Mac Game Devs Speak on Intel Move

An Anonymous Reader wrote "InsideMacGames has posted a response to the news of Apple using Intel processors from both original Mac game developers as well as people who work on porting Windows games to OS X. Some negative and positive feedback is expressed, though it seems there's more uncertainty than anything else at this point. Can the fear of a Wine-like VM solution gutting the biz be balanced by faster CPU speeds?" From the article: "We think Apple's move to Intel is great. For one thing, it demonstrates that Apple is really serious about giving Windows-based computing head-to-head competition. For another, it lays the groundwork for the future of personal computing in a digitally connected home. And, for another, it's going to narrow the gap between the release of a game on Windows and the release on Mac -- maybe to zero."

Comments

DirectX

[jtshaw]

"And, for another, it's going to narrow the gap between the release of a game on Windows and the release on Mac -- maybe to zero."

What about those games tooled towards DirectX... it isn't the architecture screwing us here...it is the lack of DirectX for OSX that is screwing us.

Re:DirectX

[FLAGGR]

It's not that hard to port from DirectX -> OpenGL. What he's saying is it removes things like endian issues and can only make porting easier.

Re:DirectX

[Cthefuture]

Endian issues are minor though (usually not a problem at all) compared to the API differences.

I don't see the difference between porting between Windows/Linux, and Windows/OS X (Intel). The same problems will still be there.

I don't see Linux ports all over the place dispite the fact that my CPU and even my hardware is the same as I use in Windows. I don't see why OS X would be any different (other than industry support, but that doesn't make it easier).

Re:DirectX

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know who's been telling you otherwise, but the latest games are coded in Assembly. Your concepts of APIs are from a much older time.

Re:DirectX

[macrom]

It's not lack of DirectX that's screwing us, it's the simple fact that there are multiple APIs that a developer has to contend with. I seriously, seriously doubt that the problem with developing games on both Mac and Windows has to do with the small parts of assembly code. From what I understand, endianess issues are easily taken care of as well.

It's simply the lack of time, possibly talent and most likely desire to get the games done simultaneously. Cross-platform development is not hard, just time consuming. OS X will still have the same API interface that will need to be dealt with differently from DirectX, and I think it's too soon to outright say that it will be simple to develop games on both platforms at the same time. After all, if it really were that easy, there would be more Linux games out there now.

Re:DirectX

[Gropo]

it is the lack of DirectX for OSX that is screwing us.

Granted, but the fact that the assembly target will now be (supposedly?) x86, these guys might be able to develop a far more robust and complete tool in the near future.

Re:DirectX

[FLAGGR]

First off, disclaimer: I'm running a mac mini that dual boots gentoo and osx, I'm not a linux hater and not trying to start a flame war or anything. Anyways, reasons why they would port to osx and not *nix:
1. Apple has more desktop market share (Probably more total market share, but if not then definantly for marketshare) If they switch to Intel I can only assume their market share will increase even more (as it has been lately)
2. Most linux users are badly spoiled by free software. Sorry but its true, not a very pretty market for game producers (I'm that no one would pay, but I can see a large sum of the *nix users I know bitching about how the game wasn't free)
3. Coding for OSX is easier than coding for *nix (Worrying about whether your game works with distro xyz release 123.abc, with system configured in such-and-such a way etc)
4. Apple's gaming/graphics/gui API's are more advanced then anything on linux, theres no way you can argue that kde/gnome/etc comes anywhere close to the technical poweress (not to mention looks) of Aqua
5. Go out into public, ask people if they know what apple/mac/etc is (not the fruit), and then ask them what linux/tux/gnu/etc is, want to wager on the results?

Re:DirectX

[Ilgaz]

Why would people emulate (oh its not emulator, api) directx while "the original" on "original kernel" exists?

I don't give a F to Intels, as well as "new" Mactel, I just try to build a strategy for buying games for this year and 2006

Just a concerned customer here...

Re:DirectX

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that's the point. All that doesn't make it a "zero time" release. It still must be ported to OS X.

Windows apps won't run on OS X, even if you are using an Intel processor.

Re:DirectX

[photon317]

Perhaps this will push game engine creators more in the direction of open standards like OpenGL that can exist on both operating systems.

Re:DirectX

[Bri3D]

Except for that a lot of games use quite a bit of inline ASM and other x86-specific stuff in their code, so this will help a bit. It's not always the API(Doom3 was openGL and look at how long it took). I doubt this will hurt porting, it pretty much can only help.

Re:DirectX

[mangu]

I can see a large sum of the *nix users I know bitching about how the game wasn't free

I'm a Linux user. I only use Microsoft systems for games. I buy games for Microsoft systems only because that's what's available. I would certainly buy games for Linux if they were in the same quality/playability level as the games I buy for MS-windows. However, I do bitch about games not being free. Not free as in beer, but they aren't free as in speech.

Case in point: I like racing games. But, unfortunately, most racing games are made for kids, they are arcade-like and have very little physical realism. There are only two really good racing games that I know, "Grand Prix Legends" and "Need for Speed - Porsche Unleashed". (I've seen also good reviews of "Richard Burns Rally", but haven't got it yet). If GPL and NFS-PU were free-as-in-speech, we would be able to buy/design new car models and new tracks for them. I know, there *are* some utilities for that, but they are all rather limited.

What I would pay for is an open-specification car racing game. One where all the aspects of the physical simulation of the car and track files were openly published. And if the specifications on the force feedback steering wheels were also open, we could create new response modes for each car.

But no, commercial game publishers don't want that. They do not want to other companies to develop add-ons for their games. They do not want people to buy add-ons. They do not want me to buy new tracks for NFS-PU, they want me to buy "Need for Speed - Underground", instead.

The consequence: I bought "Need for Speed - Underground", found it to be a piece of shit, "Need for Speed - Underground 2" came out, I didn't buy it. Not interested. Now I'm following with interest the development of TORCS. I hope this will be a very good speech/beer-free car racing game someday.

Re:DirectX

[bersl2]

1. So what?
2. If you make a game we want bad enough, we will buy it.
3. That's not exactly a coding issue. If you require a certain version of a library, ship it with the game.
4. libSDL; games use custom GUIs.
5. So what?

Re:DirectX

[BitGeek]

You have that exactly backwards. Even in the mid 90s, most games were written in C. Now they are going more object oriented, and further from assembly.

Sure, some routines might be done in assembly, but generally its the API that is important in porting.

My experience as a game developer doing ports to Mac OS from Windows was that it really wasn't that hard-- but then I was working with developers who kept the need for multiple platforms in mind when they wrote their original code.

Re:DirectX

[Trillan]

You are absolutely correct. The article makes no sense at all.

Re:DirectX

[smallduck]

Endian issues are minor though (usually not a problem at all) compared to the API differences.

No. It was said today at a certain conference by someone knowledgeable that the two main problems facing Windows to Mac game ports are DirectX and endian-ness, and the majority of the lingering Mac-specific bugs are due to endian issues.

While the rewrites for DirectX etc. are a lot of work, they seem to be more easy to do the more you do it as you build your toolset for porting code using those APIs. Endianness is instead a nightmare of little case-by-case problems, death by a thousand cuts.

Re:DirectX

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what? Endianness, I bet Apple has been working on this for quite some time. That, and it's really only the PPC970 that can't switch endianess at boot time. I'd imagine with thier experience with G3 and G4 processors, that they've got that part figured out.

Wish as small a market share as Apple has compared to Windows, I bet they're more forward thinking that you, Slashdot user #xxxjoeschmoe.

BTW, I'm a Windows/SometimesLinux user.

Re:DirectX

[Mycroft_VIII]

1)probably right on desktop, but total is much more iffy, esp if you allow one to group bsd with linux, considering servers. However as we're talking games here it's the desktop that matters.

2) Yes, the number that would complain about it not being open source, or at least having fully exposed api, ect. for mods and adding thier own stuff in would be to large relative to the market, this would be bad publicity wise and make sales past initial realease to much of a gamble. And this is all for the cluefull game coders, many would likely expect near zero willingess to pay anything near normal(overinflated imho) prices.

3) yep, untill compatability becomes more common across distros and revisions you can't just write a linux 'program' you have to write a red-hat ver x.y.z and madrake ver y.x.z and so on for at least the top 5 distro's and the most common 3 or 4 versions of each. Next you have to re-code it for bsd, sheesh.

4) I would say polish(sp? I mean 'shined up', not from Poland) and maturity, not technical prowess as some the people in the open source community are pretty damn skilled.

5) In my experience the ratio has droped to somewhere around 3:2 of people who know apple computers but haven't at least heard of linux. That said if they don't have/use a mac or linux distro they seldom know much more than mac=pretty with only mouse button and linux=geek computer.

