Actually, Quake III was simultaneously developed on Mac, Windows and Linux. Quake I and II were definitely not developed on the Mac before or concurrently with the PC version, though. If they had been, id wouldn’t have had to hire other companies to port them over.
The list provided by JoeyBlades does consist almost entirely of older titles, or titles I’ve never heard of, and I follow the game industry pretty religiously.
Macs are great machines, but they aren’t even close to the PC when it comes to gaming. None of the many fantastic games I played last year are – or ever will be – ported to the Mac, it’s a shame, but the Mac gaming audience is just too small to support anything but the biggest blockbusters.
Case in point: Blizzard Studios is preparing to release Diablo II, it is the sequel to their mega-hit Diablo (never would have guessed, huh?) of 1997 and it is as close to being a guaranteed huge-mungus blockbuster as any game ever released. Even though this game is going to sell faster than Gingkoba at Bush 2000 headquarters, Blizzard still hasn’t committed to a Mac port. They fear that the Mac gaming audience is too small.
Of course, a lot of people could care less that their Mac doesn’t have any good games for it, more power to them. But if you like gaming, Windows is your only choice.
My list was admitedly old. It came from some older data that I found on the Mac EvangeList. I didn’t research it much… I’ve got better things to do with my time, however I did check and a few of the titles are fairly new and fairly popular. The list is certainly not exhaustive or current. One of the criticisms was that they were games with a high degree of art content… I’ll not deny that, but it is my impression that most of today’s popular games are 95% art, so I don’t see this as invalidating the point in any way. Me, I don’t play games, or at least very rarely and when I do they are typically things like Scrabble or Chess, so I am not the best suited person to defend the point I was trying to make… a point that I was merely parroting from people who are involved in Mac and PC game development.
“One of the criticisms was that they were games with a high degree of art content… I’ll not deny that, but it is my impression that most of today’s popular games are 95% art, so I don’t see this as invalidating the point in any way.”
No, the criticism was that I think games are on that list because somebody, somewhere on the project (probably the artists) used Macs in order to develop it. That is not the same as saying the game was developed “on” a platform, and it definitely not the same as saying the game was developed “for” a platform (which I originally thought the point of your post was, but now I guess that it’s not). Saying that a game is 95% art is completely wrong. Some games have lots of artists, some have very few, but the programming and desing aspects are still the bulk of game development (except for games which are just rehashes of already existing engines, I guess).
Not in my world. I started out on PCs, then my company pushed me onto the Mac platform. At first, I went kicking and screaming. Slowly I came to realize that I was being more productive on my Mac than I was on my PC. Eventually, I became proficient on the Mac platform that I became a part-time admin for the Macs. All the while, the PC-heads would routinely tell me how the company was making a mistake. When they found out that I bought a Mac at home, they became even more relentless - I put up with a lot of crap and propaganda. Somewhere along the road came Windows and suddenly the PC-heads were telling me that their Windows boxes were better than Macs because they now could do everything the Mac could do (crazy logic, if you ask me). Since I was no longer involved with PCs, I simply believed them and assumed that all of the hype was true. It wasn’t until I was forced to start using a PC agian that I realized that the differences were much more dramatic than I expected.
I love this attitude. I love it all the way to the bank… I’ve got some of my small fortune invested in Apple. I bought back in 98 and now my money has grown more than 600%… and Apple continues to rise. If I had bought Dell stock in the same time frame, I would have only doubled my money. I would have lost money in Compaq, which conventional wisdom at the time said was the safe bet.
It may be a niche market, but it’s a pretty damned big niche with good profitability. I’m happy to be investing both my time and money in Apple.
Furthermore, the existing x86 architecture is losing headroom fast. 1GHz CSIC CPUs have a hard time keeping up with 500MHz RISC CPUs and the end is in sight. The Wintel architecture is going to have to change in the next few years because the chip developers are bumping up against the theoretical limits of physics. I only hope, for the sake of the global economy, that Intel or AMD or whoever comes up with the next generation PC architecture manages it as seamlessly as Apple and Motorola did with the conversion from 68XXX to PowerPC.
