There was enormous amount of discussion about this in Mac forums and newsgroups at the time; as far as it's possible to make out, the Mac port was complete and it did network to the PC version.
However, at the time a lot of patches were being released for the PC version, many of which broke networking compatability with each other. Naturally that means they would also break compatability with the Mac version until a patch was released for that too, but neither Valve nor Sierra wanted to take on the responsibility of maintaining (or paying to maintain) the Mac version indefinitely. So rather than release a product which would become obsolete very quickly, they decided to save face and not release the game at all.
Oni, a much underrated game developed by Bungie (who, of course, went on to write Halo) had a great trailer. All the scenes were from actual gameplay (or at least the engine) with hints at the plot, fight scenes, gunplay...
A Dark Future... An Uncertain Past... No one left to trust
Unfortunately I can't find a download link which still works in general, but FilePlanet subscribers may have luck via http://www.3dactionplanet.com/oni/files/movies.sht ml
There's also pom-pom who have written two games (supports PC, Mac and Linux) with some of the best 3D graphics in the indie scene.
And of course, Ambrosia who have been in the Mac shareware business for ages, and have ported a few of their most successful titles to Windows already.
Aren't those the same list of things that if done by Microsoft would have you screaming bloody murder though?
Not at all - Apple wins customers by making products which are better (or better value) than the competitor's offering.
Yes, iMovie is (effectively) free, and perhaps that discourages the light users from buying high-end packages from third parties. But that's obviously not Adobe's core market, and when you want to move to a more advanced program you can freely choose between Final Cut or Premiere, and it's a level playing field. That's perfectly fair competition.
The fact that Adobe have decided they can't compete with Final Cut is no indication of foul play.
Microsoft win customers by making the competitor's product unviable. (e.g. bringing up bogus error messages to incite FUD, or making their own products difficult (or impossible) to uninstall, or strongarming OEMs into contracts which bias the market in Microsoft's favour.)
I think a lot of Microsoft's Mac products are better than their PC equivalents: on windows, they can rely on their monopoly to get sales; on the Mac they actually need to make a superior program, because there's no other reason to use it by default.
So Apple are making a simple editor which can read.doc files? Big deal - a low end program will only attract low end customers. The sort of people who only needed to buy Word because of the number of.doc files they have to read, and that's only because so many other Word users don't know better than to send text files as.doc attachemts to emails. This market should never have existed anyway.
Now, I'm sure that TextEdit won't compete with the features of Word, and the people who actually need that program can quite easily buy and install it. Apple are not blocking those potential customers from spending their money on Microsoft.
Re:Lindows joins the fight
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 3, Informative
From the C|Net article: "Businesses, educational institutions and home users of LindowsOS can be confident they will not be dragged into a legal battle." -- Michael Robertson, Lindows' chief executive.
This assurance is based on a pre-existing arrangement between Lindows and SCO. But does their statement imply that other Linux users have something to fear? Have they inadvertently validated SCO's claim of an IP breach by other Linux vendor(s)?
This just illustrates that commercial success doesn't always originate from quality.
Have you considered *why* the game-playing demographic is what it is? Because that's what the Tomb Raiders of this world are aiming for. They aim there because such games sell well, and that's because there's a large section of the demographic interested in adolescent voyeurism.
We need games more like the Longest Journey to break that vicious circle, not to wait for the demographic to magically change before targetting the new audience.
See also the last section of this article in the Designer's Notebook at gamasutra.com, (free registration required, etc,)
For some GB games (e.g. Kirby's Tilt and Tumble) part of the control method is literally to move and tilt the controller - of course, for the GB this means you're tilting the entire unit and in fact there is a tilt sensor in the cartridge itself.
How will this translate to the GameCube adapter? I wouldn't want to pick up, and tilt or shake anything that had an optical drive in it...
But you can burn audio CDs of any music you buy, so I don't see why any of those things pose a problem.
Unless you're saying that the conversion from 128-bit AAC to MP3 would be audibly worse than from CDDA to MP3, in which case it's hardly Apple's fault that the other devices and programs are limited to playing only an older, larger file format.