(just my $.02)

Mycroft

Re:DirectX

[Mycroft_VIII]

1 makes macs a bit more attractive to write/port games for

2)true, he even says so. Problem is convincing the game companies enough will be sold to be worth while and the 'it should be $free and FREE' crowd not to yell and create negative press for them.

3) and what about all the things that break when the new lib displaces the old that half the distro requires. Not to mention all the wories about exactly when using/relying on glp libs and such cause a program to fall under the gpl or even lgpl. If they're shipping it with (let alone satically linking it) some open source lib thier percieved potential liability skyrockets I would imagine.

4) no comment, I lack needed knowledge.

5) see #1

Mycorft

Re:DirectX

[Anonymous Coward]

And when was the last time you ever saw a game that used a system's native GUI? Games just do not do that. The occasional game has a separate configuration program, but those are increasingly rare, aren't that hard to program anyway, and it doesn't really matter what they look like. You could write one in Motif, and I don't think anyone would really care.

The graphics APIs (for games anyway) used on MacOS X and Linux are the same - OpenGL. The sound APIs are different, but not massively so. If you wanted to write a cross-platform game with decent sound support you'd use OpenAL anyway, which is the same API on MacOS X and Linux. And Windows, for that matter.

The system-dependent parts (initialisation, event loops, and so forth) are different between systems. But not by much - GLX and AGL are very similar to each other, and to Windows' WGL. That leaves networking (which is the same on Linux and MacOS X), and input. Keyboard and mouse input is pretty much a non-issue - the windowing system will handle most of that for you. That leaves controller input, which I will acknowledge is better on MacOS X, only because Linux doesn't have any support for force feedback / rumbling / whatever.

Deployment isn't as much of an issue as you make it out to be. As long as you don't link to any external C++ libraries (which may have been compiled with a different ABI), and either bundle non-standard libraries with your game or statically link them (you have to do this on MacOS X and Windows as well). For actual applications, the differences between Linux distros might be a pain to manage. You need to know where configuration files are, you might need to interact with system programs, devices, or require special libraries that should be installed into the system itself. For games, it doesn't matter, because you aren't interacting with the operating system at all. Just dump the entire game into it's own directory, put all of the (exotic, non-ubiquitous, C++) libraries you require in there, and attach a simple shell script to it.

Notice that games on Windows and MacOS X use this same strategy, because despite the fact that they're supposedly more uniform than Linux, the rest of the system is still far too unpredictable to rely on.

Re:DirectX

[mosschops]

I don't see the difference between porting between Windows/Linux, and Windows/OS X (Intel). The same problems will still be there.

How about Macs only having a few known hardware configurations?

It's not quite as simple as targetting a console, but it's got to be much better than the zillions of driver/hardware combinations in Linux and Windows.

Re:DirectX

[kyojin the clown]

Check out GTR - http://www.simbin.com/games/ - thats a pretty realistic physics model in there.

Phew!

[ndansmith]

Well, it couldn't make the gaming situation for Mac any worse because, well, you get the idea.

Which comes first?

[Cr0w T. Trollbot]

The first Intel Mac, or Duke Nukem Forever?

Place your bets now...

Crow T. Trollbot

Re:Which comes first?

[FLAGGR]

Considering developers could buy the machines *yesterday*....

Re:Which comes first?

[ABaumann]

They can technically rent the machines. They have to return them by the end of 2006.

biz my ass.

[jasongetsdown]

Can the fear of a Wine-like VM solution gutting the biz be balanced by faster CPU speeds?

Biz? What biz?

Hmmm

[Auckerman]

Games are only relevent when you start thinking about APIs. With DirectX being Windows only, I really don't see how it's going to be that much easier to port.

The one issue it might solve is byte order problems (big/little endian) on the graphics cards. Though, theres going to be no guarantee that drivers for OS X for any off the shelf card is actually going to be any good.

It may be some time before Apple gets around to even caring that the Half Life 2 market exists, much less builds machines to compete in that market.

Re:Hmmm

[ciroknight]

AFAIK, Apple writes all the drivers for OS X in the video department. How they do this, I'm not exactly sure, whether they get the specs from the manufacturers or what.

That being said, OpenGL on OS X is still blazing fast. Porting a game engine that's OpenGL-friendly shouldn't take very long at all.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

"That being said, OpenGL on OS X is still blazing fast"

What fucking planet do you live?

Apple's OpenGL incombination with the lower level parts the vendors write are:

* Slow
* Buggy
* Absurdly behind in extension support

And none of this will change when Apple starts shipping Intel base Macs. There are some areas that Apple does give a shit about, mostly texture uploading for things like the window server, but outside of those specific areas porting code to Apple's OpenGL is like being forced to code in a time machine a year or two in the past.

Re:Hmmm

[Auckerman]

"Apple writes all the drivers for OS X in the video department."

I doubt that. Even given that, my point went right over your head. You see, Mac users can't just buy off the shelf PC video cards put them in their macs, even if the mac had drivers for it. The ROM on the card is set for little endian, when macs use big endian. Making Mac cards more expensive (only difference being the rom and the box it came in). IIRC, there are ways of working around this, but they require a lot more patience than I've cared to have.

With the switch to Intel processors, the graphics cards will be physically identical in every way to the ones Windows uses, making using them easier. This means, the premium charge you had no choice to pay for being a mac customer will be gone. As people/companies write drivers for cards, one will be able to use those cards instead of the stock one that came with the mac.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Dream on...

Half/part of the OpenGL stack for OS X is written by Apple.

A new CPU, no matter what endian it is, isn't going change that next year. No one is going to be putting out OS X GPU drivers out other than Apple. In other words you can expect the same shitty, out of date OpenGL game performance you've come to know and love from Apple in the future.

Re:Hmmm

[BitGeek]

Earth. The question is, what have you been smoking?

You're wrong-- Apple does much of the graphics processing on the GPU, which is optimized for it. The rendering pipeline is years ahead of Microsoft.

And its quite fast, and stable, and has been for 5 years. OpenGL support on the Mac is top notch.

You can continue to spew all this made up crap you want, Coward, but you have never pointed to a concrete example or given us any reason to believe you-- and what you say is just simplistic "no itsnot!" garbage.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

The texture uploading parts of the Apple GL pipeline have been wonderfully optimized. However, go write some GL code that uses VBOs or other code that falls outside of Apple's narrow needs of a GL accelerated window server. Too bad Apple doesn't give a shit about games until they get publicly humilated with something like Doom 3. Because they do finally get their shit together and update their drives to something on par with Windows and Linux. So it's not outright incompetence, it's no one gives a crap.

Go back to drinking Job's KoolAid and jerking off to Keynote demos of Apple's GL prowes fanboy, you don't have a fucking clue about realworld Apple GL performance.

Re:Hmmm

[BitGeek]

Why make up shit like that? Doom 3 runs on Panther. No driver update is needed.

Sure, they improved all the graphics code for Tiger, but by your argument they'd have to never innovate, or you could say that they were doing it just because it sucked before.

You're an idiot who doesn't know shit about what you're talking about.

I remember when slashdot was inhabited by software developers.... it really sucks that its been taken over by script kiddies.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

So the little port monkey is trying save face.

Whatever.

Re:Hmmm

[Too Much Noise]

If anything, maybe Macs getting better gaming hardware will encourage moving away from DirectX ... which will benefit more than just OSX gamers. Provided that MS doesn't play the XBox card too well, that is.

Death of Mac games

[squiggleslash]

If you can run Windows on a Mac, which Apple has pretty much confirmed you'll be able to:

After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."

then I'm pretty sure most game developers will target Windows, and look at OS X much the same way as they do GNU/Linux. "We can sell to this crowd, they just have to set up their machines to dual boot."

Not that I don't hope I'm wrong, but I suspect this is why Microsoft isn't looking that upset about the switch right now.

Re:Death of Mac games

[FLAGGR]

Do you honestly think someone is going to buy a Apple computer to run Windows? That's why they aren't going to "do anything to preclude that", because no one would honestly do such a thing. Maybe they would dual boot if they were intelligent enough, or maybe just run Windows in VirtualPC like I do now on my macmini.

p.s. the reason MS isn't looking upset about the switch is a) because it was yesterday, MS hasn't commented yet b) If they were upset do you think they'd show it?

Re:Death of Mac games

[squiggleslash]

Did I say they would? No. I said that if Apple computers can run Windows, it's more reasonable for a game developer to presume you will dual boot if you want to play their games than to spend the development time porting it. Take a look at the GNU/Linux situation with games. There are a few, but game developers generally ignore it, assuming that as you have a machine capable of running Windows, you'll happily boot into Windows to play your games.

