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TransGaming Launches Mac Game Portal
Gamasutra is reporting that TransGaming, maker of Cedega, has announced the launch of the new Mac video game distribution portal, "GameTree." "GameTree Online hopes to replicate digital distribution offerings for Windows-based PC, enabling consumers to purchase and download Mac games, read gaming news, participate in promotional opportunities, and write game reviews. TransGaming plans to continually add new titles from a mix of genres to its online portal."
Will there be cake? (oops, wrong Portal)
And of course, it's actually just Intel-based Macs. So my two-year-old G5 is completely overlooked yet again. If I had an Intel Mac, I'd just put Windows on a partition. Kind of pointless, if you ask me. Not every Mac user buys a new computer every time Apple comes out with a new product line.
Great! An entirely new market for them to begin ignoring!
I didn't realize cross-dressing mac gamers were such a large demographic.
Oh, I'm sorry, I guess I should stop playing PC games on my Imac dual-booted to XP using Bootcamp then.
Its not the best platform for playing games, but its let me play Starwars Galaxies, City of Heroes, Age of Conan and Pirates of the Burning Sea effectively enough, some of them even run quite well.
Now I would prefer to have native OS/X versions of these games of course, but the Imac seems to run XP just fine in the meantime. The only downside is that Apple is very slow to update their drivers for XP under bootcamp so some games suffer when the publisher moves to the latest driver and Apple hasn't played catch up yet.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
http://www.gametreeonline.com/home.php
They have three games. Wow. Color me impressed.
I'd be the first to bash a Mac, especially in the realm of gaming, (I actually came here to post something along the lines of "ROFL it's gonna flop!") but you're completely wrong in your statement (with the exception of the Mini + Air). Out of the box, Macs have:
iMac: ATI HD2400, 26000, or nV 8800GS
Mac Pro: ATI HD2600XT
MacBook: Ok, crap integrated on this one
MB Pro: nV 8600GT
Not too bad, especially considering most off-the-shelf Windows PCs have crappy integrated graphics....nV 7150, ATI x1150, Intel X3100, etc...garbage. Even nicer $800+ desktops or so don't usually come with video horsepower (nV 8300 is still shit) unless you buy a gaming PC. Laptops are even worse. There are a plethora of large (15"+) $1500k+ laptops out there that could have good GPUs that don't.
Now if you get into stuff on places like Newegg, yes, you will find a better ratio. But Newegg is not the bulk of the Windows PC industry. (D)Hell, Worst Buy, and Circuit Shity are.
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Here's the link to the actual portal. (Annoyingly not included in the summary OR the Gamasutra hosted press release.)
Looks like yet another portal attempting to bank in with the same games already hosted on existing portals like Big Fish Games and Game Socks...
The more the merrier, I guess.
Any ideas as it seems that this competes with Crossover Games in the same market?
COOL! Maybe I can FINALLY play World of Warcraft on my Mac!
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Have you seen the selection of games for the Apple? It's a lot bigger then people seem to believe.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Even since Apple switched from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X, there was a project called Darwine that tried to port both wine for the PPC architecture *and* port this mode of Qemu from Linux to the BSD variant underneath Mac OS X.
With such a stack, executing x86 windows binaries on a PPC Mac would have been possible.
Qemu would be in charge in executing a x86 variant of Wine inside a PPC mac, this x86 version of Wine would have be in charge of translating Win32 API to system calls which qemu would pass back to the PPC host.
This is something that Transgaming might have considered supporting to help PPC gamers. But given all the "lack of giving back" controversies between Cedega and all other Wine derivates (Wine, CrossOver, etc....), this doesn't surprise me at all. Thankfully, I have an Athlon 64 machine and I'm not affected at all by this, having a Linux which can run win32 binaries natively, and having a separate Windows partition (for free from MSDNAA) for my gaming sessions. If you wanted/expected to ever run Windows games on that computer, you would never have selected a G5 in the first place. Back in the days when this users picked his G5, only PPC processor where available in Macs. So he didn't have any choice to begin with.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yes, I have, but selection isn't everything (and the selection is still somewhat laughable).
The other issue is performance. Most games (higher-end ones) that get ported over suffer from performance hits, sometimes as bad as 25%. If you poke around, you'll find plenty of benchmarks comparing games like Unreal Tournament on OSX and then bootcamping into XP on the same hardware, and getting a significant performance boost. Those games were optimized for Windows, and Mac compatibility was just afterthought to squeeze some extra bucks out of the title. And I did say most games...there are exceptions.
