🚀 go-pugleaf

jonh@icat.com (Jon Hirota) wrote:



>It's interesting to note that one developer (Papyrus) mentioned that
>they're getting a roughly the same performance out of DirectDraw as from
>WinG. It's not quite what it's hyped up to be just like many things
>originated from Microsoft. Besides as far as I could tell current Mac
>could do what DirectDraw is designed to do. 

Other developers have stated things _quite_ differently. And no, it's
not the same as the Mac- WinG is closer than that.  A representative
from Lion (who did the Mac Doom port) was recently on the Mac
games.action conference, and explained the differences.


>those 3D accelerators at least as well as PCs. I know that at least Matrox
>already has 3D cards for Macs.

The Nvidia?  Yamaha?  They've been announced for PC's.  Not for the
Mac.  You have to have the drivers, you have to have the market to
make it feasible.  Not to say they won't come out on the Macs- they
might.  Then again, they might not.  Just because it's PCI doesn't
mean you can plug it in and away you go- you still need Mac drivers.


>It's about time PCs get multi-channel sound which Macs enjoyed for quite a
>while with Sound Manager 3.x.

You have got to be kidding me.  PC's had had multi-channel sound in
games for years under DOS.  And 32-channel, 16-bit wavetable without
sucking CPU time.  Don't even compare the average PC wavetable card to
the Macs sound quality.

> As for digital joysticks, Mac had the
>interface for it for a long time in the form of ADB.

No, they haven't.  The DirectInput API allows digitial joysticks which
the system doesn't recognize to be supported in any game that uses the
API- have a joystick with 20 buttons and program each game function
into it.  It is NOT the same as keyboard emulation, which the Gravis
Gamepad on the Mac does.  It doesn't have the "buffer overload"
problems of keybaord emualtion, for one.

> For 3D, QuikDraw 3D
>should do the job, and it will be available for Windows, too. I don't see
>why some game developers will not take advantage of this and develop 3D
>games for both.

Quickdraw 3D is over bloated and too slow for real-time games.  It's
overkill.