Home Page Forums Archives MacMAME Boot Camp!

Well, to be fair, one of the instances was my own fault.

1. Go to "My Computer"
2. "Ooo look, i wander what that USB video device is"
3. Click
4. BSOD
5. "Doh!, that'll be the iSight that Apple specifically says doesn't work then!!"

I kind of assumed when they said it doesn't work that it would not be recognised though, not that it would cause things to blue screen.

Other times were video driver related i _THINK_.

Yep, i'm guessing beta driver issues.

Martin.
PS: The novelty has already worn off

At work i've try Guild Wars and Fear on the iMac 20" standard: the first go very good, the second give 30/40 fps, 15/20 fps on some schemes with video settings on 1100xdon'trememberwhat...

Parallels Workstation go very fast but i don't found time for install any games....

Honestly enough... if it is easy enough to just have it run windows on the machine natively, it should be equally easy to program ports that work on windows AND mac. The only problem is that it wont, in that case, work on PowerPC macs, only universal. Thats the only thing that is really the issue. If Publishers decided to go to Universal ONLY, it would be easy to have OSX and Win versions of everything. Just it would completely alienate a good portion of the Mac Users that haven't upgraded yet. (Like me.)

That's rubbish. CPU architecture is one of the smallest hurdles when porting from Windows to Mac OS X. Look at all the differences in important APIs (UI, file system, network). CPU architecture is often just a recompile away.

Yeah. As something of a portability expert, endianness is (usually) easy. Or put another way: Windows to Mac is way harder than Mactel to PPC (or vice-versa).

Maybe if the app was written correctly in the first place, yes. But many - in fact I'd say most - PC games use binary data, and make *absolutely* no account for endianness. I'd estimate that a good 30% of our time is spend on endian issues during the lifetime of a port on average. Worse are the games that try to account for endian issues but do it all wrong.

Similarly, we have to fight with 1-byte (Win32, Mac x86) vs. 4-byte (Mac PPC) bools. There's also issues with 2/4 byte wchars, but those are generally not as big a time-sink.

Hehe, I've had some trouble like that here at work, porting from Win32/x86 to Solaris/SPARC and Mac/PPC. The code that was supposed to flip host-to-network and vice versa always flipped, and I had to go and put in macros conditionalise it all.

SMP-safe atomic operations got me as well. That had to be completely re-implemented. The different approaches on different CPUs made some of that interesting (x86 lock prefix vs PPC lwarx/stwcx.).

But that wasn't anywhere near as much work as porting things like network lookups, IPC, multithreading, etc.