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The future of the Mac and Combat Mission


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Originally posted by Jarmo:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Andreas:

On my G4/400, when I am in OS9.2.2, it does not recognise the internal ZIP drive, or one of these cute USB memory sticks, at all. ....

Does anyone know which extension I must have screwed up in OS9.2.2 to achieve this peculiar setup?

Sounds like one of the USB extensions.

Do you have "USB device extension" in there?

If not, you can use "tome wiever" (search versiontracker and apple site) to get the USB extensions from an Apple installer file without doing a reinstall. </font>

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Jarmo,

The current mac towers are incompatible with CM, I refute your assertion otherwise... they all come with a Radeon 9000, which I assume there are problems with, as discussed in this forum... to what macs are you referring when you say that CM is compatible with all current macs (of course not including the G5)?

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Also, since my thread was locked in the main forum (yes I did a search and I couldnt find this thread) I will repost it here... Jarmo, please tell me what current shipping macs display CM properly out of the box? No, I'm not tooting my own horn by reposting, its just I have no way to respond to those people who have already responded to my initial post unless I post here to this thread.

Here is the post that got locked up that should have been placed in this thread...

-------

I am a loyal patron of BTS and its products, however, recent changes in Mac hardware have made CM incompatible with most, if not all macintosh computers in the current supply chain. I have made my views public in this forum in the past, but they seem to have fallen on deaf ears. I grow tired of criticizing the company that brought me endless hours of gaming bliss, however, I think its in the best interests of the company to voice how I feel, in order to make the product better, and to ensure that future generations of CM don't suffer the same fate.

*rant on*

Please help me as I am so angry that BTS no longer supports the Mac platform.

Let me first make something very clear, there are no current mac towers capable of playing CM... none, nada, zip. Is this what BTS calls "Mac Compatible"? I hasten to say the Mac has been abandoned by BTS, and thats a shame. I am sure all of you out there are happy chugging along in your Beige G3's with OS9 and CM, but I have a new G4, and my copy of CMBO and CMBB are now worthless... doesn't this bother anyone, that CM is no longer "Mac Compatible" on any tower Apple sells?

Please don't quote me numbers on how the OS9 installed user base is huge, and that there are only about 15 people using OSX in the whole world, ergo why should BTS support it? Its a croc. OSX is robust and stable for at least the last 18 months.

Do any of you mac users wish to chime in on the situation? I seem to be the only one here that is getting really pissed. CMAK is nice, but OSX has been out for years, and BTS still refuses to support it, thats a shame. Its also a shame that noone here seems to care. Let me say this... I DO CARE... but, from a business standpoint, maintaining legacy hardware for a single game is almost as ludicrous as some the comments in the Peng Challenge thread. I have to turn over my macs because I use them for business and need the fastest/greatest, and to take advantage of their correspondingly high resale value, and now my new mac no longer supports CM... I say its time to remove "Mac Compatible" from the BTS website, its a lie, OS9 is dead.

Two years from now I am sure I may be assuaged by a new CM engine that is compatible with my hardware, however, in the meantime, CMAK is a stab in the back to me as a Mac user, I hasten to say it was the wrong move by BTS not to commence work immediately on a new 3D engine that supports OSX. Naturally, this is a narcisstic viewpoint, and BTS will do whatever it wants to do anyway (indeed it already has), however I feel completely disenfranchised as a new mac owner that I can no longer play my favorite game, which isn't "Mac Compatible" by my definition.

I ask you Mac users out there, how do you feel?... are you happy just to have CM on OS9? Are you happy that you cannot buy a new mac if you want to play CM? Are you happy dual booting?

It makes me nauseous that I won't be able to play CM for ? years because BTS refuses to support OSX. I freely admit there were numerous external circumstances that affected BTS's ability to produce an OSX game initially, but here we are... two years later.

*rant off*

Please take all of this with a grain of salt smile.gif I had a few shots of kahlua in my coffee this morning, and felt like I needed to vent my frustration somewhere, and since I can't do it on the battlefield...

--------

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Good Lord... perhaps you're as deaf as you claim BTS/BFC are !

Yes, CM doesn't work with OS X.x and won't work on the newest Macs that have Radeons in the 9000 family and they're marginal (but 'working') on most of the NVidias offered on the Mac platform. No one on the forum here or within BFC/BTS claim that there are not problems with CM on the Mac plaform. They mention the problems with OS X to those who might purchase the Mac version. Admittedly the warnings aren't perfect and don't cover every contingency that has popped up on the Mac, but then again there is still hope. Maybe ATI will fix their RAVE drivers at some point that OS 9.x boot-capable Macs can play CM if they have a Radeon 9000 family video chip.