Microsoft has commented, at the WWDC during the announcement, saying the MacBU will port Office to the new architecture. I think that's very much a vote of confidence, not something said by someone taken unawares, right? You think Apple sprung this on them? Even the Wall Street Journal knew about this a month ago.

Re:Death of Mac games

[Anonymous Coward]

People buy Macs to run Linux on them, so why not Windows? (Neither makes sense to me, but there's always someone who will do it.)

Re:Death of Mac games

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

No. I said that if Apple computers can run Windows, it's more reasonable for a game developer to presume you will dual boot if you want to play their games than to spend the development time porting it. Take a look at the GNU/Linux situation with games.

How much does a copy of Windows cost, retail? You seem to be making the assumption that all macs will have windows, but unlike pretty much all Linux boxes, Apple will not be paying MS a fee for every box and will not be including Windows. Any game developer who assumes that mac users can "just boot into Windows" is assuming that either all mac users will go out, buy Windows, and install it alongside or replacing OS X (which ain't gonna happen) or they are assuming everyone will pirate Windows and do the same (which is only a little less likely). There are plenty of game makers that develop for the mac because they make money doing so. Those that make stupid assumptions, like you are claiming they will, will lose a good chunk of that money. Those that continue to make mac native versions will make that money. It does not take a genius to figure out that most people are not going to install Windows on their macs (Aside from some geeks).

That said, a WINE solution is a possibility. I could see a lot of game makers contributing to and writing for WINE implementation to try to sell to the mac market with less dev time/cost.

Re:Death of Mac games

[ciroknight]

Microsoft really can't do anything to upset this archetectural switch.

Microsoft recently shot themselves in the foot by putting their money and operating system behind AMD (Athlon XP, Windows XP.. hmm coincidence? I don't think so). So Intel goes shopping for a new OS contender. Linux is free, so that's out of the question. The BSD's are all good candidates, but someone's gotta develop a good GUI system... Bingo, Apple Computers is there and waiting. And since IBM pissed Apple off so much by not producing the G5's they promised, Intel was ready to sell to them.

Game developers would, at this point, be retarded not to quickly shift game development to the x86 Mac platform. The only thing most game developers would lose entirely is DirectX, and with OpenGL being just as good as an option, entirely free, (and in some opinions, faster), it wouldn't be that bad of a loss in time or momentum.

Why else do you think Microsoft would try to buy into the gaming world with a PPC chip? If your gaming archetecture requires coding on a platform that nobody else can use, you've locked your developers in. Their moves are just one more strategic step towards it. Apple's, ironically, was a step away from vendor lock-in (which Apple has fought so hard to attain and maintain).

Re:Death of Mac games

[porcupine8]

The difference between people who Linux/Windows dual-boot and people who own Macs and *could* dual-boot is a big one, though.

Linux users are more technically sophisticated, on average, than either Mac or Windows users, and thus are capable of making their machine dual-boot - or, hell, even knowing what dual-boot MEANS.

Your average person who buys a Mac or Windows machine has never even heard of dual-booting, and even if they did know that somewhere out there are people who run more than one OS, they would probably assume it's too complicated for them to do (whether or not that's true).

Game makers can assume that linux users can and will dual-boot... They might not be able to assume that about Mac users, unless someone makes a super-easy and well-publicized way to do it. Which could happen, and it would be smart to market this specifically at gamers. But the average Mac user is not likely to say "Hey, why don't I dual-boot, that sounds like fun!"

This argument doesn't necessarily apply to Windows emulators, but you seemed to be specifically addressing dual-booting so I am too.

Re:Death of Mac games

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. That's just about the cutest, most off-target rant I've ever read. You had best stop looking in your own ass for opinions - the source is not as fertile as you think.

Here's something for you mac fans to think about: Homosexual men represent a very small proportion of the US general population, about three percent, but according to CDC figures 440,000 homosexual men had gotten infected with HIV in the United States by 2003, as opposed to 150,000 cases in the entire other 97% of the population.

Re:Death of Mac games

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft recently shot themselves in the foot by putting their money and operating system behind AMD.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Re:Death of Mac games

[Lewisham]

Running a Mac + Windows is perfect sense. I would love to see Apple grow some real balls and even offer a dual boot configurer for Windows out the box, and really stick it to them.

My Dad is technically literate, and only cares about what he has to get done. This is the market Apple can now take with ease, if they allow Windows on a Mac, and actually *market* it! Why?

My Dad was scared to switch to Mac. He was scared he wouldn't understand it and he was scared he wouldn't be compatible with his business apps. Many businesses run horrible proprietary apps, especially in government. Let my Dad learn at his own pace how to use OS X, and let him know he can go back to Windows at any time if he feels out of his depth or needs to do something he doesn't yet know how/cannot. Switching is no longer this change of religion, it's an OS upgrade, and one many many more will be willing to take with a Windows security blanket.

The techies can keep their games on Windows (that's what excites me the most), but for the Apple stock price? The tech-literate are the way forward.

And consumers really love it when you show they aren't scared of the competition, especially in the US, I've noticed.

Re:Death of Mac games

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody confirmed anything, you asshat. He just said Apple wouldn't stop anyone from doing it. That's a HUGE difference from saying "yes it can be done." They've probably never tried it, and why would they bother? Most likely the Apple/Intel platform will not be Windows compatible. It won't have the standard BIOS, and it'll have specialized chips on the motherboard for connectivity, etc. If MS wanted to get Windows working on it, that'd be their perogative, but I'll bet anyone here a bunch of money that it won't run any Windows version in current release.

I love how people take comments out of context and assign extra meaning to them. What a bunch of idiots!

Now, I'm dead sure this new platform will be able to run Windows under hardware virtualization quite easily - whether that's VMware or Virtual PC. Totally different from running it 100% natively, though.

Re:Death of Mac games

[XxtraLarGe]

Your average person who buys a Mac or Windows machine has never even heard of dual-booting, and even if they did know that somewhere out there are people who run more than one OS, they would probably assume it's too complicated for them to do (whether or not that's true).

I beg to differ. Those of us who have been around since the pre-OS X days know exactly what dual-booting is and how to do it. This is especially true of most Mac gamers, who found that many of their games suffered a significant performance hit when running in classic (if they even ran at all) vs. booting into OS 9.

Not only does Apple give you the ability to boot into a different disk in the control panels, you can do it right when you start up your computer by holding down the option key and clicking on which disk to mount as the boot volume.

Re:Death of Mac games

[porcupine8]

I guess the question becomes, has the average Mac user been around since before OS X? If so, will that still be true five years from now? I know my sister has never booted her eMac into OS 9, although she uses classic occasionally for one or two programs.

Re:Death of Mac games

[squiggleslash]

No, it's a BIOS. And yes, he said Apple wouldn't do anything to preclude running Windows. Not having a BIOS would be a pretty significant preclusion.

It's a crying shame. Open Firmware on the Intel architecture would be a vast improvement. But it makes sense, with modern graphics cards requiring an Intel architecture and PC BIOS to start up. Apple would pretty much be guaranteeing a continuation of "Mac version" graphics cards if it went non-standard here. Apple would also not be able to take advantage of the huge amount of third party R&D in the PC market.

I assume you're one of the morons (hey, you started the insults) that was claiming Intel would be making PowerPCs right until the very end, correct? Look, sorry to tell you this, but Apple is going into the IBM PC clone business. It's sad. It's unfortunate. But that's what's happening. From now on, they're using two things to distinguish themselves from the herd: a different OS, and a passion for style. That's it.

Re:Death of Mac games

[squiggleslash]

Do you think the games market is going to care HOW the Apple users get their copies of Windows? Or that those same Apple users run the very latest versions? Or that they're able to run Windows apps via some suddenly viable third party development like Wine for OS X?

Re:Death of Mac games

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Yes.

I think that because how a mac user runs windows games is a very important indicator of how many mac users will have that ability and hence will be able to run their particular game. If they don't consider it, then they are idiots.

If Apple includes a emulator for free, they will be able to assume all mac users can run Windows games. (not going to happen)

If you can buy an emulator for $200 and Windows for another $100 (or pirate it for free) and you need to be technically savvy to install and use it games makers can assume basically no mac users will be able to run their games and have to consider making a port or including a custom WINE for OSX+game package.

If mac users can buy a computer with windows on another partition and dual boot again game makers might assume users will be willing to do that, most likely though you will only be able to install windows after the fact and probably with a BIOS hack, so again very very few people will be able to do that.

I'm sure there will be some morons out there that don't consider how they expect mac users to play their games, but there are idiots everywhere. Most game makers will certainly take into account what percentage of mac users can play a game and at what cost and use that to decide if they want to make a port.

Re:Death of Mac games

[squiggleslash]

If you can buy an emulator for $200 and Windows for another $100

An emulator? Why is someone going to have to spend $200 on an emulator? What emulator? What's it going to emulate?

