In late-night sessions this week, Apple developers have been getting their first look at how much work they have ahead to convert their programs to run on Intel-based Macs. Also game developers react to Intel switch. Update: More developer opinions here.
Developers get taste of Intel-based Macs
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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38 Comments
2005-06-12 4:38 am
2005-06-12 8:30 am
2005-06-12 10:21 pm
2005-06-13 1:33 am
So now Macs are going to go through the same as Linux, native vs emulation.
From his random thoughts:
"That being said, PowerPC is much saner to emulate than x86 is, so a comparison between Rosetta and VirtualPC wouldn’t be fair."
Wait a minute…. three sentences before this you called BS on Rosetta. I highly respect the developers at Epic, but man…. is this dude serious?
So called “game developers” have very moronic arguments like:
EPIC
“Apple’s been a good contributor to GCC, and it’ll be nice to have their engineers optimizing the compiler’s x86 output…good benefit to Linux, if nothing else.”
It is pretty obvious that Apple is gonna use icc, not gcc.
“As usual, Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned. Apple just spent five years saying “stop using CodeWarrior” and even without a clear support path or G5 support, people still wouldn’t stop using it.”
OK, now if MS says “stop using GCC and use VC++”, we’ve been warned.
ASPYR MEDIA
“Tech Support is one big issue that crops up with emulators as well. If you are playing Sims 2 under some wine-like emulator on OS X Intel, will EA answer you call/email if you have problems? Or will they say its not a supported config?”
This is exactly what happened with The Sims and WINE. You’re an ignorant fool, Sir.
“Not that I won’t have a job or that Mac games will disappear, but nervous that there are too many unknowns to really know where this transition will take us.”
OK, this is the real point. Many of you are just afraid of competence, due to the fact with PPC it was possible to a small company to release crappy games and sell them well.
PANGEA
“Once Windows runs natively on a Mac there won’t be any reason for publishers to make Mac-specific versions of their warez anymore. It’s going to totally kill the Mac game porting industry and probably have serious implications on original content developers like me.”
More BS. If your game sucks, it sucks period. Doesn’t blame Apple for that.
ANONYMOUS PORTER
“This is the death of the platform. Unless Apple integrates DirectX, the port time would only decrease by roughly 33%. We really only spend about a 1/3 of our times AT MOST on Endian issues (ie, byte-swapping). The rest of the time is spent converting DX and Windows OS calls to OpenGL and Mac OS.”
Crap, if you use things like SDL (free) or RenderWare (commercial), this is not a problem at all.
The big concern seems to be the idea that, through dual-booting or running an emulator, people will be able to run Windows games on their Mac and the demand for a Mac native port will decrease.
While this is somewhat true, I think the demand will still be there. The fact is, to run a Windows game, you still need to have copy of Windows. One of the reasons people use Macs is to get away from the hassle that is Windows. The viruses, the spyware, the problems, etc. Mac OS X may not be vulnerable, but your dual boot partition, or your Virtual PC virtual drive will be. Possibly even more so; if you only use Windows to play games you may be less likely to keep up on patches and virus scanning.
As a Mac user myself, I can say that dual booting is not an option I’ll consider. As it is, I only reboot my Mac for system upgrades. Other than that, it runs 24/7 with my current programming project on screen. I might consider VirtualPC, but even then, I’ve not heard of many people playing games within VMWare on x86 Linux, and that doesn’t seem much different than VirtualPC on Mac/Intel. I’ve heard of a few games that run under WINE, but that seems to be a very short list.
Even with these options, they will still be my last resort. I’ll still be looking for “Mac version” on the packaging.
your comment is reviewed before it is posted
sorry this is not related to the topic directly. But now you should warn people whenever you see Apple Intel MS.
“And though Apple won’t start selling Intel-based Macs to customers until sometime next year, the Mac maker is leasing test machines to developers for $999 starting this month.”
LEASING!!!
