Aspyr On Porting Games to the Mac

jvm writes "This in-depth interview with Aspyr's Glenda Adams over at Curmudgeon Gamer discusses in detail the issues of porting games to the Mac. Starting with Civilization on the Mac LC up through today's Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, Glenda takes on PC vs. Mac system requirements, how games are selected for porting, patching Mac games, and some thoughts on the future." A notable quote from the interview: "The PC often lets you [code/architect] things in a sloppy manner with little penalty, but then when it gets on the Mac it drags the game down."

Comments

PC Architecture

[Detritus]

I'm curious about what the problems mentioned in the article are, sloppy code that runs with a slight penalty on the PC and falls over on the Mac. My Mac has a reasonable number of MIPS (2 x 450 MHz G4), but most ports of PC games are barely playable.

Re:PC Architecture

[Tomah4wk]

Loop unrolling in most cases i have played with it on the P4 also slows programs down (albiet not hugely) and i had also attributed this to the instuction cache. In fact the only time i have seen it to be beneficial is with a really tight (i.e. one line of code) loop where we new how many times the loop would be executing almost all of the time and used a pragma to advise the compiler (intel c++) of this.

A VM always helps.

[Domini]

Writing a game to use a virtual machine and some form of quasi interpreted code always makes portability a near given.

See this site: http://this.is/vortex/osx-ports/?action=games
for games 'ported' to OS X using the scumm vm. (Some cool ones!)

Also note how seamlessly Quake 3 runs on even a slow iBook 900 G3.

Other games which also ported nicely would be Warcraft III and Neverwinter Nights.

This is mainly due to the programmer showing some foresight.

The only problem is that the Mac version of Neverwinter Nights is out only recently, when all my multiplayer PC friends area already tired of playing it, and it costs about 8 times the price of the current Neverwinter Nights PC version, as well as the fact that it's difficult to get the expansions running for a normal home user, and ALSO the fact that I am unable to purchase the game AT ALL locally and the US and GB amazon stores don't ship here and Paypal does not support my currency.

AND THEN THEY COMPLAIN THAT THE PORTED VERSION DOES NOT SELL!!!!

I own the game on PC already, so why buy it twice? Warcraft 3 AND Quake3 runs on both nearly out of the box.

No, it's all up to sloppy marketing and programming. Don't blame the OS or the users.

Wasted cycles?

[AmiMoJo]

I find it hard to beleive that a 600MHz PPC processor isn't powerful enough to run a golf game like Tiger Woods.

There were highly realistic golf simulations that ran okay on a 7MHz A500 or 8086. Sure, these days people demand more from the graphics, but a simple option to turn off some of the fancy stuff couldn't be too hard to do, could it?