Way" (author's name is Nordyke). Covers all of the 82d during WW2 but has a section on Market Garden. Good book (note however that I'm biased - I was in the 82d Abn Division Artillery in my younger days :-) )

For bringing Combat Mission back to the Mac. I played many many our of CMBO and finally had to give up when it was no longer playable on newer Macs. The other titles were too much for earlier versions of Parallels Desktop so no chance of running the Windows versions on the Mac. Now, though - no need as CMBN looks beautiful and runs like a dream on my new MacBook Pro. Just wanted to pass along a word of thanks from a very satisfied customer. Dave