For such a “hell freezing” event you’d expect more concrete details.
Any exact details on what the $999 “Developer Transition Kit” includes? (Processor, Hz, memory, HD, software, etc)?
Do you have to have an ADC Select or Premier membership which costs $500 and $3500 respectively in order to buy the $999 DTK?
Next week’s rumor… Microsoft buys AMD!
Its kind of funny to read about the shock and fear of the poor mac game devs…windows games have more features, more content, more titles…and they look damn good and run damn fast…if mac game devs are scared of the switch then they are quite incompetent in dealing with the amount of power now that has been unleased with a Mac running on an x86 platform.
Yep, game developers are now thinking, if you dual boot to run windows on your system, then I am not going to bother porting games to the other OS.
Here are some good quotes from that second article mentioned above:
“Once Windows runs natively on a Mac there won’t be any reason for publishers to make Mac-specific versions of their warez anymore. It’s going to totally kill the Mac game porting industry and probably have serious implications on original content developers like me.”
“If you can run Windows games on a Mac, will it kill Mac gaming and the need for ports? Yes ….This may result in developers not wishing to spend the money to port games to the Mac, certainly.”
“If so, it’s hard for me to see that [game] porting companies will have much to offer once the inevitable Win32 virtual machines get released.”
“Running windows on a Mac pretty much eliminates the need for Mac ports of PC software.”
“it all depends on WINE and the ability to run PC games on the Mac. it could cut the heart out of the Mac game business.”
Soooo, basically, in the future MacOS will enjoy the same level of (low) Gaming support that Linux has today and for the same exact reasons.
Game Developers will say “Why port games to (Linux/MacOS) when they can run them in Windows on the same system by dual booting”.
*sigh*….
This hurts Linux too btw. Much of the games that run native on Linux only exist in the first place because companies made their games compatible enough to work on Mac-PowerPC. Once the need to target ANY other platform other than X86 is gone, then we will see zero games for any other OS besides Windows.
No, I don’t think so. People who buy macs buy them because they prefer the look and feel of mac applications and the mac os. We don’t buy macs to run windoze software.
Whether developers port their software to macs is largely up to the mac user base. If you want mac ports, say so, and just say NO to running windows software on your mac. And when the ports appear, buy them.
It’s all about economics. If there is money to be made from the ports, they’ll come. It surely WON’T come however if mac users just buy windows softare and dual boot.
“It is pretty obvious that Apple is gonna use icc, not gcc.”
AFAIK ICC doesn’t support Objective-C
“This is exactly what happened with The Sims and WINE. You’re an ignorant fool, Sir.”
So, as he said, it is an issue. reading++
“Crap, if you use things like SDL (free) or RenderWare (commercial), this is not a problem at all.”
So SDL and RenderWare provide a DirectX compatible API?
The real affect on Mac gaming is when WINE and Cedega become available for OS X. Once Macs have the same ability to natively execute x86 at full speed (because they ARE x86) such ports are trivial, and most Windows games will run at or very near full speed and functionality without duel-booting, emulation, or even a copy of Windows!
Does this mean the end of a seperate dedicated Mac gaming industry? In the end, I think so, but that doesn’t mean these companies will tank, just that they will need to transition into the larger overall gaming market and compete there.
The real question is: could a product like Crossover Office make even the need for a native MS Office not completely necessary? The move to x86 could essentially free Apple from worrying about Microsoft ending Mac support for Office.
This will not mean the end of Office on OS X. First, Microsoft makes money on Office for the Mac. They don’t sell as many copies as Office for Windows, but there’s also less piracy. The Mac Business Unit generates profits for the company. Second, cutting Office for the Mac would be inviting the FTC and the Justice Department to bring a fresh round of anti-trust charges against Microsoft.
>cutting Office for the Mac would be inviting the FTC and the
>Justice Department to bring a fresh round of anti-trust
>charges against Microsoft.
What are you smoking?