Yeah, that’s what THEY all said, yet each one of them fell like dominos and eventually gave up. I know it’s grossly inappropriate to hijack this thread for such things so I’ve created a new thread in this forum to address it…
I’m a guru type, and my main reason for not liking Macs is not that people can use them without my help; it’s that, when something goes wrong, the internals are so carefully hidden from everyone yone that it’s much harder to fix than an IBM compatible.
Borderline MPSIMS, but there may actually be some meaningful points in here for people who want to understand some of the differences between the MacOS and Windows.
Top ten things I hate about my switch to Windows
Windows doesn’t support aliases or symbolic links.
Every other modern OS has this capability. Because Windows dosn’t, I spend a lot of time doing file maintenence on several large directories.
Windows can’t read a Mac file system.
When I create floppy or Zip disks that I want to share between my PC and my Mac, I have to format using the PC because my Mac can read PC file systems, but not the other way around. And when I happened on a CDROM formatted exclusively for the Mac and wanted to get some of the files onto my PC, I found it was next to impossible.
Windows is inflexible about application organization.
On my Mac, if I decide I want an application to be in another folder, I just drag it there. For most of my PC applications, doing this will break the application. Also, ever notice how the Mac doesn’t need special software to remove applications?
Windows lacks flexibility with file extensions.
Three little characters. That’s all you get to determine which applications can and will open your documents. This really sucks when you’re a developer like myself who may use multiple applications to operate on a single file.
Windows doesn’t have a decent Mac emulator.
There is Basalisk, but it’s not a PowerPC emulator and is mostly useless. What ever OS you use, there’s always going to be something that runs under the other OS that you’re going to want.
Windows doesn’t check the available file space before copy.
Man, I hate this. I rarely even use Zip disks with my PC anymore. If I grab a large number of files and try to copy them to a disk (floppy or Zip), the OS doesn’t warn me if they won’t fit. Instead it just starts copying files randomly. This not only waste my time during the copy operation, but also when I have to go through and sort out what actually did get copied.
Windows window management is ignorant of display size.
Particularly troublesome when moving between my 21 inch monitor and my laptop display. I’m constantly having to drag windows around resizing and repositioning and sometimes I just can’t manipulate the window because the necessary controls are off screen and I am unable to bring them back on screen.
Windows closes the application with the last window.
This is particularly bothersome with applications that require some sort of intialization or take a while to start up. I finally got used to either leaving a dummy window open. Sadly, this behavior has rolled over to my Mac routine unnecessarily, impacting my productivity slightly.
The sort order in Explorer is non intuitive and inconsistent.
Whenever, I change the contents of a folder or a file, the folder or file re-sorts to the bottom of the list in the right hand pane of Explorer. This has me scrolling around unnecessarily sometimes.
10.The OS is unaware of some file system changes.
Stick in a floppy. Oops! Wrong floppy. Eject that one insert the right one… Hey, nothing changed! I’ve got to tell the OS that something has changed with the Refresh command. Same problem with Zip disks and also the local hard disk when I’m FTP’ing files.
There’s actually a buch of others, but I left one off the list and now I’m having second thoughts. Even on my old 68040 Mac,
when I’m listening to music on a CD in the drive, I never had a problem with dropouts in the music, even when the CPU was very busy. On my supposedly fast Pentium II machine, the music stops all the time when the machine gets busy. Except for when I’m reading mail or poking around on the Straight Dope boards, I can’t listen to music like I did with my Mac. Bummer!
I get to go first. I imagine someone else will come along and correct me.
