John Kettler Posted May 12, 2000 Share Posted May 12, 2000 First of all, let me be clear. I own an iMac; this is therefore not a flame, but simply a statement of fact. According to BTS, 2 MB of VRAM won't run Combat Mission. Yet that is exactly what I just got through doing. On a Gen One 233 MHz iMac (w/64 MB RAM and 2 MB VRAM (stock ATI RAGE board), OS 8.6) I played the Gold demo CE straight through vicious to and fro combat to a crushing Allied victory by Axis surrender. By game end, the Axis had 10 functioning troops left, 40 were captured, and 204 became casualties (57 KIA). All StuGs were killed. I lost two Shermans and 90 casualties (19 KIA). Roughly a fourth of my fatalities came from a tank crew forced to abandon its track and caught in a fierce fight for the church. The battlefield itself was a wasteland of burning vehicles, bodies, and dense arrays of craters. Not only did the game not freeze then, but it didn't even twitch earlier when the Germans dropped a major smoke bombardment on me. Of course, I didn't have transparent smoke, but I did have white smoke for screening and pillared oily black smoke for vehicle kills. The default resolution of 640x480 gave me a headache from eyestrain, because everything looks blurry compared to 800x600, yet the game was still eminently playable--even if the figures did look more like those in Close Combat! There are some odd things occurring,though. For one, the movement bar seems to not notice things like walls many times. I don't know whether this is a glitch or a deliberate effort to keep us from knowing as much as we did in the Beta demo. The curved, ground following line of sight display takes some getting used to, and I think that the movement bar used to also display information differently. The new rays for LOS and firing are huge compared to the Beta demo, though I suspect some of this may be because of reduced display resolution. Artillery fire has gotten really nasty, and the atmospheric sounds (distant crump of artillery) really add to the immersion experience. There are far more voices heard and commands given to the troops on both sides. It's also refreshing to see the enemy surrender when the situation becomes hopeless, standing up in foxholes with arms held high. I saw my first Panzerfausts tonight too. A combination of infantry assault and Sherman direct fire flushed an antitank team from the woods--squarely in the path of a Sherman with hunt orders. It was fascinating to watch the fleeing Germans being chased and shot at by the pursuing Sherman. Never saw anything like that before! I'm sure I've barely touched the surface of what's really in the Gold demo, but I wanted to tell all you Mac users whose machines seem way short of the minimum recommended specs that things are nowhere nearly as bleak as they may seem. CM Gold demo shouldn't run on my admittedly anemic rig, but it does. Try it on yours! Regards, John Kettler Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tom w Posted May 12, 2000 Share Posted May 12, 2000 It will also run on a 233 mHz beige G3 with the stock on-board 2 megs of VRAM, and yes it will only run at 640x480 and there is no fancy smoke or transparency effects but will run fine. The problem seems to be with the add on video cards which are not top of the line units. Seems like the Voodoo 1's are a real pain.... That 2 megs of VRAM on the iMacs and early biege G3's will do the trick for a 640x480 display, but its just emulating video in software (I think) instead of using the raw horsepower of an add on 3D graphics card, which would be the prefered solution. -tom w Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Berlichtingen Posted May 12, 2000 Share Posted May 12, 2000 Question for both of you... have you tried reducing the number of colors displayed? You might be able to run at 800x600 if you are only displaying thousands of colors rather than millions. I'm not sure it will work, but it might be worth a try. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tom w Posted May 12, 2000 Share Posted May 12, 2000 Tried that, in other circumstances that might work but I suspect that the CM app it self defaults the video down to 640x480 at 8-bit (256 colors) when it can only find 2 megs of VRAM on board doesn't matter what the video is set to 256 thousands or millions, on the 2meg VRAM biege G3 the game simply defaults down to 256 colors at 640x480 Again I'm not complaining, given that there is only 2 megs of VRAM on these things this is quite an accomplishment for a 3D game like this. Same goes for the first Gen iMacs. -tom w <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Berlichtingen: Question for both of you... have you tried reducing the number of colors displayed? You might be able to run at 800x600 if you are only displaying thousands of colors rather than millions. I'm not sure it will work, but it might be worth a try.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Berlichtingen Posted May 12, 2000 Share Posted May 12, 2000 Oh well, just a thought Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts