Bring Back The Mac Version

Wily Rites

Wily Rites
I'd forgotten how well baulders gate runs on this set up, all graphics settings to maximum, this is so frustrating! Alas, Baulders Gate is not 3D enough for my 3D hankerings, just does not scratch the same itch as Elite. I'd love to try the Microsoft flight sim, the new one, now that it has some missions and things to do in it, it could be getting closer to elite. X-plane is lacking only that, would be amazing if it had missions, but it runs natively here so, well that's a big plus.

... Back to coding, probably is for the best! :D
 
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Wily Rites

Wily Rites
Well, it's running again today, seems that it is something coming from outside, from the client connection that is causing the system to shut down. As sometimes its fine but other times it does it a lot.

If a mac shuts down like this, it's a kernel trap and indicates a fairly severe security issue in the code that was running when it shuts down; Love how secure the mac is in this way, highly suspicious of the stack that I'm having to run this on.
 

Razzerman

R
Wily Rites said:
running odyssey with wineskins on an M1 ultra
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M1 Ultra - nice. There is hope with the new M4 mac mini coming soon(TM); I've seen this youtube man running quite a few pc games on the apple silicone macs. With new M4 chips imminent, it'll be interesting to see how viable pc gaming on a Mac becomes. Meanwhile, I'm plodding along on my (admittedly upgraded) 2009 mac pro, bootcamping to play E D, playing at 1440 on medium settings.
 

Wily Rites

Wily Rites
Razzerman said:
M1 Ultra - nice. There is hope with the new M4 mac mini coming soon(TM); I've seen this youtube man running quite a few pc games on the apple silicone macs. With new M4 chips imminent, it'll be interesting to see how viable pc gaming on a Mac becomes. Meanwhile, I'm plodding along on my (admittedly upgraded) 2009 mac pro, bootcamping to play E D, playing at 1440 on medium settings.
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Oh it is very viable on this machine, works really well when there is no issue, and at an amazingly low power draw; I believe this chip to be the inspiration for the ultra line of chips that intel are now working on or releasing, ground breaking stuff really, a work of art at the same time as amazing tech.

I've found a work around for this wine bug, seems to be an issue with the Vulcan to metal translation, some misuse of the shader cache, or some other cache by one of the layers in this software stack. If I simply run x-plane before loading elite, then it runs without issue. There must be a simple out of bounds violation at a very low level that is triggering the Mac's highly safety conscious kernel panic when it uses the cached GPU data, loading another game is causing this to invalidated.

Yay; I'm back in the game!!!

Addendum:

In investigating the in's and out's here I was surprised to learn that the Mac game porting toolkit which runs games on Macs for developers to get an idea of how their game will run on the hardware if they choose to port to it, is basically a wrapper around wine that gives the developer system stats for the game whilst running. You can then get an even better performance if you do develop for native and remove the translation layer, my point being that it is amazing that wine is being used in this way.
 
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Wily Rites

Wily Rites
Razzerman said:
M1 Ultra - nice. There is hope with the new M4 mac mini coming soon(TM); I've seen this youtube man running quite a few pc games on the apple silicone macs. With new M4 chips imminent, it'll be interesting to see how viable pc gaming on a Mac becomes. Meanwhile, I'm plodding along on my (admittedly upgraded) 2009 mac pro, bootcamping to play E D, playing at 1440 on medium settings.
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The reason that I cracked for this machine is that I code in C and the memory bandwidth is utterly insane, every generation since the M1 the memory bandwidth is reduced. So I'm a happy camper even with the release of the newer models, they are trading this bandwidth for other functionality because folk simply don't use it, everyone is still coding for x86 machines and its bottlenecks. But for my project, well I can use it however I want.

I suspect that elite would run well on an studio model and that for other models you would need to help out the cooling or suffer frame rate drops once it heats up, if it was running natively though, this would be less of an issue, there is a lot of waisted energy in the translation and that generates quite a bit of heat.

I'm not sure about the mini, again it all depends on how you set up and assist the cooling, that is where there is a major difference between the different models.
 
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Wily Rites

Wily Rites
Fizzatron said:
MS' Recall "feature" may lead to some switching going on...
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Especially when folks see what apple are doing with the onboard neural nets that all there devices have, it is quite likely that fear of this is driving windows into making such silly decision at the moment.
 

Rat Catcher

Rat Catcher
Fizzatron said:
MS' Recall "feature" may lead to some switching going on...
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Indeed
Wily Rites said:
Especially when folks see what apple are doing with the onboard neural nets that all there devices have, it is quite likely that fear of this is driving windows into making such silly decision at the moment.
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Or just use one of the many linux variants on their expensive PC gaming hardware, the possibilites for gaming on linux is growing apace, particularly when compared to just a few years ago.
 