There is LOTS of software that only runs on Windows, on what grounds would this charge be made? And why is MS not supporting MacOS different than not supporting Linux or Solaris, or AIX, or for that matter BeOS??????
Quick Prediction.
MacOS will have no native games, no native MS Office, no native Quicken, no native IE etc.. developers will tell people to run Windows on their systems or do without.
I am afraid that MacOS is now headed for the same status as Linux.
News Flash for Mac Fans: Previously, you were insulated from reality, but now that your in the same back yard, your gonna have to directly compete with the Big Dog.
Ohh…how I miss the old days of many small innovative software houses producting products for lots of different operating systems on many platforms. Computing was much more fun and exciting when we had apples, commodores, amigas, ibm’s, atari’s, and bbc’s etc. all as viable computing platforms used by a portion of the market.
I just don’t see why it cant be “profitable” to support more than one computer platform. There is room for more than one Console platform, why not computing?
The real problem in todays computing world and why we have had such slow innovation and almost stagnation in computing is that its turned into too many big businesses.
Big businesses are great at running the status-quo but they just don’t come up with new things.
I’m afraid its going to be a LONG TIME before we see another couple of guys start something in their garage like Woz and Steve did….those days are dead, now the “innovation” occurs in the board room, and we get board room (aka status-quo) ideas and not ideas from the garage.
Welcome to the land of the red-headed-step-child Mac fans, we Linux, BeOS, and BSD’ers greet you. Maybe if we work together, like develop a common framework for software publishers to use to make software for ALL of the alternative OS’s at once we can get something done to compete with Windows.
Who care really except maybe for some TSR game that play better on a PC, if you wanna play buy a console, and the next gen will have games that PC won’t match any time soon.
/kml
> MacOS will have no native games, no native MS Office, no
> native Quicken, no native IE etc.. developers will tell
> people to run Windows on their systems or do without.
1. why would anyone need a native IE – have you ever used the current version of IE on a mac (was it 5.2?) – its a joke and you got a much better browser anyway (safari) or one download away (firefox/camino).
2. ‘run windows on their systems’ – the intel based macs will not be standard wintel pcs you can get from dell etc. those will be custom machines with non-standard chipset / bios / … just the proc is from intel – so no chance you can run windows on them
“AFAIK ICC doesn’t support Objective-C”
Intel website: “Intel plans to provide industry leading development tools support for Apple later this year, including the Intel C/C++ Compiler for Apple, Intel Fortran Compiler for Apple, Intel Math Kernel Libraries for Apple and Intel Integrated Performance Primitives for Apple.”
I bet you it’ll include Objective-C support.
“So, as he said, it is an issue. reading++”
No, it isn’t. A company can support it (like EA with The Sims) or not. What kind of ‘issue’ is that? This is like saying ‘Windows has an issue because you can use it under bochs or qemu, and who’s gonna to support that??’. Ridiculous.
“So SDL and RenderWare provide a DirectX compatible API?”
Your use of ‘compatible API’ is totally misleading (i.e., RenderWare uses Direct3D and OGL on Win32, so it’s ‘compatible’). You’re confusing it with an API not produced by MS but can compile code linked to that library. I never said that, because RenderWare and SDL are aimed at portability, not replacing an specific API. Of course, if you don’t use them from scratch, you have to work (but you have to do some work to port a program anyway).
Ok, there are some people that are saying why port to mac when the apps can run on windows?
This is dumb. Why use Linux and Solaris then? Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux are booming in the x86 world and There is no reason why mac shouldnt retain its wonderfulnes. i mean, you may be able to run linux or windows on a mac but why would you when you have a kickass operating system (mac os x)
Why make software for freebsd, linux, mac? etc..?? apparently you should ONLY make software for windows. what a dumb idea.
When Be, Inc. started giving away BeOS it grew big time. c|Net has a download section dedicated to it and it appeared on television many many times.