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iMac: ATI HD2400, 26000, or nV 8800GS
Except for the 8800GS, these are definately not "gaming" video cards.
HD3650 would be good if they had them, and even then it'd play like crap on the iMac's resolutions. Especially considering they insist to put them with such big monitors.
And aren't these mobile cards?
Mac Pro: ATI HD2600XT
Definately not a good card, wasn't this squished in between the 8600GT and HD3650 in terms of age with the performance of a X1650 on a smaller die?
And you're paying a pretty premium for that mac pro, what is it now, 4,000$?
MacBook: Ok, crap integrated on this one
And sadly IIRC macbook is the better selling 'book.
MB Pro: nV 8600GT
Isn't this the 8600GT-M? There is a small but fair difference between them... And the 8600GT has always been an underwhelmer; it's only worth the 80$ they're starting to sell them that... With the amount of money they charge for a MBP, this feels very underwhelming, but yeah it's better than nothing.
It's incredibly sad that the latest and greatest Apple can muster will cost you in the thousands and will come with a crippled processor & RAM.
I do Team Fortress 2 on my MacBook's GMA X3100. It's not stellar, but it's certainly playable. (The GMA 950, on the other hand, is complete and utter crap.)
So EA comes out with Cnc:3 but then has no plans to release the expansion packs for it. This is a great example of native games, however, it's probably just an example of releasing titles for dominant platforms, aka making money.
With Apple's big push towards iPhone, I can just see Jobs trying to get companies to write serious games for i[Pod|phone|touch]
but you can get / built a pc with better hardware for less then you can with the iMacs and YOU CAN ALSO USE ANY SCREEN THAT YOU WANT. The mac starts at $2300 and putting a ATI HD2600XT in a system at that price is not good.
...iMacs...starts at $2300... You are comparing two different systems here. iMac, starts at 1199US/EU. The Mac Pro, starts at 2,299.00US/EU. At the time these systems are released, they are hard to match, especially if you include all hardware features and comparable QUALITY.The reason I specify quality, is because of the amount of counterfeit and crap PC hardware on the market. How many revisions are there of a typical motherboard during the product cycle? 5? Apple puts time and testing into R&D before a product is released. I was running tests on a Mac Pro 8-core six months before it was released a 2 years ago. Was it stable? No, not really. However, I have been sold pc motherboards and processors that are compatible on paper, but are actually not multiple times. Old bios, needed a newer revision of the mobo (newer southbridge), etc.
Issues I've had with Macs? Typically, minor hardware failure. You know what I do? I bring it to an Apple store and they replace the defective part or system.
As far as video cards go, I blame the developers of the hardware. Apple needs to support these cards, so they select ones that will compliment the hard ware and their wallet nicely. Apple provides the drivers, not Intel or ATI. Apple isn't about open hardware, and probably never will be.
If you are looking to play the latest games, get something that is compatible with the hardware the game was made for. At this time, it just isn't a Mac. Hopefully, this will change in the near future as Apple is even getting hurt by big third party software vendors as well due to their closed decisions (Adobe is who I am thinking of).
The bigger down side is no upgradeable video card in an iMac. Also you have buy the top of the line iMac in order to get a decent video card. The Radeon 2600 Pro gets beaten all over the map by a mid range card like an 8800GTS (about $200).
It's an OK chip but Conan will look a lot better on a nicer card.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
With the exception of the Mac Pro those cards are not upgradeable. So sure it may be better than a PC with integrated graphics but many of those PCs can be upgraded. Maybe not to a 9800GTX but at least to a nice mid-range card.
Also on the iMac range the only way to get the 8600 is to buy the most expensive 24" model.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
World of Warcraft runs great on my MacPro and my Wifes iMac. Both outperform my Fathers custom made water cooled gaming machine.
All World of Warcraft DVD come with both with a Windows and an OSX version - no need to search for Mac version in the shops either.
BTW: World of Warcraft also runs on Linux using bog standard WINE. Note that after a nasty glitch in there anti cheat program Blizzard sanctioned the use of Linux a platform (as in: "Using Linux to play is not considered cheating").
World of Warcraft is quite accommodating to Non-Windows use.
Martin
I take it that my MacPro was only marginally more expensive but with 200+ fps it runs circles around my fathers computer - and that without actually breaking into a sweat.
Which is the best part of it: All that water cooling stuff is of course to keep the system silent
Martin
You know how, when they try to benchmark new CPUs in games, most online review site put some ridiculously low visual settings in game ? With resolutions like 640x480 and every gimmick turned off ? And even then there aren't that much big different between CPUs ?
