45 replies to this topic

[DaveyJJ]

And this is why some of us want to boot XP on a Mac, yes siree.

http://www.digg.com/...n_MacBook_Pro_2



    

RTW here I come!

[Tomatocow]

Oh just buy a PC already

[Batcat]

Mac OpenGL supporting Lost Coast's HDR lighting nicely?

Silent Hunter 3 and Pacific Fighters next!

[Tomatocow]

SH3! I want that game. Perhaps I should buy a PC?? Nah.

[steiner designer]

DaveyJJ, on March 20th 2006, 06:00 AM, said:

I'm not sure if the framerates will improve as the drivers are tweaked, and as hardware beefs-up over time, but this video seemed a little choppy to me...

Do you think it was a function of the video (recording), or is this pretty much the type of framerate one can expect from a Mac running windows?

I'd love to see some actual benchmarks, maybe barefeats is working on it...

[atari]

steiner designer, on March 20th 2006, 04:02 PM, said:

I'm not sure if the framerates will improve as the drivers are tweaked, and as hardware beefs-up over time, but this video seemed a little choppy to me...

Do you think it was a function of the video (recording), or is this pretty much the type of framerate one can expect from a Mac running windows?

I'd love to see some actual benchmarks, maybe barefeats is working on it...

The near 0 frame rate is most certainly a "function" of the hack job this entire solution currently still is.

[teflon]

true, but at least it runs, and im sure that once its less than a hack job, the frame rate will improve. also, it could be a badly compressed recording, or the settings put up too high for what is a hack job.

[Brad Oliver]

teflon, on March 20th 2006, 10:13 AM, said:

true, but at least it runs, and im sure that once its less than a hack job, the frame rate will improve. also, it could be a badly compressed recording, or the settings put up too high for what is a hack job.

Or - most likely - they're using a software renderer of some kind. Whatever it is, it's certainly not hardware accelerated.

[atari]

Brad Oliver, on March 20th 2006, 07:52 PM, said:

Or - most likely - they're using a software renderer of some kind. Whatever it is, it's certainly not hardware accelerated.

If wonder if there really is a way around the Mac specific Rom without flashing it.

[teflon]

rubbish, i didnt think of that...

only real way would be to rewrite the drivers (like people that use linux have to do).

[Ichigo27]

DaveyJJ, on March 20th 2006, 06:00 AM, said:

And this is why some of us want to boot XP on a Mac, yes siree.

http://www.digg.com/...n_MacBook_Pro_2



    

RTW here I come!

Not bad. Is it just me or do the objects in the game dissappear for a couple of seconds.

Tomatocow, on March 20th 2006, 08:05 AM, said:

SH3! I want that game. Perhaps I should buy a PC?? Nah.

I need one.

As for the next game to be tested, I say Onimusha 3 or Melty Blood should be taken into consideration.

[Eric5h5]

teflon, on March 20th 2006, 02:11 PM, said:

only real way would be to rewrite the drivers (like people that use linux have to do).

That's not much of a solution...there's no hardware documentation for any recent or even semi-recent cards.  Linux 3D drivers are not exactly cutting-edge....

--Eric

[teflon]

but seeing as windows cards are all BIOS (from what i understand), and the EFI ROMs on the macs are very different, it looks to me like it will be the only way (aside from flashing)..

theres next to no way that ATI or Nvidia will release drivers for XP that will support the mac ROMs. And so writing your own drivers (or cut and pasting) would seem to be the only way.

[DaveyJJ]

Speaking with the head programmer here ... a guy who writes assembly langugae CNC stuff (to 1/1,000th inch) for his personal use on weekends ... he says that ATI cards have two technologies that will help do the flashing thing. One allows ATI cards to reset their firware without a system reboot (the other is some sort of traffic thingy that allows you to step through what's ahppeneing on the card in realtime during a boot sequence).

The jist of what he was telling me was that these cards can take 250,000 flashes before giving up the ghost and the easiest way to get things going would be to take a firmware dump of the Mac version of the X1600 card and a firmware dump of the exact same card working under XP (on a Windows boxen) and do a diff that compares those two dumped files. Then either write a program that flashes the card with only the differences or when XP starts flashes it to have the Windows firware and when Windows shuts down it flashes the card back to the Mac firware state.

I think that's what he said. I'll ask again tonight on the ride home.

[bobbob]

Eric5h5, on March 20th 2006, 01:47 PM, said:

Linux 3D drivers are not exactly cutting-edge

nVidia's are. Certainly more capable than Apple's. There are also lots of people who can modify the drivers or the ROM to work with these cards. Getting them to work with OSX after might be tricky, but still doable if ATI can.

[Quicksilver]

Why not just write a software BIOS compatability module and have it translate instructions to the video card?

[teflon]

because then you get the rosetta effect and slow down because of this, not to mention an increase in CPU usage to do the translating. Youve got to remember that while the X1600 is good, its going to be limited a lot by software translation, and most people here doing this thing want to run windows games.

[atari]

Quicksilver, on March 21st 2006, 02:22 AM, said:

Why not just write a software BIOS compatability module and have it translate instructions to the video card?

You´d have the drivers communicate with this layer which itself needs to communicate with the EFI-compliant ROM on the GPU.
That,aside from matters of implementation,does not sound very speed to me.

In fact, that is pretty much what is being done now (excluding the suitable set of drivers).
An EFI-extension makes XP and its bootloader believe there is a VGA compliant video chip available.

So essentially,there are two solutions:
-) Modify the video-bios
-) Adapt the drivers

[macmanZ]

Adapt the drivers, Adapt the drivers!

:Wishes I had spent some more time learning to program instead of this stupid 3d cg stuff:

[Space_Pirate_Killer]

Tomatocow, on March 20th 2006, 06:06 AM, said:

Oh just buy a PC already

Thats a lot more expensive than installing XP on a mac.