Now–Comparing Mac to Windows is not that intelligent. Although I think Mac OS X takes up more resources than windows does right now, I think that’s all going to change with longhorn arrives in town! Hopefully if there is a lot of people installing windows on macs then it would let them sell their OS for other x86 systems.
OFcourse, the main selling point of getting a mac IS OS X. If you dont want MAC OS X then don’t get a mac.. it’s always been that way and i dont see it changing…
people are dumb sometimes
IF…you actually read what people @ apple say, they said you can install windows on the intel macs.
I think OSNews posted an article that says it on there.. now do you read stuff before you post?
— “This will not mean the end of Office on OS X.”
Of course not, I never said that. I only suggested that it will mitigate the consequences if Microsoft WERE to end OS X support. I agree thats pretty unlikly.
I also agree that this is NOT the end of native Mac software. Thats crazy, as its now EASIER to provide it! Porting applications is orders of magnitude easier then porting modern games. The Mac games industry is in for major change because they are a seperate and distinct industry in their own little world, due to the fact that PC game companies can afford the massive efforts to participate directly, where as most other major Mac software comes from the same companies that produce Windows and *nix software. This will eventually make their job even easier.
Er, that was supposed to be “…due to the fact that PC game companies can’t afford the massive efforts to participate directly…”
Sorry bout that.
Apparently many people have no clue about software developement and should go back to higher education. You can look into the open source world where code is ported all over the place all the time. Most all of the major source code (dev and userland stuff) was ported to amd64 last year. Yes it’s easy to recompile and debug. Seriously people…
According to this –
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/archives/jun05/060805.html#S19340
– the transition kit is probably just a standard x86 board that will run Windows with no problems. Has anyone else had a good look at the transition hardware (or seen any comments elsewhere on the web) and would like to comment on whether it is, or is not, a bog standard x86 PC ?
The Mac games industry is in for major change because they are a seperate and distinct industry in their own little world, due to the fact that PC game companies can afford the massive efforts to participate directly, where as most other major Mac software comes from the same companies that produce Windows and *nix software. This will eventually make their job even easier.
Who’s to say that games companies won’t bring Mac development inhouse and bring more games to the platform? there will only be one underlying CPU, meaning, optimisations can be shared between the MacOS X and Windows versions; the companies are already familar with the x86 architecture, its pitfalls and benefits – it’ll simply be a matter of porting and using many of the parts they use on the x86 Windows version.
(1) Despite the announcement at WWDC, there’s still a year before the first 80×86 Macintosh is sold to a non-ADC member, two years before the last PowerPC Macintosh is cleared from inventory, and using my experience with the 68000 to PowerPC transition, another two years on top before PowerPC Macintosh customers start finding applications that they can’t run.
The announcement will certainly factor into future product plans, but for now it’s business as usual. Game Developers have to think years in advance, and projects in train for sale to PowerPC Macintosh customers aren’t going to all suddenly vanish. Even Application Developers, who don’t have to think as far ahead, are unlikely to suddenly cancel their designs on PowerPC Macintosh because of this announcement.
(2) Apple’s urging developers to migrate from CodeWarrior since 2001, in light of this announcement, makes sense. But let us not forget that Apple would prefer all their customers to develop in Cocoa, which is a goal they pursue despite knowing full well that it’s not going to happen (all my tools are developed in RealBASIC, which in turn is built using Carbon on Macintosh for MacOS 9 compatibility, and has ties to CodeWarrior from what I know of its’ history). Yes, Apple does want developers to lock in to their tools, but the migration to 80×86 is hardly a serious vehicle for doing this.
(3) The lack of an integrated series of libraries for Game Developers is telling on non-Windows platforms. Despite its’ flaws, Direct3D, DirectAudio, DirectInput, and DirectPlay are a more or less coherent set of libraries for game developers to work with, which they can code to knowing that DirectX is installed as part of Windows, and if a newer version is required it’s only an installer away.