Slashdot Mirror
There was enormous amount of discussion about this in Mac forums and newsgroups at the time; as far as it's possible to make out, the Mac port was complete and it did network to the PC version.
However, at the time a lot of patches were being released for the PC version, many of which broke networking compatability with each other. Naturally that means they would also break compatability with the Mac version until a patch was released for that too, but neither Valve nor Sierra wanted to take on the responsibility of maintaining (or paying to maintain) the Mac version indefinitely. So rather than release a product which would become obsolete very quickly, they decided to save face and not release the game at all.
Oni, a much underrated game developed by Bungie (who, of course, went on to write Halo) had a great trailer. All the scenes were from actual gameplay (or at least the engine) with hints at the plot, fight scenes, gunplay...
... An Uncertain Past ... No one left to trust
t ml
A Dark Future
Unfortunately I can't find a download link which still works in general, but FilePlanet subscribers may have luck via http://www.3dactionplanet.com/oni/files/movies.sh
There's also pom-pom who have written two games (supports PC, Mac and Linux) with some of the best 3D graphics in the indie scene.
And of course, Ambrosia who have been in the Mac shareware business for ages, and have ported a few of their most successful titles to Windows already.
Aren't those the same list of things that if done by Microsoft would have you screaming bloody murder though?
.doc files? Big deal - a low end program will only attract low end customers. The sort of people who only needed to buy Word because of the number of .doc files they have to read, and that's only because so many other Word users don't know better than to send text files as .doc attachemts to emails. This market should never have existed anyway.
Not at all - Apple wins customers by making products which are better (or better value) than the competitor's offering.
Yes, iMovie is (effectively) free, and perhaps that discourages the light users from buying high-end packages from third parties. But that's obviously not Adobe's core market, and when you want to move to a more advanced program you can freely choose between Final Cut or Premiere, and it's a level playing field. That's perfectly fair competition.
The fact that Adobe have decided they can't compete with Final Cut is no indication of foul play.
Microsoft win customers by making the competitor's product unviable. (e.g. bringing up bogus error messages to incite FUD, or making their own products difficult (or impossible) to uninstall, or strongarming OEMs into contracts which bias the market in Microsoft's favour.)
I think a lot of Microsoft's Mac products are better than their PC equivalents: on windows, they can rely on their monopoly to get sales; on the Mac they actually need to make a superior program, because there's no other reason to use it by default.
So Apple are making a simple editor which can read
Now, I'm sure that TextEdit won't compete with the features of Word, and the people who actually need that program can quite easily buy and install it. Apple are not blocking those potential customers from spending their money on Microsoft.
This was also covered by C|net and discussed in The Register.
From the C|Net article: "Businesses, educational institutions and home users of LindowsOS can be confident they will not be dragged into a legal battle." -- Michael Robertson, Lindows' chief executive.
This assurance is based on a pre-existing arrangement between Lindows and SCO. But does their statement imply that other Linux users have something to fear? Have they inadvertently validated SCO's claim of an IP breach by other Linux vendor(s)?
This just illustrates that commercial success doesn't always originate from quality.
Have you considered *why* the game-playing demographic is what it is? Because that's what the Tomb Raiders of this world are aiming for. They aim there because such games sell well, and that's because there's a large section of the demographic interested in adolescent voyeurism.
We need games more like the Longest Journey to break that vicious circle, not to wait for the demographic to magically change before targetting the new audience.
See also the last section of this article in the Designer's Notebook at gamasutra.com, (free registration required, etc,)
For some GB games (e.g. Kirby's Tilt and Tumble) part of the control method is literally to move and tilt the controller - of course, for the GB this means you're tilting the entire unit and in fact there is a tilt sensor in the cartridge itself.
How will this translate to the GameCube adapter? I wouldn't want to pick up, and tilt or shake anything that had an optical drive in it...
Shouldn't this article be on unwired.com?
But you can burn audio CDs of any music you buy, so I don't see why any of those things pose a problem.
Unless you're saying that the conversion from 128-bit AAC to MP3 would be audibly worse than from CDDA to MP3, in which case it's hardly Apple's fault that the other devices and programs are limited to playing only an older, larger file format.