The only money they'll have to spend, assuming they're not going to pirate a copy, is on Windows itself. Once they have Windows, it'll be a simple matter of partioning the disk and installing it. That's it. Potentially, the only third party software they'll need is the dual boot menu software, and those will be readily available, as they are anyway today.

Apple is moving from Open Firmware PowerPC boxes to IBM PC clones with the latest Intel processors and BIOSes. They've said you'll be able to install Windows on them, and you will. I don't know where you're getting it from that you'll need an "emulator", I'm sure a few VMWare things will appear for those who want to run two operating systems at once, but dual booting will satisfy the majority of those who want to play the full range of Windows games more readily than waiting for Aspyr and MacGames to port the three games they plan to port this year. Indeed, a Codeweavers-style Wine port will probably be the Mac gamer's second choice, which leaves relatively little market left for those who want to port the games properly.

Re:Death of Mac games

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

You are misinformed. The intel based macs will most likely be running a custom BIOS, not on compatible with Windows by default. In any case, I think you are still thinking of the Linux market. Most mac users (like most Windows users) do not dual boot their systems, or even have any idea how to partition and install a second OS. They certainly don't know how to, or don't care to hack their BIOS, which may be necessary. A wine style port will have a very large footprint, but will probably be used by some game developers once the project is up and running well on OS X. Wine ports of some games may be fine, while others will suck very badly (depending on the type of game and controls).

If you really think most users are going to install a second OS and reboot every time they want to play a game, well you're an idiot. A very small percentage of users certainly will, but most will not. We'll have to see if that means WINE style non-emulation or native ports. I can tell you 90% of the mac market will not be installing Windows or an emulator and will not run Windows apps unless Apple ships a way to to do it.

Re:Death of Mac games

[squiggleslash]

You are misinformed. The intel based macs will most likely be running a custom BIOS, not on compatible with Windows by default

You're accusing me of being misinformed?

Apple has said, outright, they intend to do nothing to prevent Windows from running. That's a fact. It's been widely quoted.

Most mac users (like most Windows users) do not dual boot their systems, or even have any idea how to partition and install a second OS

That's because there's no benefit to them as yet. What is the incentive to install OpenBSD, GNU/Linux, or AIX, on their other partition?

There's a huge incentive to install Windows on an ix86 based Mac. Out of the box, your choice of games, if you're interested in them, becomes pretty much the sum total of almost every game written since the mid nineties.

They certainly don't know how to, or don't care to hack their BIOS, which may be necessary.

Oh goodness gracious! What are you talking about? To remind you, we're talking about Apple shipping PCs with one minor change - they'll come with a version of OS X installed by default that can detect whether it's running on Apple hardware. That's it. You don't have to "hack the BIOS" to dual boot on any PC made now. Why, oh why, are you pretending such a thing will be necessary just because it has the word "Apple" on the front?

A wine style port will have a very large footprint, but will probably be used by some game developers once the project is up and running well on OS X. Wine ports of some games may be fine, while others will suck very badly (depending on the type of game and controls).

Sure. But you're missing the point here. The point is that developers are no longer going to care about porting games. There's a fairly large expense associated with doing so, and those developers are going to see little point in doing this themselves when Codeweavers can do it for them, and if Codeweavers eff up, the serious gamers will probably already have Windows anyway.

I know why you're arguing against this. You're arguing because I'm telling you stuff you don't want to hear. That's why you're making stuff up, pretending that Apple is going to disable Windows, or that dual booting is somehow hard (it's not even hard on a real Mac, believe me.) You're saying "This is going to suck, I'll have to run Windows or use a poor clone of the Windows API that might not run the games I want the way I want them". And you know what, you're right. But you're failing to look at the bigger picture. The developers are interested in making games that people will buy. Serious gamers will get Windows. Non-serious gamers will probably get Windows anyway, if only to help see the occasional website under IE or use some bit of software from the office. For the rest, open sourcers can help. It's no longer a matter of emulating a CPU, just an API. No, it'll not be perfect, but hey, that's your fault, you should have installed Windows, right?

If you really think most users are going to install a second OS and reboot every time they want to play a game, well you're an idiot.

Thanks, but I think the truth is you're delusional. Most people will look at the relative merits, and realise they don't have a choice in the matter. Just as now, the majority of games will be Windows-only. Just as now, the Mac games that exist will generally cost more than their PC counterparts. Those sales can and will dwindle as the majority of people put two and two together and realise they're better off buying Windows games than Mac games. There will be multiple ways in which those games can be run, but at least one of them will involve dual booting.

Will 90% of the Mac market not install Windows? I don't know. But I can tell you that 90% will probably not be playing many games.

Re:Death of Mac games

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Sigh. OK, lets see what percentage of mac users have the know-how to, and will be motivated to install Windows on a partition of their mac? I'd say maybe 10%, if that. What percentage of mac users buy games? I'd say maybe 70%. Thus, the vast majority of mac users won't have Windows but will want to run games. Do you see where I'm going with this?

As to the issue of whether or not there will be other hurdles to installing Windows on a mac, who knows, but the Apple VP said that apple would not actively try to stop users from running Windows, but will stop users from running OS X on another machine, that means a custom BIOS, chipset, a new kind of management system, or activating the DRM on the pentiums. The first two of those will require either user hacking or support from MS, which is unlikely.

Your ad hominem attack on me is weak, by the way. I really don't care if I have to run PC versions of games (which I rarely play) and I'll almost certainly be installing VMware on a new mac as soon as possible for testing reasons anyway.

Your view on this situation is suffering from too much Slashdot. Please try to understand that 99.9% of computer users are not Slashdot geeks and wouldn't even attempt to re-install windows as the only operating system on their existing machine today. The vast majority of people who buy video games are included in that.

Re:Death of Mac games

[squiggleslash]

Sigh. OK, lets see what percentage of mac users have the know-how to, and will be motivated to install Windows on a partition of their mac? I'd say maybe 10%, if that. What percentage of mac users buy games? I'd say maybe 70%. Thus, the vast majority of mac users won't have Windows but will want to run games. Do you see where I'm going with this?

It's not that difficult to install Windows. It's especially not difficult if you're using a standardized architecture and can get a friend to come over who "knows PCs". One thing I thought of after I wrote the response to you is that it doesn't even need repartioning - the user can get a cheap external drive and install Windows on that. We know that unless Apple goes out of its way to cripple the BIOS, their machines will be USB2 bootable.

As to the issue of whether or not there will be other hurdles to installing Windows on a mac, who knows, but the Apple VP said that apple would not actively try to stop users from running Windows, but will stop users from running OS X on another machine, that means a custom BIOS, chipset, a new kind of management system, or activating the DRM on the pentiums. The first two of those will require either user hacking or support from MS, which is unlikely.

That Mac today is an open system. It doesn't have a non-standard BIOS. It doesn't have a special chipset that makes OS X incompatable with anything else. It doesn't have any hardware DRM. Yet you can't install Mac OS X on the architecturally compatable IBM RS/6000. Why? Because the routines to boot OS X do some fairly trivial checks before loading it to make sure that OS X is running on "supported hardware".

Even so, your essential point is false. A custom BIOS is not enough to prevent an operating system like Windows from booting. Neither is a custom chipset. What would be required would be for those measures to be incompatable with Windows. That's far from likely. Apple wouldn't be saying what they're saying if they were going to do that.

Finally, as I've said before, Apple has said they'll not take any measures to prevent Windows from running. In fact, Schiller has outright said people "probably will" run Windows on their Macs.

Your ad hominem attack on me is weak, by the way. I really don't care if I have to run PC versions of games (which I rarely play) and I'll almost certainly be installing VMware on a new mac as soon as possible for testing reasons anyway.

I didn't say you cared about whether you can run PC versions of games. And it wasn't an ad hominem attack, it was an attempt to try to persuade you to see the obvious: I sincerely believe you're blinded by the fact you want the new Mac to not be a PC clone. I'm coming across so many Mac users who react with horror with every new revelation about it. I'm not calling upon others to dismiss your ideas because of that, I'm telling YOU to look into why you're arguing this is some kind of non-standard non-PC-clone box when EVERY SINGLE BIT OF NEWS RELEASED SO FAR says it is. If you're not of this mindset, and just haven't been following this in that much depth, then I apologise, but in that case, just to let you know, it's not a great day for people who do not like the PC architecture that much.

As a suggestion, take a look at the JE I've linked to from my .sig. I have a strong suspicion that you'll not like it, but I've sourced every single statement I've made as a statement of fact. Sure, there's some speculation, but even then, I've only posted that when it's highly improbable that it's false.