BFC/BTS are small companies that CANNOT keep up with all of the changes on the Mac. CMBO took over 3 years to develop since most of the code was written by one developer. BFC/BTS are admittedly trying to get as much mileage as possible off of the RAVE/DirectX 6-based engine as they can. This includes the next release CMAK. Why do this ? I assume you've already heard the arguement about BFC/BTS needing paychecks and all... Actually CMAK has only had so much 'programming' done to it (what I mean to say here is that the differences in the engine are nowhere near as great as they were between CMBO and CMBB). It is mostly the CMBB-engine with some necessary tweaks.

Work is already progressing on CMX2, but it takes time since it isn't just an API transposition (RAVE > OpenGL), but a rewrite of the way the whole game engine works. While not every detail that has been requested so far can possibly make it into the engine rewrite - many other details will be, but only with a much more complexly coded engine. If it were easy or cost-effective (time and/or money) to just transpose the graphical API to make the CM series work with current Macs I assume this would have already been done. Others have made suggestions in the past on how this might be done, but most of these methods involved either expensive licensing (would you like to pay US$150 for your Mac copy of CMBB ?) and/or involve so much more extra coding to make the process actually work as to be a near waste of time. On top of this is the idea that it would be better to spend all this time actually rewriting the engine only once - rather than twice (the first time would be graphical only - the next time would be the game mechanics plus many other additional graphical engine changes that would be necessary).

However everything that's been said here has probably fallen on deaf ears too. There's nothing that will placate you and that's probably why BFC/BTS won't respond to you. They have to make business decisions that won't please everyone (trying to please everyone is quite insane if you've ever attempted it in the long term yourself). There's no sense of mean-spiritedness or 'cutting-off' going on here. Apple has made some major changes in their platform and BFC/BTS cannot react and change their product line to immediately satisfy Mac users. It's just the way things have to be until CMX2 can be released.

As Steve has mentioned in the past (and I'll generously paraphrase here) - he's grateful that some forum members don't run BFC/BTS, otherwise CM wouldn't have existed at all. When you're in a similar situation to BFC/BTS perhaps you'll have a bit more empathy. 'Til then you may want to put enough Kahlua in your coffee so you'll reach a state of depression rather than anger. ;)

[ August 04, 2003, 08:00 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

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Originally posted by yunfat:

Jarmo,

The current mac towers are incompatible with CM, I refute your assertion otherwise... they all come with a Radeon 9000, which I assume there are problems with, as discussed in this forum... to what macs are you referring when you say that CM is compatible with all current macs (of course not including the G5)?

The radeon9000's preconfigured in the towers may or may not have problems. There has been at least one user with a 9000 without problems.

You can, however, order the tower with Geforce4Ti. A much better choice for a gamer anyway.

In addition, iBooks should still run OS9 and CM.

Not sure of iMacs.

Also note that BFC has the same stance on PC side too.

Of all card manufacturers, only nVidias cards have played

CM properly. And even they had huge problems a while back.

In any of these cases the problem has been/continues to be

with the card manufacturers.

It's not that I wouldnt be pissed about the situation.

It's just that it's so pointless wailing when nothing

can be done to make the situation better.

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I have a G4 1.25 GHz and am running 10.2.6. When I try to play Combat Mission in Classic Mode, everything works fine until the end of the startup when the message "Displaying 3D Graphics" stays on my screen. I eventually have to do a force quit of CM.

Any suggestions?

Meanwhile, I hope that software issues can be resolved because this is the best military game for the Mac that I've played.

Thanks.

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Originally posted by JT:

I have a G4 1.25 GHz and am running 10.2.6. When I try to play Combat Mission in Classic Mode....

....Any suggestions?

Yeah. Dont try to run CM in classic, it wont work.

You'll need to boot to OS9 to run CM.

Go to system preferences/startup and select OS9 to boot into.

I'm not sure if your mac is of OS9 booting type or not. You'll find out...

--

edit. you might end up with black screen and no bootup. In that case, reboot holding "alt" (or was it ctrl) until you get a screen that lets you choose which OS to boot in.

[ August 08, 2003, 09:54 AM: Message edited by: Jarmo ]

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Originally posted by yunfat:

Also, since my thread was locked in the main forum....

You had to repost here without reading any of this thread?

Here's a recap...

Steve and Charles... Mac Users

Why don't they fix it now?... They can't. Steve's first name might be Steve, but his last ain't Jobs

Why don't they fix it at all?... They are. Complete engine rewrite

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Edit: My mistake... I wasn't aware of Mac-on-Linux, the Mac OS 9/X 'emulator' for Mac Linux distros.

It would be interesting to see if this works. I'm not sure there would be hardware-level support for RAVE under this environment. So the display speed of CM may be quite slow with this setup, but it may still work.

