“Good news from Ryan C. Gordon, the programmer who brought Unreal Tournament 2004 to the Macintosh. Gordon has reported success getting the game to run on an Intel-based Mac at last week’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC),’ Peter Cohen reports for MacCentral.
“Gordon reports his efforts in a recent update to his .plan file — not only regarding Unreal Tournament 2004, but for other games and game software he works on,” Cohen reports.
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
MAXON announces Cinema4D Universal Binary for Apple ‘Macintel’ and PowerPC Macs – June 08, 2005
from many other similar reports it is not that far fetched to say that Mac sw titles will run on Mac + Intel well before customer will be able to buy one.
Great, now all we need is hardware that can keep up with the demanding games out there…
Damn, that was quick!
yes that was very quick….hopefully this will be the avg. time for all mac games.
Too bad I suck.
In at MOST 1-2 months, Apple needs to publicize how much software has already been ported to universal binaries, and how many more software companies have committed to getting it done. They need to get the news out quickly to avoid an Osborne effect on current PPC Mac sales. I’m the type of person that they need to target. I was thinking of approving a few Mac purchases for our company but I put that on hold for at least one or two months to get a sense of how well PPC Mac owners will be served in 4+ years (our goal is for new computers to last 4 years). Don’t get me wrong, I love my PB17, but I have to be able to justify my business decisions to others, and serious progress on universal binaries would permit me to do that!
P.S. Does anyone think it’s worth it to buy PowerBooks for our execs now, or should we just get iBooks to tide us over for a couple of years until the MacIntel PowerBooks (“B”/second version)? Advice is welcome.
RT: iBooks look high school, plastic purse…Powerbooks look executive.
Wow, there is some really good stuff in his plan files:
http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus
I thought this especially was pretty interesting:
“Rosetta isn’t as bad as I anticipated. In fact, it’s pretty darned good. For everything but games, you probably wouldn’t even know you were running it. I’d even go as far to say that if you have a game that isn’t absolutely dependent on framerate, you probably wouldn’t even know you were running a PowerPC app. There are some bits in it that are still buggy, but in terms of raw performance, even fairly CPU-intensive things performed better than I expected. Granted, we’re using 3.6GHz, Hyperthreaded Pentium 4s, if they ship a Mac Mini with a 400MHz Celeron or something like that, then I might be singing a different tune, but there’s more potential to Rosetta across the board than my original flinch reaction granted.”
Other than that it seems that he talks mostly about the ins and outs of porting various games. He seems to have made a lot of progress considering that it has been barely a week.
RT,
My advice is buy now if you need them. They will not be obsolete in 4 years, they’ll be slower but 4 year old computers are.
There are too many PPC based users out there for Apple to stop supporting them in just 4 years time. Maybe in about 10-15 years they’ll stop supporting PPC but by that time you’ll have bought an Intel based Mac, WON’T YOU!
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”gulp” style=”border:0;” />
jamie kelly is right!
Buy whatever you need now RT. IT is a moving target so don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today. Just make sure you have a future strategy in place that outlines where you want to be in 2 to 5 years. Then just update the “plan” every year so that you are ready whenever you want to upgrade.
As for PPC Macs, they are very reliable and are currently available. I see no reason not to purchase them. Sure, Intel Macs will be available next year, but so what. If I learned anything in college about engineering, it is that you should treat all systems as black boxes. Black boxes contain more black boxes, so just dig as far as you need depending on what you plan to do. For the average user, there is no difference between PPC and Intel. They’re just glorified calculators.
I can only the huge grins on the faces of developers when they realize they’ve ported their apps with one-button click and a recompile.
(And where’s “lisa” with her obligatory “Waaahh, Intel sucks, Mac hardware is dead, Steve betrayed me!” post? She must be slipping.)
Way to go Ryan! Keep up the good work buddy!
All this talk about waiting to buy until OSXi is released puzzles me.
If software developers are dragging their feet when the move to Intel happens, PPC will still be the best bet for software compatibility. Basically, if you still want to run the software you’re running today, then the answer if obvious…buy your next Mac whenever you want. Waiting until the Intel hardware is released may actually be counterproductive if the software you’re depending on still only works with PPC architecture.
So stop fretting about the hardware, and start fretting about the software being ported before you need it to be.