Under Mac OS X, you have OpenGL, OpenAL, HID Manager, OpenPlay and/or Bonjour and/or straight TCP/IP. The same functionality is there, but the lack of integration shows and hurts in real-world situations, not just at the naming level. There are also backwards-compatibility, cross platform and adoption issues with these technologies (some are specific to Mac OS X, others are open source but not widespread), which competitors to Microsoft can’t afford.
Fortunately, this hasn’t prevented a small but steady stream of ports since Mac OS X came along. Its’ mainly prevented the stream from getting any bigger than ‘small’. Perhaps Apple will do something about this.
However, given that emulators (VirtualPC), simulators (WINE) and virtualisation engines have yet to solve many problems at the desktop level, the best way for Game Developers to reach a Macintosh audience is still going to be a port. It wouldn’t surprise me if the new generation of ports shifts straight from being a PowerPC executable to an 80×86 executable, with no “Universal Binaries” to be seen… but those ports will still happen.
(4) Han Solo, the charges would be on the basis that Microsoft Office is a ‘lynchpin’ suite of applications that dominates its’ market. Were it only available on Windows, it would mean that you would have to run Windows in order to run Office and thus correctly read and write Office file formats (no competitor is able to read and write Office file formats with 100% accuracy where Microsoft has not exposed the format). In short, Microsoft would be leveraging the dominance of Office to increase the dominance of Windows.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050609.html
I appologize if this has been mentioned because I have not read all the posts, but… How much do you want to bet Cadega will be ported to mac, in which case, most popular DirectX windows games can and will run on a mac at full native speeds (without windows installed).
and yes… this may very well kill Mac games….. In addition to that, I wouldn’t be at all supprised if Cadega would make some kind of deal with apple to include it’s modified Wine DirectX compatability layer as an upgrade to the standard Mac software package. (maybe even a 3 month free trial or something) (Apple may even work with them in development)
— “Who’s to say that games companies won’t bring Mac development inhouse and bring more games to the platform?”
The big hangup for porting games to Mac was never really the architecture, although that didn’t help, its the lack of DirectX. Any games made in DirectX, which is most, require massive work to port over to OpenGL for use on Macs. That doesn’t change with the switch to x86. What DOES change is that it becomes possible to port Cedega, which would then result in the ability to run (most) Windows games directly without needing to wait for a native port at all.
— “I appologize if this has been mentioned because I have not read all the posts…”
…which are so few in number it would have taken all of 15 seconds to scan over and see that yes, that WAS mentioned and discussed? Honestly, is it to much to ask for a tiny bit of effort to show some consideration to your fellow posters?
*sigh*
Excellent point. Apple might want to restrict what OS runs on their intel Macs, after all.
Why would someone go buy a Apple PC when they know that current product line will be phased out starting in 2006?
With the price of PowerMac, I would be very mad to drop 4000$ on this PC to find out that they are replacing it real soon with something completely diffrent…. (Intel CPU!).
I guess this will hurt Apple sale… I hope they can cope with it…
I’m very interested to see if Microsoft is going to make Virtual PC for Intel Macs. It would be very cool to be able to run alot of the other x86 OS’s in a window on OSX at near native speed.
I’m very interested to see if Microsoft is going to make Virtual PC for Intel Macs. It would be very cool to be able to run alot of the other x86 OS’s in a window on OSX at near native speed.
I can’t see why Microsoft wouldn’t want to sell copies of Windows to Mac users. More money. Really, through selling Virtual PC, they get to charge for two software titles in one shot – not too shabby.
Virtual PC still has some convenient features over simply dual-booting between the two OSes. The one is that you can copy/paste between the two, you don’t have to drop everything and reboot just to use a Windows app, and of course, you don’t need to buy more hardware (though that point will be moot soon). For general testing and applications it’s quite useable.
SteveH (IP: —.hsd1.fl.comcast.net) – Posted on 2005-06-11 05:46:34