I highly doubt that CM would work under Linux on the Mac. CM is a RAVE application and I don't believe that Yellow Dog Linux or any other Mac Linux distro has native support for RAVE. In fact I don't know of any extensive ports of RAVE to OpenGL on Linux. The closest product would be Quesa, but this would require that CM be rewritten to support the Quesa libraries (to my knowledge).

[ August 08, 2003, 01:32 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

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Hi, I have just purchased and taken delivery of CMBB and I am trying to install it and run it on my power book G4 550, 1 gig ram, about two years old.

After I install it and boot in OS 9.22 I try to start and get a plain grey screen with no graphics but the words, writ small, "main menu" at the bottom of the page.

I have run the CMBB demo with no probs and run CM the first on it ok. So what is going on with CMBB?

Do I need to download a patch? And which one as I don't know which version I have as I havn't run the game yet.

Also I just do the "install English" version, do I need to seperately install any of the 'data' files on the disc?

Hope someone can help as I really really want to start using CMBB. :confused:

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Originally posted by philk:

Hi, I have just purchased and taken delivery of CMBB and I am trying to install it and run it on my power book G4 550, 1 gig ram, about two years old.

After I install it and boot in OS 9.22 I try to start and get a plain grey screen with no graphics but the words, writ small, "main menu" at the bottom of the page.

I have run the CMBB demo with no probs and run CM the first on it ok. So what is going on with CMBB?

Do I need to download a patch? And which one as I don't know which version I have as I havn't run the game yet.

Also I just do the "install English" version, do I need to seperately install any of the 'data' files on the disc?

Hope someone can help as I really really want to start using CMBB. :confused:

It should work if its dual boot

is the G4 550 a Tibook?

What video card are you using?

(It "should" work?)

-tom w

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philk:

Yes your machine should work just fine. It is the later units (G4 Powerbooks) that suffer from issues with CM.

The version number should be listed when you click on the CMBB icon on your hard drive and choose get info under the file menu. Or use Apple key I. You may need a patch, but the patch fixes small issues of game play and has no effect on whether the game will run or not.

Before reinstalling, I would go to the System Folder:Preferences and delete the existing CMBB prefs. Then try restarting CMBB after changing the screen resolution to 800x600. If you get a correctly running game be happy. Or quit CM and go through the process of trashing the preferences again, raising the screen resolution to the next supported size and restarting CMBB until you are either happy or the game doesn't run right.

If you need to reinstall after all that, my sure fire method for installing CMBB is to first copy the entire CD to your hard drive. Do this by double clicking the CD and dragging the all of the contents to a folder on the hard drive. Then run the installer from the harddrive.

This gives a much faster install and is much less likely to suffer from errors. I went from a 40-50 minute install (on a 867 G4) to 15 minutes or less.

I hope that helps, if it doesn't, there may be other issues, but in any case keep track of what you did and what did or did not work so we can try to assist. The more info the easier it is to help. Good luck.

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  • 4 months later...

I'd pitch in for Mountain Dew, chocolate covered espresso beans and Jolt cola for the one guy doing the Mac port. :D

As to the earlier discussion about the direction change in the Graphics APIs... remember, RAVE was what Apple was hawking back in before the Amelio days. This was when everyone at Apple was sold in the NIH-mentality.

Hopefully, now that OS X is out, and is pretty much based on BSD Unix, Apple would not revert back to NIH. OpenGL, .pdf and all that jazz are good things, lets hope this keeps up.

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Hi,

A cross post from the psychedelic display thread just to show that all is not lost.

As long as you have a Mac that can boot into OS 9 (not classic within OS X) you can now run CMBO, CMBB and CMAK with a ATI Radeon card.

And now that CMAK is out and R&D is now focused on CM2 (which will run natively in OS X) things are looking much rosier than even a few weeks ago.

Rather than waste bandwidth, have a look at the before and after shots here:

Beta Driver pictures

Resolution was 1152 x 768 (millions of colours)

Note: All testing done with High Quality Smoke, Extreme Trees and show all paths / targets. I left everything else (unit size, bases, etc.) as is.

The only two issues I could find are:

1. You either get this sort of smoke / dust (using High Quality or Fast and Compatible) or none at all. Previously the smoke looked more realistic with vision blocked totally at the source but becoming less opaque towards the edges.

2. In the desert, pixelation showed up in the mid to far distance. I couldn't see it in the Italian scenarios (perhaps it is there but concealed in the more congested landscape).

As you can see its much better than where we were.

If you still want the originals (28 screenshots, between 700Kb and 1.7Mb each), email me directly.

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Hopefully by early next month we have some more info on this. We have forwarded all the comments and issues still present with these beta drivers to ATI but they seem off for the holidays so we are not sure what the current status is. They might go ahead and release the new extensions as is or they might encorporate even more fixes.

As soon as we hear back, I will let you guys all know.

If anyone wants to try out the current beta extensions (the same as were used in the pics above), let me know and I will send them to you.

Madmatt

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