Your view on this situation is suffering from too much Slashdot. Please try to understand that 99.9% of computer users are not Slashdot geeks and wouldn't even attempt to re-install windows as the only operating system on their existing machine today. The vast majority of people who buy video games are included in that.

I'm not sure 9

Re:Death of Mac games

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

We'll just have to agree to disagree on this. I don't think anyone I know who is not a software engineer will either install or have someone install windows on their mac for them. Maybe we just move in very different circles, but I just think you are plain wrong. I'm sure it will be possible to run windows, but unless Apple makes it so, it just won't be easy just as it is not easy to install Windows on a box running linux now, and certainly not easy without destroying the Linux install. And by easy I mean easy for the average user. Your arguments about external hard drives are a good example of how strained your arguments are. Do you know how many people buy external hard drives for their computers? Do you think it is even .001% of people who own computers? Most people including most gamers don't upgrade their hardware or their software ever, aside from installing new software. And most users fail to install a percentage of mainstream software they purchase from Walmart. Sorry, you're just wrong.

Marketing Scheme

[Talie]

I'm just wondering how the marketing of these new intel macs will go. Just not long ago, they were showing bench test results "proving" that the G5 PPC is faster than the Pentium 4. I'm not sure people will switch to Mac because more games are available, I think more games will always available for PCs. Also, with all the new gaming consoles coming out, maybe gamers don't need Mac or PCs to play games.

Re:Marketing Scheme

[anaesthetica]

Those benches may still be spot on. Marketing won't have to dramatically reverse their spin, because Apple won't be using Pentium 4's. They're much more likely to use some sort of souped-up Pentium M. Then they can still claim to be the latest and greatest.

Re:Marketing Scheme

[wyldeone]

The dev machines being sent out right now to developers are pentium 4s.

Re:Marketing Scheme

[amliebsch]

Yeah, the latest and greatest 32-bit. I can't see going from a 64-bit PPC to a 32-bit Pentium as anything but a downgrade.

Re:Marketing Scheme

[poopdeville]

Pre-release development platforms aren't something you want to base speculation on. What does this tell us about Apple's new machines? It only tells us that the processor's intruction set is compatible with the P4's. Big deal, we already knew that. You still don't know what processor is going into the final product, nor do you know what kinds of bussing or extending functionality the motherboard is going to have.

Re:Marketing Scheme

[bursch-X]

>The dev machines being sent out right now to developers are pentium 4s.

Could that have to do with the fact that the next generation Intel CPUs are not available yet?

I just checked out the Intel roadmap for some future Desktop CPUs with multiple cores and the new single core Yonah for laptops and somehow they are all scheduled for early 2006. How come Apple wants to sell the first Intel-based Mac in June 2006? coincidence? synchronicity? A cry from the chrome plated megaphone of destiny?

Re:Marketing Scheme

[damsa]

I don't know why they didn't aim for the AMD64. Seems like that's the future of desktop procs. Won't software have to be recompiled for AMD64? I like Apple, but I don't like this move.

Re:Marketing Scheme

[li99sh79]

Yeah, the latest and greatest 32-bit. I can't see going from a 64-bit PPC to a 32-bit Pentium as anything but a downgrade.

So what about going from a 32-bit PPC to a 32-bit Pentium? Since that's what's going to happen first.

-sam

This doesn't make porting ANY easier

[WouldIPutMYRealNameO]

This won't decrease the gap between porting games. Though I am not a professional game developer, I find it hard to imagine that modern games have much (if any) assembler content in them. Any language higher level than assembly was already able to be compiled for other CPUs - so the actual machine instructions have never been a problem.

Endianness is a small issue, really there are only a few places that you need to fix up for that, so that has never been a real problem.
The APIs that you use to make your game are the big problems, DirectX for example.

There are a couple of things that do make this better for Mac gamers. Raw computing power for the Mac user base will generally rise, after all how many people are trying (and failing) to run games on underpowered iBooks?
Now if Apple supports and promotes OpenGL2.0 and perhaps OpenAL, then maybe game developers will target those APIs. In which case porting between Windows and OS X should be easier.

The truely interesting thing is that we are going to see how much OS overhead there is between Windows and OS X - a more Apples to Apples comparison :) If OS X is significantly more efficient than WinXP, then people will really start to target Macs as development platforms.

Re:This doesn't make porting ANY easier

[TheRaven64]

Games make heavy use of SSE. While they usually include a non-SSE code path which can be used on a Mac, this is a lot slower. Writing an AltiVec version of this code takes a significant amount of time.

Additionally, games do have a number of endian issues. It is quite common for games to simply dump data structures into networks streams or save-game files for performance reasons. Trying to open these on a Mac requires byte-swapping - not hard, but you have to make sure you do it everywhere.

Apple includes OpenGL, OpenAL, OpenPlay and QuickTime for game developers. If people developed on the Mac, they would find moving to Windows (and *NIX if they didn't use QuickTime) to be fairly trivial. Porting the other way is harder.

Not so fast

[nigham]

And, for another, it's going to narrow the gap between the release of a game on Windows and the release on Mac -- maybe to zero.

Just because Mac is running on x86 doesn't mean that games will automatically be ported to a Mac more easily. Linux runs on Intel and x86, need I say more?

Re:Not so fast

[FLAGGR]

Not to troll, but developers don't want to port to Linux. Well, more the producers decision but still. Why do you think games get ported to OSX when it would be 10x easier to port them to Linux? Hard truth. Go outside onto the street, ask someone if they know what an iMac, macintosh, apple computer, etc is, then ask the same people if they know what linux is, or gnu, or heaven forbid freebsd.

Re:Not so fast

[Anonymous Coward]

You're living in the past. That was somewhat true in the past few years, but no longer. The amount of interest in Linux gaming is gaining rapidly - and I say this as a Mac game developer.

Apple games are dead outside of emulation on next year's x86 Apple machines. The companies that port to PPC OS X will of course not come right out and say the market is going away because they still have prodcut out there and in the pipeline.

Re:Not so fast

[vertinox]

Just because Mac is running on x86 doesn't mean that games will automatically be ported to a Mac more easily. Linux runs on Intel and x86, need I say more?

Hrm... Lets see:

A gazillion varients of Linux OS on infinite combinations of hardware.

vs

1 type of Mac OS X on a very narrow band of hardware configurations.

On would be worthwhile and the other would take some effort (not that more people should make Linux games, because they should... I'm just saying one of these is going to be easier. Heck one of these would be easier to code than Windows since not only do you know the OS, but you know what hardware will be used too!)

Re:Not so fast

[Anonymous Coward]

"A gazillion varients of Linux"

Honestly, whatever guy.

I guess it will be funny to watch the looks on the diehard Apple crowd as Linux continues to gain marketshare and they are still trying to pass off those same old "Linux is teh suck" arguments.

Even Microsoft has given up with most of the Linux FUD the Apple zealots are still clinging to.

Re:Not so fast

[ultramk]

Part of this is, Linux users--especially hobby or home users--have a reputation (deserved or not) for not wanting to pay for software. Or hardware, if they could get away with it.

Mac users, on the other hand, seem to be willing to shell out actual hard-earned cash for stuff (not only that, but willing to pay a premium to get the best). Witness iTMS.

(I'm not trolling, and I'm not talking about the reality, only the perception.)

To be fair, having WINE or the ability to dual-boot XP seems to be a big part of the difference: those Linux users who really want to run HL2 (for example) can.

m-

Re:Not so fast

[BitGeek]

Not only are you not a Mac game developer, you're not that familiar with the industry.

The installed base of PowerPC macs is huge, not huge compared to windows, but huge compared to Linux. Furthermore, linux games just don't sell well.

While interest in linux games may be growing rapidly, that bodes well for Mac games-- meaning you can do a windows version and a Unix version that runs on Linux and Mac.

They aren't going to kill Mac support after it goes to the x86 and choose Linux instead-- that's silly.

Especially since once they've ported it to Mac OS X, they get PowerPC support for free or very cheap.

Re:Not so fast

[BitGeek]

You're so silly. Linux is not competitive on the desktop. I wish it was. IF they hadn't chosen the windows UI they might be... but its not like Apple has much to feel threatened of from linux.

Microsoft has linux and Mac taking market share away from it... Linux isn't taking marketshare away from Apple (though OS X has won a lot of converts among the elite of the unix hacker circles.)

Re:Not so fast

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been making, used to make now, Mac games long before there even was such a thing as a PowerMac. I was making games back when Apple people were warning developers not do crazy shit like avoiding WaitNextEvent calls in the Mac games.

I, or anyone with ANY OEM or built from scratch x86 box can dual boot Windows and Linux but no OS X, ignoring the pie in the sky talk of 'hacking' OS X to run on everyday x86 boxes.