/.er has humorously pointed out, those barely run on actual x86 machine either.
That's because most games are usually GPU bound, not CPU boung. The CPU start to be significant only once you almost completely shut off the graphics.
What is important for a game is to have a nice and good graphic card. What is important for gaming with wine isn't that much the code being run under wine, but more the API that wine is offering (namely the WineD3D engine). The most performance eating part of a game are the graphics (well, except some of the latest games. Or if you run a "game" like Creatures 2 which has several a complete neural nets emulating each creature's brain).
Running the game code in qemu seems weird ? Keep in mind that in linux you can find lots of games which are written in high-level language some of which aren't even JIT-ed. (But as the graphics are handled by SDL and/or Mesa the games still have reasonable speed). For fuck's sake there are several windows games written in *gasp* Visual Basic, and ShockWave is popular game development platform. And that doesn't stop the games from running well (as long as underneath DirectX is hardware accelerated).
And this doesn't even take into account that QEMU, like most modern emulator, doesn't actually emulated a full blown virtual processor, but instead uses much faster technique whenever it's possible like dynamic recompilation (foreign code is converted into native binary which is run at nearly native speeds - this feature is available for x86 and x86_64 hosts in stable, devel has support for PPC in addition to Sparc, ARM, HPPA though PPC isn't ported yet in the newer TCG engine).
So when you run a game with the Darwine stack, you get some little overhead because the code being ran is dynamically recompiled from a foreign architecture, and some additional but still not huge overhead from the translation of APIs (there's no DirectX API in POSIX. There's a whole WineD3D engine that serves as a DirectX API with an OpenGL backend for applications that are executed inside Wine). And then the graphic hardware causes the largest performance hit. Given that later G5 have PCI express connectors (according to Wikipedia), you can put quite decent GFX card inside (as long as there are drivers for it - ATI/AMD seem to provide drivers on their website for Mac OS X, but I don't know if those are universal binaries or intel only)
I wasn't referring to playing the latest CryTech production on G5. As other
I was more thinking about running the bulk rest of games, that aren't as much CPU hungry as Crysis. Most of which run happily on CPU even older than the G5. Some of which we were even able to run on Pentium-IIIs at home (as long as the P3 was paired to a decent GFX card and/or the visual settings were kept low).
The original poster could have been able to run them on his G5. But Cedega is not interested in funding efforts from Darwine.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I am over-f*cking-welmed.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
There's Breakout and...um.....um...Super Breakout.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yeah, I think if Apple was smart they would keep their current design style, but ensure that the graphics card could be swapped out, just as you can add memory etc. It would go a long way towards keeping the Imac uptodate. I imagine we can expect this in the future if the mac continues to gain market share.
:P
Certainly its got a gorgeous LCD screen, good enough sound etc. The video is good enough for the moment (its a very recent Imac) but when the next generation of games comes out, I am more or less hooped until I want to upgrade the whole box
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
There's a difference between being able to play modern games and playing modern games well.
I have an 8600M GS, a weaker card than the GT by a good margin, in my Asus laptop...it plays Crysis (not that well, but playable at medium-low settings), Tabula Rasa actually works great, Team Fortress 2 runs smooth on medium settings (all this at 1680x1050). Obviously my 8800GTX in my gaming desktop
outperforms these considerably, but when I'm 7,000 miles away from it in some stinkhole of a hotel in the Philippines, I'll take what I can get. I greatly prefer the better graphics, but the games are not any less fun because they don't look as good.
The parent was just making a horrible blanket statment about Macs that was misleading and relatively inaccurate. When I worked at CompUSA (you may laugh, I have no regrets) in my college days, when Bootcamp first came out, we sadly realized the 20" iMac was the best gaming PC in the store (x1600 at the time IIRC)...because all the Windows PCs had horrible integrated graphics. I never said Macs were a good gaming platform, nor did I say they were a good value. You'll never catch me owning a Mac, or settling for anything less than a high-end card. I was just simply pointing out that they would work better on modern games than your average off-the-shelf PC. Many of those integrated graphics can't even play half the modern games out there (or if they do, the framerate is unplayable even on low).
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Yes, but that is not the point. The Parent said Macs don't have good gaming hardware, and that's simply untrue, especially compared to off-the-shelf PCs. Most people will never upgrade their video card. They'll buy Halo 2 or CoD4, wonder why it runs like shit, and then go play on their console. I'm a card-carrying Mac hater, I wouldn't defend them if I didn't think they deserved it.
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