A. Shortcuts, batch files, scripts
B. it’s a holdover from the early DOS days.
A. There’s shareware and commercial stuff which you can install on a PC which will allow you to read Mac disks natively.
B. it’s another DOS holdover. Damn that backwards-compatiblity…
True enough, but I would ask, why do you want to move stuff around anyway? Are you that anal about how the files on your system are organized? Maybe you should have installed it in the right place the first time. Oh, and the “special software” for uninstalling windows software is just a log file, read by a built-in app, which records where files were installed and what registry entries were created – last time I checked, a lot of Mac programs do exactly the same thing.
You still haven’t figured out the whole right-mouse-button thing yet, have you? You can set up any type of file such that if you right-click it, an option appears in the menu to open it with the app of your choice.
The question is, why would you WANT a Mac emulator when every imaginable program has been ported over already, if it wasn’t written for PC in the first place? Emulators are toys, nothing else.
God forbid you should know anything basic about your system, like how much space you have on a disk. Granted it’s true, but this sounds like nothing more than plain laziness.
You must be using Win98 osr1 or osr2, or NT with an early SP. They fixed that with 98 and the newer service packs. Besides, I’ve seen the exact same problems with Macs. It’s something endemic to a GUI, not just PCs.
Ok, you have me stumped on this one. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Could you be a little clearer?
I hate it when people say something is “non-intuitive.” That’s such a bs term – it’s non-intuitive to YOU, because it’s not what you’re used to. The sorting in explorer makes perfect sense to me. Besides, if it’s that hard for you, just switch it to the Details view – it’s almost exactly the same as the “View as List” option on a Mac. Is it still “non-intuitive.”
More laziness. God forbid you should have to hit the F5 button. At least the PC floppy drive has an eject button; you don’t have to drag it into the trash, and you can get my disk out without the power being on.
Also, that’s been changed in win98. Now if you have a window showing the floppy contents open, the window closes automatically when you eject the disk. (exactly as much work to put in a new disk and click on it to open as in a Mac, I might add).
I will agree that the standard CD player that comes with windows is garbage. Try playing your cds through WinAmp – No skippage there (the key is that the default windows CD player will only take very low memory priority – winamp will grab a higher priority, high enough so it doesn’t skip, low enough so it doesn’t interfere with anything else). If you don’t like winamp, there are a million other cd-playing programs out there. Most of them support CDDW at this point, too.
I’m sorry if this seems like being picky or defensive, but I want you to see that the problems you see aren’t real – they’re in your head. I could come up with just as long a list of ‘problems’ with Macs, but then you would say the same things to me. It’s all just a matter of familiarity.
To be perfectly blunt: so? The theoretical market for Wintel boxes that could read Mac diskettes and/or CDROMs is just slightly larger than that for a Wintel box that could read Sidney Sheldon novels.
Besides, IIRC, Macs use a proprietary file structure. If Microsoft itself were to reverse-engineer a Mac file, Apple would probably scream bloody murder and demand that Jacksom immediately cast Gates in irons. If anyone else did it and offered a third-party add-on, Apple would doubtlessly sue them, as have done to others.
Incidentally, ARDI is selling a [url=http://www.ardi.com[Mac emulator for the PC. Again, though, this is not exactly an item of high demand.
“I don’t just want you to feel envy. I want you to suffer, I want you to bleed, I want you to die a little bit each day. And I want you to thank me for it.” – What “Let’s just be friends” really means
Sorry. Not the same thing. I can make an alias of a folder and move that alias somewhere else. Now, for all intensive purposes, I’ve got two copies of that folder in two different places. My applications don’t know the difference. Why would I want to do that? I maintain several different web sites each with a predefined architecture. I mirror these site on my local computer so I can do maintenance off-line. I have a huge image directory that appears at different levels of hierarchy on the host machines. On my PC, I have to move my image directories (plus a few other shared directories) around to accomodate the changes in expacted architecture. On my Mac I could just drop an alias in the right place. This is only one of several uses I had for aliases…
Yeah, I know about several of these, but you have to spend money to get this functionality.
