52 replies to this topic

[Cougar]

Homy, on 24 November 2020 - 11:46 AM, said:

Why is his name Doug McKenzie if he's Brad Oliver?

Private joke, I guess? Or an attempt at anonymity. He changed it a while ago.

[jeannot]

ozzy, on 23 November 2020 - 12:33 PM, said:

Brad Oliver posted on Twitter this morning mentioning that by far the biggest impediment to patching games for ARM was all the middle-ware and libraries. Physics libraries, sound libraries, etc.

His tweets are now protected (they were accessible two days ago), but Brad does seem to be investigating the issue of porting intel games to ARM. At least that's something. Maybe we'll get some games ported after all.

[dr.zeissler]

I like to address this to apple:
Take 10Mio bucks and sent them to the devs/portres in order to get the 64bit x86 to arm64 native and because of the 64bit apocalypse, port the 32bit x86 aaa-titles as well. I would be a huhge benefit to get arm64 even on titles that did not made it to x64 in the first place.

That would BOOOST the M1 platform!!!

[jeannot]

Yeah. Apple has all the cards in hands to improve gaming on their platforms. They're the only ones that master the whole stack from the silicon to the OS to the 3D APIs.
If only they cared about games...

[dr.zeissler]

The "middleware" seems to be "standard-stuff", so who is responsible for that?
Do the porters use their own "middleware"...? what are we talking about? sound-libs/keyb-/mouse/joystick-libs?

it's fine that some games that made the way through the rough 64bit apocalypse also "run" on M1, but that is the wrong approach.
"make mac-gaming great again " like in the early 68k/ppc times

[pofox]

ozzy, on 23 November 2020 - 12:33 PM, said:

Brad Oliver posted on Twitter this morning mentioning that by far the biggest impediment to patching games for ARM was all the middle-ware and libraries. Physics libraries, sound libraries, etc.

Fairly important point and I remember that being part of the reason for slow OS 9 to OS X porting, and slow PPC to Intel porting unfortunately. Luckily it seems like Rosetta 2 runs games at only a 20-30% performance hit, which isn't too bad if we get some decent GPU options in the next Mac AS releases (I.e. ATI or much much more powerful Apple GPUs).

Also, over at eGPU.io some users have concluded that the only thing holding back eGPU's on the M1 machines is lack of ARM-native ATI drivers. Looks like all the thunderbolt chips and other extensions necessary are in place and with ARM-native ATI drivers it would be easy to "hack" it if Apple didn't natively support it (similar to how I can "hack" my Thunderbolt 1 to use an eGPU even though it isn't natively supported). Who knows whether we will ever get ARM-native ATI drivers though. It will only happen if Apple includes an ATI graphics card in one of their Pro machines going forward I would think...

So Aspyr was quick to spurn its back catalog of mac games when Catalina cut off 32 bit support, but very willing to port pod racer and jedi knight to the Nintendo Switch, a 64 bit ARM platform. I get that the addressable market there is bigger, but I'm hoping that AS macs will usher in a more attractive and consistent gaming performance baseline across the entire hardware lineup that companies will consider macos a viable platform again.

It does give me hope that middleware, libraries, 64-bit ness, ARM ISA were no technical barriers for Aspyr, and they (and others) consider porting their back catalog on AS macs (RtCW please!)

[Matt Diamond]

pofox, on 04 December 2020 - 08:35 PM, said:

I'm hoping that AS macs will usher in a more attractive and consistent gaming performance baseline across the entire hardware lineup that companies will consider macos a viable platform again.

Agree 100%. Macs doesn't have to be the most profitable platform, or competitive with consoles, to make a Mac game ports more attractive. Whole companies did nothing but Mac games, back in the day.

Another example: the kickstarter game My Time at Portia actually had a Mac port well in progress, but eventually gave up on it. They said it was performance problems, but I think they would have solved those eventually if they weren't instead working on console ports.

(Yes, I'm still mad at them, mainly because they kept us in the dark and still haven't admitted that the Mac port is dead. They just quietly moved on to their next game.)

But my point isn't to talk about how mad I am about their cowardly and dishonest lack of-- sorry, sorry. My point is that the larger the market and better the performance, the easier a Mac port is to justify. Even if you are a *redacted*

Heck, remember the game Future Cop LAPD? I believe the only reason there was a Mac version was the lead developer wanted to do it and just quietly delivered it at the same time as the Windows version. All EA had to do was slap a Mac logo on the box! (Well not really, they had to pony up for additional QA, write more pages in the game manual, etc. But they went along with it.)

[nick68k]

Matt Diamond, on 04 December 2020 - 09:19 PM, said:

Another example: the kickstarter game My Time at Portia actually had a Mac port well in progress, but eventually gave up on it. They said it was performance problems, but I think they would have solved those eventually if they weren't instead working on console ports.

[...]

Heck, remember the game Future Cop LAPD? I believe the only reason there was a Mac version was the lead developer wanted to do it and just quietly delivered it at the same time as the Windows version. All EA had to do was slap a Mac logo on the box! (Well not really, they had to pony up for additional QA, write more pages in the game manual, etc. But they went along with it.)

I wondered what happened to Portia. That's too bad, I was looking forward to it.

And historically, well, prehistorically, I like to think that the Mac version of the Baldur's Gate 2 expansion 'Throne of Bhaal' came about because of some gentle pressure on the lead dev by the fans. Hell, he probably even wanted to do it himself, I suspect it wasn't a great deal of work. It may even have been the mighty Brad Oliver, but my memory is very hazy (this was 20-odd years ago). Somebody will correct me, no doubt.

[Thain Esh Kelch]

Matt Diamond, on 04 December 2020 - 09:19 PM, said:

Heck, remember the game Future Cop LAPD? I believe the only reason there was a Mac version was the lead developer wanted to do it and just quietly delivered it at the same time as the Windows version. All EA had to do was slap a Mac logo on the box! (Well not really, they had to pony up for additional QA, write more pages in the game manual, etc. But they went along with it.)

It was soooo good! I distinctly remember thinking "Wauw, this feels like a cutting edge Windows game!" back then, and I guess it really was!

I was always sad that I never got to play it multiplayer against anything but the computer AI. It was a really tense action game, that in many ways was my first foray into MOBAs.

[nick68k]

Arch-Apple fanboy John Gruber linked to the Apple Silicon Games website - it has a large and useful compatibility list (scroll down the page). Seems like quite a good resource.

[Cougar]

Thain Esh Kelch, on 05 December 2020 - 04:54 AM, said:

It was soooo good! I distinctly remember thinking "Wauw, this feels like a cutting edge Windows game!" back then, and I guess it really was!

I was always sad that I never got to play it multiplayer against anything but the computer AI. It was a really tense action game, that in many ways was my first foray into MOBAs.

I tried this recently on a PlayStation. I gave up after the third mission because of the lack of save checkpoints. A bit too old school for me I guess. But the game itself was fun.

[Matt Diamond]

Cougar, on 05 December 2020 - 11:49 AM, said:

I tried this recently on a PlayStation. I gave up after the third mission because of the lack of save checkpoints. A bit too old school for me I guess. But the game itself was fun.

Yeah, I'm curious to try it again, but I'm sure I wouldn't get far. I think I'll just let it be a happy memory.

[pofox]

Yet another Mac/PC port by Aspyr to iOS & Android, this time it is KOTOR II. Fingers crossed they're sharpening their ARM porting prowess and lining up their entire back catalog ready to roll out to AS macs