Macintosh with LFS

[OutlaW666]

hi gang ,
i am trying to play LFS in my computer , the question is that it runs on Mac Osx .
Can i play ?

[ORION]

I guess no...

Macs even cant use most normal windows files, it really sucks.
We have macs in our uni and they are incredibly slow... G4's and they only make 33Mflops/s - as much as a P3 333MHz.

Maybe there is some kind of windows emulator, but trust me it will be ultra slow if it works at all.

[Lautsprecher[NOR]]

Nope, windows only

[ferret]

There are no current plans by the devs to port LFS to MacOSX. That's the simple answer :shy:

However might I suggest a small upgrade to your current hardware config. - Buy a PC !! Sorry, had to get that one in :razz:

[mantis9]

Ive seen people running other PC games on a Mac with virtual PC (http://www.apple.com/macosx/applications/virtualpc/),
not LFS though, might be too cpu intensive, dunno. Im sure it can be done, but you might need a damn fast mac.

[the_angry_angel]

You might also want to look into a MacOSX binary of QEmu (http://free.oszoo.org/download.html) available from OSZoo (Virtual PC-style software). I dont know how well it would cope with LFS, but it could be worth looking into.

[ajp71]

Macs are great for most things, just not playing games. My iBook is still faster and smoother for genral use than my 2.8 ghz P4, which only runs ATi, Philips sound card software and McAfee in the background.

Anyone no a screensaver with the smooth transitions and zooming that the Mac screensavers have, I'd really like this, at the moment my screensaver is of '60s Grand Prix cars, which I got off a GPL site somewhere, the images are great but the transitions are a bit powerpointy to say the least ;)

[ORION]

I have only had big trouble with those macs at my uni, simply because they are incredibly slow... And I dont think the G5 is about 10 times faster than the G4.
All the time the whole system wrecked, no error, nothing - the most unstable system I have ever seen, even lockups when you just select an icon or copy a file.

No need to talk about the Mac IE - its not more than pure bs :)

[WorldFamous]

Macs are great for most things, just not playing games.


That's not actually true, the problem comes from poor support by developers rather than any technical limitations. One of the main problems is DirectX, if everyone had gone down the OpenGL route years ago there wouldn't be such a giant divide between PCs and Macs game wise.

Just look how good the Unreal games play on a Mac, proof that it's a viable games machine just criminally under supported.

[Vendetta]

Hey, hey, OutlaW666 (http://www.lfsforum.net/member.php?u=81613), try to right click.

[the_angry_angel]

if everyone had gone down the OpenGL route years ago there wouldn't be such a giant divide between PCs and Macs game wise.Unfortunately Windows will NOT be natively supporting OpenGL 2.0 or anything beyond 1.1, last I read at any rate. Microsoft attempting to extend its monopoly? Plus not many games seem to be writing with the intention of swapping out the graphics engine (hmm, abstraction rocks, but only if its going to be used properly) :shrug:

[WorldFamous]

Unfortunately Windows will NOT be natively supporting OpenGL 2.0 or anything beyond 1.1, last I read at any rate. Microsoft attempting to extend its monopoly? Plus not many games seem to be writing with the intention of swapping out the graphics engine (hmm, abstraction rocks, but only if its going to be used properly) :shrug:

That's partially what I was referring to. Future versions of Windows/DirectX will only support a very basic version of OpenGL, basically pegging back the performance to such a state that using DirectX is the only sensible option for games.

With Apple moving to x86 in the near future their prices should be coming down, with more users the chances of games becomes higher. Sadly, if devs have to recode everything because of Microsoft then gaming on a Mac is still going to be a rare thing. Shrewd business I suppose.

[ajp71]

The Mac network at my school is very fast and stable, only very occasionally down. The windows networks at my school before were awful, very slow and unreliable. A badly managed and over stretched network is going to be bad whatever OS it uses.

As for Mac IE. it's bollocks, just like the windows version, wtf do you want to use IE, you can get Mozzilla Firefox and Camino for Mac, but the standard Safari browser is good enough for me, so simple does just what it has to and nothing more, but it does it so much better and quicker than all the other browsers I've used (IE, Opera, Firefox, Netscape, that 'revolutionary' 3D browser).

And right click is just ctrl + click, you can still get a right click and scroller if you use a windows mouse. I have no idea why the desktop macs should have a single mouse button, but in a laptop a single button just Macs the whole thing easier to use.

[ORION]

We are not allowed to install any software, thats the problem :/
But we will try to talk to the technical head staff there, or maybe the headmaster, so we can at least get FF installed and this damn port 21 unblocked ;)

Well, about the MAC IE - it is a completely different browser than the Windows IE, and compared to the mac one, the win one is almost good... LOL :D

[Ziploc]

If anything I would LOVE to have the skinner in mac format. All the good graphics come from OSX anyway :x

[dUmAsS]

Unfortunately Windows will NOT be natively supporting OpenGL 2.0 or anything beyond 1.1, last I read at any rate. Microsoft attempting to extend its monopoly?
windows xp doesnt even support opengl 2.0, the DRIVERS add support for opengl 2.0 ;)


and most games dont abstract the engine because that needs to be in the design from the get go. how many studios do you see re writing the entire game from ground up for each release?

[the_angry_angel]

windows xp doesnt even support opengl 2.0, the DRIVERS add support for opengl 2.0 ;)A lot of users I've come across use the default drivers (i.e. Microsoft's), as they do what they require. If drivers are so important, then why does the core of Windows run DirectX? Its a sutble move in my opinion. Perhaps I'm being paranoid.

and most games dont abstract the engine because that needs to be in the design from the get go.You've missed my point, and the concept of abstraction. You make a wrapper to abstract the finer points of the underlying engine, so that if any of the following occurs, you can do it very very very quickly;

You want to change to a newer version of the API, you can easily, without having to edit the underlying core of the game (only the graphics object).
You want to swap from DirectX to OpenGL, you can; without touching the rest of the game.Its much easier to change the class CGraphicsCore than it is to change every single call of DrawPrimitive, in the entire program. Once you've changed the graphics object, you've changed the whole program - in one go.

how many studios do you see re writing the entire game from ground up for each release?Who said anything about rewriting it each time. Once you've written a wrapper / object to abstract the graphics, unless you're adding things to it, you can reuse it as many times as you like, in as many different projects as you like. You would'nt rewrite the STL C++ classes everytime you wanted to write cout << "Hello World\r\n";

Not that I'm a great programmer, nor have I written anything to the level of sophistication of LFS, but that would be how I would do it, and I suspect a lot of professionals.

[dUmAsS]

if you can catch anyone running any kind of 3d game on the microsoft 3d drivers then i will eat my keyboard.

the only version of windows where the microsoft drivers seem to work the slightest is vista (and by the slightest i mean anything more then 640*480*8. and moving/resizing a window is a no no)

youve missed what i ment, most current released games have engines that date back many years and have been added to over time. to add abstraction to the 3d engine will most likely require a lot of recoding and i doubt many studios will do that. its the initial re-writing of the engine that will stop it in it's tracks.

and then of course you have to maintain 2 copies of the graphics engine.

[huxorator]

I guess emulating Windows will be the key in the future. Cedega/Wine do that job fine for Linux, and MacOSx is a kind of linux, so probably there will be a way some day.

[Vain]

Wine doesn't emulate anything.

Vain

[huxorator]

:scratchch