No game company that does Windows development is going to go out buy Apple specific hardware just to do ports. Linux already runs on their existing systems. Almost every game windows game developer I know dual boots these days. Anywhere from writing the server version to multiplayer games to full ports of their engines.

Linux is here. Today.

Apple is going nowhere in the game market. You've never seen the inside of a real game dev house if you think Apple is anything but a dead game platform.

Re:Not so fast

[BitGeek]

LOL, they buy powerpc boxes every day to port their games to the Mac.

Go to any CompUSA or Apple Store and see dozens upon dozens of titles ported to the mac. Topline titles like Doom 4 get ported. Marginal titles don't.

I don't think you've ever programmed a mac game, or worked for a game developer.

Re:I Make Mac Games

[FLAGGR]

Your right, increased market share over the past quater is a surefire sign of it. Let's have an eulegy please.

Apples on X86

[coldgunner]

I personally think this is gonna be the start of a downfall for apple as its always been Intel + Microsoft Apple + IBM or motorola (or whatever) but then again, it may 'improve' gaming on macs if anything, difficult one to call this

What about WINE?

[Don Giannullo]

Maybe WINE will finally be useful to the OSX community, now that's it running on x86 hardware.

Re:What about WINE?

[JQuick]

I'm sure, that some people might find it useful.

However, it's not likely to affect many people. I, and most people that I know, use macs because the software (both OS and Apps) are so pleasant and reliable to use.

The thought of being able to run really crappy software again doesn't float many boats.

no delay between win32 and mac?

[Gogo0]

If a game is "too hard" to port to x86 linux (as was the case with Tribes Vengeance), then it will also be "too hard" to port it to x86 mac. some companies *coughvivendi* just dont care.

though in the case of Tribes Vengeance, i think we came out ahead by not getting it...

Re:no delay between win32 and mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

it won't be as as hard as linux. apple's got a stable base for the OS and keeps everything consistant. they even (co)develop the graphics card drivers themselves. so for the most part, game companies will be getting support *from* apple (financial/technical). there's no real company to do that for linux with the game companies.

Re:no delay between win32 and mac?

[AHumbleOpinion]

If a game is "too hard" to port to x86 linux (as was the case with Tribes Vengeance), then it will also be "too hard" to port it to x86 mac ...

That is only one of many factors. There is also the potential market. While people estimate that the Linux market might be about the size as the Mac market there is no real way to separate servers and other non-desktop installs of Linux from the true desktop installs, only the later are part of the potential market. Apple users on the other hand are nearly exclusively desktop and have a well documented track record. The track record on the Linux side is quite negative given id's comments, Loki, etc. It's easier to make the business case for Mac.

... some companies *coughvivendi* just dont care.

It's not Vivendi it's the game's programmers. Blizzard is part of Vivendi and they develop Windows and Mac titles in parallel and release simultaneously.

Re:no delay between win32 and mac?

[flawedgeek]

The funny thing is, it'll become much easier for the game devs to port to mac after they realize that there's actually a customer base.

Re:no delay between win32 and mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

Coding games for Linux is a piece of cake.

Eclipse and CDT a wonderful compared to that steaming pile of shit that is Xcode.

The Linux GL drivers are on par with windows drivers.

Writing the app shell around the core game on Linux is very straightforward. The Cocoa/Carbon mess is a massive waste of time to have to work through.

Sound on OS X is an utter joke.

Input on OS X is an utter joke.

No one at Apple gives a shit about game development. Just go look at Apple's utterly pathetic game developer page to see just how little effort Apple puts into providing the tools and APIs developers need to make modern games.

And this is just scratching the surface of Apple's problems with game development.

Re:no delay between win32 and mac?

[BitGeek]

LOL, you shouldn't make stuff like that up on Slashdot. You're likely to run into someone who actually HAS developed games for the Mac... oh, look, you have.

Apple has excellent support for multimedia, and has since before Windows 95. IT got better with OSX, not worse. Maybe windows is better, but there's no way Linux is. Hell, in linxu there isn't even a consistent set of hardware... let alone a rich set of frameworks to make development a dream.

I'm sure linux is coming along great... but Apple has a 20 year head start on the desktop, and 20 years mroe time to make an excellent environment for game developers, and they have.

There are some games that are not ported to the MAc, but that's always going to be the case for marginal games.

Its clear to me you've never tried to write game code under OS X... your beef is over something else, maybe your own inadequacy.

Re:no delay between win32 and mac?

[LandownEyes]

I was always happy that it kept me from playing games, guess that's out the window.

this whole thing is really odd....

[Malor]

It's a very weird idea... it feels a bit like waking up in the Twilight Zone or something.

I forget the name offhand, but there was an early computer company, possibly Amstrad, that preannounced that they were coming out with this really amazing new machine. Customers loved the idea, and stopped buying all the existing machines. Sales dropped to 0 and they died before they could get the new hotness out the door.

Apple has always known about this, and has been very aggressive about not preannouncing ANYTHING, so as to not hurt sales of existing products. This violates that precept so badly that I can't help but think it's prompted by panic (or anger, as some have hypothesized). I'm not sure whether or not it's a bad idea. Their existing sales are going to drop, perhaps precipitously, while they try to figure out how to make OSX on Intel work. But if they didn't preannounce, then the developers wouldn't have time to get ready for the transition, which could potentially be worse.

As an aside, PPC emulation is never going to be very good, and all that specially tuned Altivec code has just been junked. That's a huge investment down the drain.

They have to know that this is a bet-the-business move. They'll have to execute nearly perfectly, and very quickly, to make this happen without pissing off too many people. And they're going to have to continue to execute flawlessly for a long while. Apple's good at that, but this is asking an awful lot of their engineers. They must really believe their backs are against the wall.

I wish them well, but there are soooo many ways they could screw this up.

Re:this whole thing is really odd....

[Bustbang]

The name of the computer was osborne not amstrad.
Here explains the osborne effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Osborne

Re:this whole thing is really odd....

[mh101]

Apple has always known about this, and has been very aggressive about not preannouncing ANYTHING, so as to not hurt sales of existing products. [snip] But if they didn't preannounce, then the developers wouldn't have time to get ready for the transition, which could potentially be worse.

As you state, unlike a new product like the Mac Mini or iPod Shuffle, they can't wait until the last minute to let the world know about it. They have to tell the developers about this well in advance, and I'm certain it's not feasable to put every single Mac software developer in the world under an NDA.

But if I can speculate, I would assume that, with technologies such as Rosetta and their Universal Binary system, your average user won't even know, or care, what the underlying architecture is, as the overall user experience would be identical.

I see this more akin to General Motors stating that next year's Sunfires and Cavaliers would be using chassis x instead of chassis y. As long as the experience is still excellent, the end user won't really care much, and won't hold off on buying their cars. Of course, I'm speaking about average joe users here, not the typical Slashdot crowd who actually understand these under-the-hood things...

Re:this whole thing is really odd....

[flawedgeek]

They have to know that this is a bet-the-business move. They'll have to execute nearly perfectly, and very quickly, to make this happen without pissing off too many people. And they're going to have to continue to execute flawlessly for a long while. Apple's good at that, but this is asking an awful lot of their engineers. They must really believe their backs are against the wall.

My guess is that this isn't as big of a deal as it seems to be....Apple's already got a couple major cash cows....they're called the iPod and the iTunes music store.

Besides, has Apple ever missed an announced deadline....oh, nevermind.

Re:this whole thing is really odd....

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I don't see what the problem is. They survived a hardware architecture transition like this before, but this time it is supposed to be easier.

As for the PPC emulation they ran the PPC version of Photoshop CS2 and it ran pretty well on the Mactel box. Not that it is a problem for Photoship, the Adobe CEO spoke at the Keynote commiting to supporting Mactel & Mac PPC in Universal Binary for many years with all their current Mac PPC product lines.

Apple said they will support PPC for years after they've stopped selling the machines. Any developer running Xcode right now has very minimal work to port, and once ported, they can keep the PPC compatibility by just making sure that little check box is checked.

Re:this whole thing is really odd....

[Smurf]

Their existing sales are going to drop, perhaps precipitously, while they try to figure out how to make OSX on Intel work.

OS X already works on Intel. Yesterday's demo was delivered using Tiger running on a Mac/Intel machine (3.6 GHz Pentium 4). Jobs even confessed that all previous versions of MacOS X have always been compiled for Intel also. (Of course the existence of project Marklar had always been rumored, he just confirmed it).

Xcode 2.1 was also released yesterday, providing cross-compilation and production of "universal" (fat) binaries. The developers got a copy yesterday at WWDC, and it's a free download for the rest of us. Of course we don't have the hardware to test the Intel binaries, but some of the developers will get Mac/Intel prototypes in two weeks to start testing their apps, and correcting the platform-specific issues.