Yeah, I guess so. I prefer to organize all of my image manipulation programs in one folder, my text manipulation programs in another, my music programs in another, my utilities in another, etc… Occasionally I decide to reclassify a program and want to move it to keep it organized. When I get new software, I put it into an evaluation folder until I’m certain that I want to keep it. Later, I’ll want to move it to it’s appropriate folder or archive it. Occasionally I want to move programs to a temporary folder for backup or archival. Yeah, I move programs around on my Mac a lot… because I can.
Not always true. Many applications won’t let you open files if they don’t have an extension that they recognize, even if the data contained within is completely compatible. The “Open with…” feature is not particularly user friendly, though I do use it sometimes.
That’s just silly. There are many titles available for the Mac that are not available for the PC. You only think emulators are toys because all the ones you’ve been exposed to run under Windows… As I’ve said before, my 300MHz Mac running under Virtual PC emulation will outperform my 366MHz PC running native in most of the real world benchmarks that I’ve tried. I’m sure there are benchmarks where this won’t hold true, but I’ve yet to discover one that has any meaning to my routine.
Yep, your right. I was too lazy to add up the file sizes of the thousands of image files that I wanted to copy from my PC to my Zip disk. I used the “Properties” command to check the size before the move, but alas it lied to me and told me that I had enough room on my Zip disk.
NT 4.0, service pack 6 - should be current enough, don’t you think?
I’ve only seen it once on a Mac and this was the fault of the application. The OS handles it right, but the programmer may not always follow the rules… and this is key… there are rules!
OK. One example. I use Netscape to browse and read email. Each function has it’s own unique window for managing it’s task. I’m behind a firewall which requires me to login and my mail server requires a login, as well. First thing I do when I get in - read Dilbert. Gotta login to the fire wall. I’m done with that and want to check my mail. I close the browser window… oops, just quit Netscape. Restart Netscape, read my mail… gotta login to my mail server. Now I want to check out the latest intellectual reparte on the Straight Dope web pages. Close the mail window… oops, just quit Netscape. Restart Netscape, re login to the fire wall, start browsing… Telephone rings. The guy on the other end wants to know if I copied him on my last weekly report. CLose my browser window… oops, just quit Netscape… blah, blah, blah. Yeah I know I can hide the windows on the task bar, but that quickly gets so cluttered so as to become totally useless. An application should not quit just because I don’t happen to have a window open at the moment.
I’m sorry but files changing position in the file list is non intuitive by any definition.
Yeah, on the part of Microsoft.
Ah, see, you learn something everyday. I had no idea that F5 did that. Which brings up another thing that bugs me. I find Windows help files completely useless. I can’t find any documentation of the F5 key or the Refresh function. I had to find out accidentally that I had to do a Refresh in the first place. One day, when I wanted to figure out how to print my screen, I searched for 20 minutes to discover that there’s a “Print Screen” key… who’d a thunk it? So I hit the “Print Screen” key… nothing happens… It took me an hour more of asking all the PC weenies around here before someone finally told me that “Print Screen” really should be called “Copy Screen to Clipboard”… oh well!
Ahhh… I see you think that’s a good thing.
Well, there’s always Command-E, which is documented right there in the menu, BTW.
You can do this on the Mac with a paper clip, but admittedly, that could be awkward if you inadvertantly left a floppy disk in a laptop in sleep mode and you don’t have a paper clip handy.
Actually, Winamp is my player of choice and I do get skippage, but maybe I can adjust
Probably right there. The only reason for this would be if someone were switching from the Mac platform to the PC platform… I don’t expect that happens all that frequently.
Except that it has been done, as has already been pointed out. It’s just not built in to the OS the way it is on a Mac.
Although I’m firmly of the Mac-user variety, I have to make some corrections to the list of complaints about Windows:
First, the PC can read a Mac disk just as a Mac can read a PC disk. True, Windows does not have the software built in. At one time, neither did the Mac (you had to buy Dayna’s DOS Mounter or a similar product), but the drives themselves could always do so, unless you mean the old 800K double-density or even older 400K single-density Mac diskettes (heck, even a modern Mac won’t read those single-density things any more!).