Wily Rites

Wily Rites
Rat Catcher said:
I dual boot W11 & Fedora, some of my software, here's looking at you Adobe, won't work on linux.
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One of the things that went quite far in my decision to make the swap, other than wanting to gain UI experience, was the affinity suit of graphics software, which I now highly recommend; It is a real shame that this does not have a linux native version, to much of a moving target still I think, vis my comment on the year of the linux desktop. It could still happen, but I do have some doubts.
 

Wily Rites

Wily Rites
metatheurgist said:
I've been hearing that since 1995. :p
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This is a bit of a linux joke, when you've coded some and build up a picture as to why it is tricky in the environment, it becomes really quite funny to say. There is a really nice quote of Steve Jobs on what he learned about building computers which pretty much sums up why there isn't a linux desktop. "You've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around."

Linux is all about the love of the technology and its complexity, and the love of arguing about your right to maintain that complexity.
 

BetaToaster

B
Wily Rites said:
"You've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around."

Linux is all about the love of the technology and its complexity, and the love of arguing about your right to maintain that complexity.
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No, quite the contrary. Unix is about not having the "everything is one big monolithic blurb" complexity.

And for the people who want a UX that's designed the way described in the Jobs quote, there's several Desktop Environments doing exactly that. The issues with them not being more attractive for I-dont-care-which-OS-I-just-want-to-use-my-computer people are:
  • Lack of polish due to lack of manpower (due to the existence of several competing DEs and everything being volunteer efforts). This is of course slowly getting better over time.
  • Unfamiliarity, and lack of helpful neighbors. That's something that could quickly reach a tipping point where enough helpful neighbors are around to enable people to switch, which will again increase the amount of (possibly helpful) neighbors. That's why people have predicting the Year Of The Linux Desktop Any Day Now for decades.
  • That one irreplaceable program that doesn't run on Linux. I'd say that's almost solved nowadays due to the attention Wine is getting, and the ease of putting just that one program in a VM running its preferred OS.
Note there's no bullet point involving complexity, or love of arguing.

Source:
Me, with about two decades of experience being a helpful neighbor and sysadmin for friends and family that express an interest in running Linux. (While personally abhorring the Desktop metaphor, and being unable to efficiently work with a computer unless it presents as a terminal multiplexer.)
 

Wily Rites

Wily Rites
BetaToaster said:
No, quite the contrary. Unix is about not having the "everything is one big monolithic blurb" complexity.

And for the people who want a UX that's designed the way described in the Jobs quote, there's several Desktop Environments doing exactly that. The issues with them not being more attractive for I-dont-care-which-OS-I-just-want-to-use-my-computer people are:
  • Lack of polish due to lack of manpower (due to the existence of several competing DEs and everything being volunteer efforts). This is of course slowly getting better over time.
  • Unfamiliarity, and lack of helpful neighbors. That's something that could quickly reach a tipping point where enough helpful neighbors are around to enable people to switch, which will again increase the amount of (possibly helpful) neighbors. That's why people have predicting the Year Of The Linux Desktop Any Day Now for decades.
  • That one irreplaceable program that doesn't run on Linux. I'd say that's almost solved nowadays due to the attention Wine is getting, and the ease of putting just that one program in a VM running its preferred OS.
Note there's no bullet point involving complexity, or love of arguing.

Source:
Me, with about two decades of experience being a helpful neighbor and sysadmin for friends and family that express an interest in running Linux. (While personally abhorring the Desktop metaphor, and being unable to efficiently work with a computer unless it presents as a terminal multiplexer.)
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I love how you've started your reply with a flat 'No'! I did say linux and not UNIX, macOS is a UNIX OS too, but I'm not here for an argument; I got tired of all that in the linux community :D

I do agree for the most part in what you are saying and there are some fantastic folk in the community, however the conclusion that I've come to about UI design is that it will never be good as the result of a committee, because it requires top down creative direction. Harder still, it requires top down creative direction with enough technical knowledge to be able to direct technical folk who hate listening and have vastly differing opinions to their somewhat more creative brothers.

This really is not something that is easy to achieve.

Don't get me wrong, I do love linux, I love it for its UNIX origins and thus the terminal interface that it provides. However I find the desktops lacking in orchestration, my move to Mac has only served to hi light what is not quite right with the various different linux desktops, and I find that Jobs, in this quote, really does put his finger upon exactly what the difference is. I do intend to return to linux some day, with the knowledge learned from using a different operating system such as MacOS. They could teach a hell of a lot about good design. Well, they were mentored by a master from Xerox-park, the inventor of the GUI, so the lineage is pretty sound.
 
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