Re:this whole thing is really odd....

[Anonymous Coward]

General Motors? Experience "still" excellent???

What bizarro planet are you from?

Re:this whole thing is really odd....

[lisaparratt]

Unfortunately in this case, the chassis is from a Vauxhaul Chevette, but with added racing stripes.

Re:this whole thing is really odd....

[Anonymous Coward]

> Apple has always known about this, and has been very aggressive about not preannouncing ANYTHING, so as to not hurt sales of existing products. This violates that precept so badly that I can't help but think it's prompted by panic (or anger, as some have hypothesized). I'm not sure whether or not it's a bad idea.

What do you propose ? Waiting without telling anybody ?

Think about it. The truth is that they are probably lying on the timeframe. They say the transition will take a long time (a year), so they can sell the existing ppc stock (which, effectively will drop to zero sales pretty quickly) to people that would NOT buy it if they knew that the x86 is just around the corener.

Then, they will announce x86 mac ahead of plan. The boxes are probably almost ready now. They just want to sell the current crop of ppc machines.

They will put x86 boxes pretty soon. Third pary apps will follow, later.

As a NeXTstep developer, I already lived throught that transition once (was called the 'fade to white'). Building a cocoa app for OSX/intel will really be a 2 minutes job followed by a two hours compilation (if you use XCode). Releasing quad binaries was really amazing.

Re:this whole thing is really odd....

[Have Blue]

It had been well known that Apple was maintaining an Intel version of Darwin. The fact that they had also been maintaining Intel versions of the entire OS and presumably all their other in-house software was the surprise.

Re:this whole thing is really odd....

[Smurf]

The fact that they had also been maintaining Intel versions of the entire OS and presumably all their other in-house software was the surprise.

No, that's the Marklar project I was referring to.

Back in the days of Rhapsody, Apple showed full versions of the complete OS (or what they had at the time) for both PowerPC and x86. When they announced MacOS X, they (officially) killed the x86 port, leaving only the core OS, Darwin, which you can download and (try to) compile on your PC if you want to (and maybe even succeed).

But rumors talked about a project named Marklar. The goal of that project was to always keep a version of the whole OS compiling on a second processor architecture (the obvious choice was x86), for several reasons:

• If you have code that cleanly compiles in two different architectures, chances are that jumping to a third architecture is relatively easy, as the platform-specific parts are already identified.
• Maintaining more than one architecture helps identify bugs that may be obscured by the idiosyncrasies of a particular architecture. This is one of the advantages that Linus Torvalds sees in developing Linux on his G5.
• If Motorola/Freescale and IBM failed to produce a healthy PowerPC lineup, it would be easy to jump to a new chip family. (Around that time Motorola was having problems producing G4s over 500 MHz, so the fear was justified).

Most rumors are at least partially false. This one turned out to be mostly (or totally) true. The biggest surprise was not the confirmation of the project, but the fact that Apple decided to use Intel's x86 chip instead of something else (say AMD's chips) or getting a company with great expertise in the field (again AMD or even Intel) to help in producing better PowerPCs.

Re:this whole thing is really odd....

[Onan]

Apple's already got a couple major cash cows....they're called the iPod and the iTunes music store.

The music store almost precisely breaks even; its purpose is to entice people into ipods, and thus into macs.

I've heard conflicting things about how much profit they actually clear on ipods. While they obviously sell lots of units, the margins are very slim indeed. Again, they're not exactly loss leaders, but "lesser profit leaders".

So no, Apple's profit really is deeply bound to mac sales. But they do have a whooole lot of cash sitting in the bank; I would imagine that they've decided that it's worthwhile to weather a rough couple of years of decreased hardware sales in order to never again have their machines be viewed as slower than intel systems.

Re:this whole thing is really odd....

[Queer Boy]

I see this more akin to General Motors stating that next year's Sunfires and Cavaliers would be using chassis x instead of chassis y.

Except if you buy car with chassis x now, you won't be able to drive on any of the roads in the future.

You clearly know nothing of what 68k users went through with the switch to PowerPC. NO MORE optimisations when the 68040 could have been MUCH better supported. Apple burned a lot of users with the switch from 68k to Intel and a lot of them went to Windows.

Apple has made it clear that the future is not PowerPC, why bother to develop for it? Every sane developer that plans on continuing development will completely abandon Altivec. Great, there goes the whole point of my G4 and G5.

No wonder Tiger runs about 33% faster on G3s, that's what teh emulation targets, just like the 68k emulator targets a 68020.

Re:this whole thing is really odd....

[Scudsucker]

You clearly know nothing of what 68k users went through with the switch to PowerPC.

Not suprising that he doesn't know, considering that never happened. That was one of the smoothest technology transitions in history, you need to go back under your bridge.

Re:I Make Mac Games

[PierceLabs]

Good. That means you should be willing to sell that G5 pretty cheap then.

emulation is better for games than most things

[Heisenbug]

If Windows apps can run on Intel-based Macs, at full frame rates, with all the features turned on, the effect on Mac gaming could be devastating. ...

OK, I can definitely see how the effect on Mac game porting jobs will be devastating, but that quote actually sounds pretty sweet to me as a Mac user. The thing is, running most non-native apps (eg OpenOffice) on a Mac sucks, because the interface isn't Mac-like enough. But 3D games are the one case where that doesn't matter -- they all have their own (crappy) interfaces anyway. If this change means that there are half as many real ports, but twice as many game companies who make sure their title plays on a Mac via emulation, I have trouble seeing the long-term problem. This won't affect normal GUI apps -- any Mac GUI app that isn't friendly enough gets beat down by one that is.

Short term, of course, it will suck if the shift to emulation happens before you've had a chance to upgrade to a macintel ... but if not being able to play the latest 3D games is a problem for you, I imagine you'll have gotten around to it, somehow.

Great for Cross-Platform Games

[big daddy kane]

Hopefully this will lead developers to use cross-platform API's for games, so they can run on win lin and mac, more games could be sold bringing in more money and gamers on linux and mac get more games as well.

I for one disagree with Dvorack on this issue (slightly different article --sorry), it seems like this switch will lead to the development of more cross platform API's, and once that happens itll make the transition off windows even easier.

Re:Great for Cross-Platform Games

[Anonymous Coward]

This have absolutely zero effect on Win32 game development.

There will be an initial surge of interest as windows developers mistakenly rear/hear that they are going to be able to run OS X on their tricked out dual AMD systems. And then they will go right back to completely ignoring anything having to do with Apple outside of the occasional chukkle at whatever is the latest Mac game performance disaster like WoW or Doom 3.

Right now no windows development house have any interest in buying 2-3 thousand dollar G5s to port their game on.

Next year no windows developement houses will have any interest in buying 2-3 thousand dollar Intel based Macs to port their games to.

(no one actually thinks Intel based Macs are going to be cheaper do they?)

Re:I Make Mac Games

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you get back to us with Apple's marketshare after this quarter?

I doubt you'll be bragging about it...
Or the next...
Or the one after that...

***Boggle***

A company with such a tiny marketshare who has just had to abandon their entire CPU line and turned their entire customer's hardware investments into legacy equipment overnight actually has fanboys talking smack about markeshare.

***Boggle***

Optimise optimise optimise

[am46n]

The switch to intel means that a games developer can maintain a common c++ codebase and optimise the same bits for all platforms. Data formats will no longer need endian switches that porting or careful cross-platform development tend to introduce. The small remaining headache is the DirectX OpenGL issue. But that's still significantly less effort. The ease of porting to mac and larger installed user base should offset any worries about the hard-core users using some sort of WINE-style layer translation layer. Exciting times ahead.

Looks bad to me

[Enrique1218]

Certainly, the switch to Intel will open the door to dual-booting OSX/Windows Apples. Some users may just get a copy of XP and just buy the Windows version of the games and forego the wait. The original developers may just make a Macintosh version side by side with the Windows one. Then, there is the whole prediction that gamers will move to consoles decreasing the number of PC gamers. This may have an increase effect for Mac Gamers. So, I can understand the dread in mac porting houses about the future.

Or maybe not...

[bluGill]

Wine is full of linuxisms. It works on other systems, but only so long as you stay away from a lot of corners, and don't stress it. The lead developer of Wine himself will tell you that linux on x86 is the only platform they target, and it isn't worth their money (Code Weavers - his employer) to make it work on anything else.

Wine has been completely broken for months at a time on FreeBSD, less popular OSes will have even more problems. They will accept patches to fix Wine on other OSes, but they have no problem accepting a patch one hour latter that breaks non-linux all over again, so it is a frustrating task.

Now OSX might be worth the cost - particularly if Apple has some money to help it along. However it is not a trivial effort to make everything work right. Years of effort most likely.