The DataViz product ConversionsPlus, which is the PC equiv of MacLink Plus, will read a Mac diskette and allow you to format one from scratch.
Regarding emulation: Mac emulators for the PC do exist. There exists a package called Gemulator SoftMac 2000 that emulates a Macintosh on a PC. A hardward PCI card holds a legal Mac ROM, which you must own or buy. The software part emulates a Motorola 680x0 chip plus Macintosh ASICs, allowing you to run MacOS and Mac applications (including file sharing and whatnot) on a PC. This is a fairly new development and I don’t know about stability of the product or the company. Also it can’t run anything that requires a PowerPC processor, and, as with SoftWindows, you will get a performance hit and will need extra RAM to run both OS’s at the same time. There are other Mac emulators as well (Ardi Executor, Microcode Fusion, vMac), with similar or worse problems.
Well, I can’t put a post up defending Windows and leave it at that, can I? ::he asks rhetorically::
Five things I hate the most about Windows:
De-maximization of maximized windows when you switch to another window. I just want to look at something else then I’ll come back to this window. I’d appreciate it being the size of my monitor screen when I do so. I made it that size for a reason. I think there is something like a menu command hidden away somewhere – “Remember Window Position”? – but you think I want to have to go to it every time I open and maximize a window?
The lack of auto-refresh in file windows, as already discussed; it bothers me too.
Application windows (like a Netscape window inside of which is a Straight Dope/Reply to Topic window). These exist why? To chew up additional screen real estate? To keep me from viewing windows from other open apps while typing in this one?
Ten zillion bloody files, files files everywhere, with incoherent names. Files in the Windows directory. Files in the Windows\System directory. Y’all have had long file names for how long? and still it is an ocean of PMJQSL1_.DLL and MSVWR2P.DAT and similarly opaquely named things. Files in each Application’s directory, files needed for the program to run, by the hundreds. God knows the Mac System Folder is a gothic nightmare for the newbie, too, with its Extensions Folder full of files with occasionally confusing names like “OpenTptAppleTalkLib” or “MathLibMoto”, but by and large you’re talking about far fewer files, far more coherent file names for the most part, and organized into fairly self-explanatory folder structures; and although applications are seldom just the single application file any more, it is often fewer than a dozen total files.
Lack of consistent keystroke conventions. Commands are executed with Alt-something some of the time and Control-something other times, with little logic governing when and what for. Things that work in one setting (Shift-select to add things to the current selection in graphics programs or your word processor) work differently in another (shift-click two files in a file list and it grabs everything in between as well; you have to – what is it? – alt-click to select a second individual file – ??).
Perhaps Macintosh can gain some ground by adopting the Jehovah’s Witness strategy. I can just see a bunch of Imac lovers in white shirts riding around on bicycles, getting doors shut in their faces.
A computer without a Microsoft operating system is like a dog without bricks tied to its head.
It’s a small point to be sure, but about this copying to another disk thing -
YOU MEAN THE MAC WILL TELL YOU BEFORE YOU START COPYING THAT THERE IS NOT ENOUGH ROOM ON A DISK?!?!
Sorry to “shout”. I have not been on my Mac enough to know this, or else I just didn’t notice it. Many a time on my PC I would be copying something to a floppy or Zip disk, and have it tell me (almost near the end) that it was out of room. Even when I checked to make sure there would be enough room. Major headache, but I just thought “That’s the way it is”. How would I know that there was any other way? All I’ve known is PCs up until now.
And now I learn that it doesn’t have to be that way?!? That Macs don’t have that annoying trait? And the standard line in defending this shitty, inexcusable Windows thing is:
No, it doesn’t frickin’ work a lot of the time! I do know how to check “properties” and see how much space the thing I want to copy is going to (supposedly) take up, and I do know how to look and see how much open space is on a floppy or Zip disk. And yet still it’ll be wrong. On all the PCs I’ve ever used. (I’ve used several.) I hate that. And now I learn that the Mac doesn’t have that problem? And I’m being told that basically it’s my problem, that I’m too “lazy”? Typical Windows-speak. (She says as she types this on her Windows 98 PC…)
Another example of wasting my time with this crappy way of Doing it the Windows Way. Which is why I think I am liking the Mac more and more.
When you close a window of a program - hell, when you close all the windows of a program, the program is still “open”, waiting in a little dropdown “list” (on the top righthand corner of the screen) to be opened quickly at any time. (Sorry for not using the proper terms to describe all of this, but I’m a Mac newbie.) Once you close a program in Windows, it’s closed.
As far as the copying to a disk - no matter what cockamamie special way you show us to find out what the size will be on a bunch of files, the fact is that you have to take the time to do that. And even if you do, it often isn’t enough. Even when I am told that I have enough space to copy whatever files onto a disk, sometimes Windows lies about it. Like I mentioned in my previous post. What a load of BS.
And the bottom line, it takes time, my precious time, to jump through this annoying Windows hoop, in order to find out something that the Mac does automatically. Who doesn’t want to save time? Since when is that a bad thing?
Argg!!! This is getting annoying. I’m only gonna say one more thing, just a quick response to those complaining about the way windows programs close and Mac programs don’t.
I realize that the Mac people don’t like the fact that when you click the little X in the corner of a windows program, the program closes. Well, let me tell you, I think it is a LOT more annoying that when you click the little box in right corner of a Mac program, and it just closes the window but not the program. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve clicked that little box on whatever program I was using, watched the window close, then got up and walked away to do something else. I come back an hour later, and click on the app to start it again…but nothing happens? I sit there scratching my head going “WTF?” and then remember to check the program list in the top right to see if it’s already running. This drives me insane. When you close the window, the program SHOULD shut down.
Now, for the complaints about windows, it is possible to have multiple instances of the same program running. This means that you can have 12 browser windows or whatever open (some programs don’t allow it, but they’re the ones you wouldn’t want to anyway – Word, Excel, whatever). Furthermore, in the browser (with IE 5, anyway – say what you like about microsoft, IE 5 is much much much much better than Netscape 4 on a PC) if you right click on any link, you have the option to open it in a new window. Furthermore, there’s no need to constantly close a window every time you’re done with the current site. You can just go to the next site directly within the current window or open a new window.
My point, once again, is that it’s all a matter of what you’re used to. We’re all complaining about usability features and functions, but we each cling to what we know. (Personally, I’ve never had a problem fitting files onto a disk. A floppy holds 1.44 MB – and that’s that. If you’re copying a lot of stuff, try using Winzip – it automatically spans archives across disks, no need to worry about fitting them.)
Yeah, good one. Do I need all of these .fo_, .pp_, .nls, .pc_, .pt, .inf, .sys, .PNF, .etc files??? On my Mac, I know what 99% of my files are there for.
neutron star writes:
This gives you the same answer as the Properties dialog, which (for whatever reason) is not always accurate.
Ahhh… but Netscape is much more than a browser. I’m complaining that Windows closed the application when I closed the window - it assumes that just because I’m done with this window, I’m done with the application. Here’s another example. I use Canvas, which is a powerful drawing and illustration package. Canvas preloads a lot of stuff into memory, so it takes a bit of time to start up. Let’s say I’ve just finished working on one Canvas document and want to start working on another. Due to this issue with Windows, I have to remember to open the new document before I close the old one or I’ll have to wait for the Canvas startup again. Is that more clear?
BTW, there are Macintosh programs that behave like this, but the only ones I’ve seen are where it doesn’t make sense to leave the application open after the only window is closed… i.e. it’s intuitive!
Even better than that… The Mac will tell you how much you’re short so you can easily decide which file you’re not going to copy or which file you’re going to remove from your destination disk to make room.