Even then, Wine applications will always look wrong on a mac desktop. The menu bar will be on the menu, and other details. Useable, but must like OpenOffice.org is useable on the Mac - nobody will like it, but they use it when they must.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of Wine. I wouldn't be surprise to see it run under OSX. However don't expect too much from it.

Re:Or maybe not...

[TheRaven64]

Even then, Wine applications will always look wrong on a mac desktop

This is a good thing. If WINE applications looked right, but felt wrong, then developers would probably think they were good-enough (look at the Qt apps on OS X that are full of Windowsisms). If it looks wrong, then works, then users will view it in the same way they view classic - a stop-gap until a native version is available.

Re:Or maybe not...

[Anonymous Coward]

What about fullscreen games?

Re:Or maybe not...

[TheRaven64]

For fullscreen games, WINE, or more likely winelib might be a possibility. Winelib currently runs on OS X, and so many games which don't have endian issues could theoretically be built using it now.

OpenGL != DirectX

[emarkp]

I wish I had mod points so I could mod you down. OpenGL is a graphics API. It replaces Direct3D (a subset of DirectX). Keyboard input, sound, etc. aren't handled in OpenGL.

Re:I Make Mac Games

[DavidLeblond]

A company with such a tiny marketshare who has just had to abandon their entire CPU line and turned their entire customer's hardware investments into legacy equipment overnight actually has fanboys talking smack about markeshare.

Apple didn't abandon their CPU line... they never MADE CPUs. IBM did.

As far as turning their old hardware into legacy equipment, why don't you take 5 minutes to actually READ one of the thousands of damn articles that have been floating around about Universal Binaries. You can even watch the keynote if you're too lazy to read.

SLI?

[DeadBugs]

I would like to see a Mac running dual 6800's in SLI mode. Not only for gaming, but you can turn SLI off and then run 4 DVI monitors.

NVIDIA just released a chipset for Intel, so NForce4 for Mac could be coming?

I have not yet heard where the chipset for the motherboard will come from, but this would be cool.

Re:SLI?

[Onan]

Traditionally Apple has done all their own logic boards, and I don't see any reason to expect that to change now.

Apple's goal here is not to make machines that are interchangeable with Dell/HP/homebuilt systems, it's just to have a cpu architecture that will--definitionally--never fall behind what most competing systems use. But they'll still be "Macs" in all other ways.

Steve Wozniak (OT; ~~interesting)

[Anonymous Coward]

Hm, over at Wheels of Zeus (Woz; Steve W.'s site) I see they're marketing the kind of GPS/RFID system built to track people, just as the one in an earlier (/.) story, except that was in Japan, AFAIK.. ..Do you guys think they got the idea/product from Steve Wozniak?

http://woz.com/2005/index.html

OT, -I know-, but still a thought.

Virtual PC?

[Niten]

As other posters have noted, the primary problem in getting games ported to OS X (or Linux, for that matter) is not one of CPU architecture but of operating system APIs. So the Intel deal probably won't effect more games "for OS X", other than as an indirect effect; if using Intel processors allows Apple to ultimately capture a larger market share, than it could result in more (and more up-to-date) OS X ports of video games.

However, with x86 processors in Macs we should be able to run Virtual PC at nearly full speed on OS X. Could VPC allow the client operating system to access the host hardware's video card for 3D acceleration, perhaps through some special driver such as the "Additions" for Windows hosted on OS X that are available in the current version? If so, then while we might not immediately see more "for OS X" games as a result of Apple's Intel switch, we may be able to run more PC games on our Macintoshes - for whatever that's worth.

You know...

[Anonymous Coward]

An Anonymous Reader wrote "InsideMacGames has posted a response to the news of Apple using Intel processors from both original Mac game developers...

You know, it's a well-known fact that there aren't many developers creating games for the Mac, but do you have to rub it in?

Porting and Console-like Macs

[thesandtiger]

One of the big issues with PC games being buggy and having issues is because of the staggering array of hardware people have and strange behaviors and interactions between those various components. I imagine that this kind of thing takes up a marked amount of development time, and probably harms sales - if I read that XYZ game is a bug-ridden piece of shit often enough, I'm not likely to buy it.

One of the big advantages console game development is a fixed target - the developers know exactly what the specs are, the tricks of the hardware etc. While I have seen bugs in console games, I'd say they're the exception, rather than the rule.

Macintoshes are somewhere in between - the basic hardware is going to be a fixed target, with the only obvious differences being processor speed, memory, HD size, and video card. Everything else is (within certain boundaries) pretty much the same across all macs of a given generation.

So, to me, this says that it may be possible that macs might be MUCH easier to develop for than their PC counterparts - certainly, it'll be easier to port highly-optimized apps (which I'd say games count as, what with the performance demands of many) over more quickly. Moreover, the gaming experience will tend to be less of a hassle.

I think, once Mac marketshare gets above a certain point (and I can only think the switch to Intel will help drive that), developers will be more willing to do timely Mac ports of games. And, once word of mouth spreads about the (likely) more robust gaming experience on a Mac, I see market share growing quite a bit more - nice feedback loop.

Imagine - 5 years from now people might think of Macintosh as the preferred gaming platform.

Re:I Make Mac Games

[Anonymous Coward]

why don't you take 5 minutes to actually READ one of the thousands of damn articles that have been floating around about Universal Binaries

Universal... unless the code was written for 68K, G4 or G5. Or used Altivec. Or used more registers than your average x86 process.

Will DirectX still be an issue?

[el_womble]

Why would you continue to develop for DirectX when you can hit almost every single machine on the market with OpenGL/x86? Doom 3 proves that you can make cutting edge graphics with OpenGL. If Apple can throw together some already open APIs and call it OpenX, then let Ubuntoo, Gentoo and FreeBSD et al use it, writing for DirectX will look a lot less attractive.

Open Source Engines

[Goosey]

This is precisely why I wish more pc developers would take open-source engines more seriously. A key goal of many open source libraries is to maintain cross-platform portability. Just take OGRE for instance. This 3D Rendering engine is fully cross-platform and supports the latest wizbang features (it even implemented parallax mapping before Unreal3 Demoed that technology). There are libraries for every area: Sound? OpenAL. Physics? ODE. Networking? RakNet.

There are already numerous projects that are trying to create a wrapper-engine to integrate several components.. My favorite is Yake which is trying to take a plugin-based approach. The idea is to create a cross-platform API which would allow the change of one subsystem (for example graphics) to be switched as easily as a DLL is swapped.

Of course many Open Source libraries are already seeing limited use - but if game developers would put more faith into the engine (and effort into bringing them up to professional level if they aren't already) then they can have a low-cost solution that is cross platform at no extra investment. I have no idea what the installed gamer base for Macs or Linux is, but I would imagine it is worth the (near nothing) investment.

Re:I Make Mac Games

[Carthag]

Those are by far in the minority. I haven't needed to use any apps that wouldn't run on my G3.

Apple's OpenGL Implementation is terrible

[HuguesT]

Look for any recent benchmark. A top of the line G5 with the best video card (say ATI x800 series) runs at about 50% of the framerate of a comparable PC.

In fact it is currently impossible to get good full resolution performance on Doom3 for Macs, on any of the hardware that Apple sells.

Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

...there are Mac game developers? Hrm... learn something new everyday.

Excellent--dual booting for games!

[Zhe Mappel]

This is exactly what I'm looking for: the ability to dual boot into Windows so I can play PC games.

If indeed Apple doesn't lock Windows out of the hardware, then I'll be able to get rid of my Windows box. About the last reason for keeping it has been to play its incomparable library of games.

No, it's not going to be fun for the Mac game porting industry, such as it was. But in this case, that's a Dodo in the path of evolution. Better that future Apple hardware allow us an easy path into the world's biggest library of games. Games drive a lot of PC hardware sales; this new Apple-Intel platform could, if done right, appeal to the huge PC gaming market.

Re:I Make Mac Games

[aristotle-dude]

Use google for crying out loud.

You are confusing "Universal binaries" which will have separate #if def blocks for PPC and X86 code with Rosetta, which translates PPC code on the fly into X86 code.

If you need to use Altivec, you can include separate code for altivec and SSE.

You are worried about 68k code? Nobody writes games for 68k anymore.

retail games on linux

[dobesov]

i have hear over the years...
(not my oppinion)
many game companies say that they dont port to linux, not because its really hard, but because linux is not a standardised platform. so many flavors, no one to complain too. their question as a business is how do we support this? not as in programming, but customer support for such varied platforms...
(my opinion)
i assume the answer is, its to hard, lets not worry about it and anyway those ar the guys that don't like to pay for stuff, right?

am i dead wrong here?