Why no Mac versions of RCT/RCT2?
I am a person who plans to switch to using a Mac as soon as I can get the money to buy one, but there is one thing that I would still need my Windows machine for, that being RCT2. Anyone know why they won't port the game to the Mac, especially since it is a better platform, and should crash less than Windows?
Hopefully, Infogrames will get a clue and make a Mac version of the game. As of right now, I consider the Mac in my house (which my dad uses) a business computer, and this Windows machine a game machine (since I play RCT2 on it WAY TOO MUCH), something that is probably the opposite of what you would hear from most people.
-Sam
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First off, Windows these days probably crashes less than the mac. XP is very stable.
Second, much of RCT and RCT2 is written in Intel assembler, which isnt' easly translated into the Mac's Power PC instruction set.
So don't hold your breath. There is allegedly going to be an XBOX version of RCT2, and that is only possible because an XBOX is actually running an Intel CPU and a version of Windows underneath... so it's a straight-forward port.
RCT2 will never appear on the Mac.
Believe me, I'm no novice when it comes to PCs or Macs. I have all types of Virus protection programs. Windows is very susceptible to viruses. And with Microsoft's new Hibernate mode....My computer is constantly getting stuck in hibernate after it freezes.
Sigh. The point is, the Mac market is MUCH smaller than the PC market, and the development costs for a Mac version would be better spent elsewhere. There are certainly some developers who are willing to throw money at the platform (which is good for Apple), but there just isn't any business sense in it for RCT.
As for virii, the Mac system IS certainly vulnerable to them (when I was in college at Carnegie Mellon in the late 80's and early 90's, it was the Mac, not the PC, that presented more problems for the Academic Computing group), but if you were a malicious programmer going for maximum effect, which platform would you put your efforts into? Right, the one more people are running...
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*** This post was edited by GregLeg on 1/21/2003. ***
The Mac vs. Windows debate is pointless these days. OS X and Windows XP are, without question, the stability that we've longed for since the beginning of time. I've run XP since beta 2 and never crashed it. My PC at work hasn't even been rebooted in about two months. I've heard similarly good things about OS X.
In this case, which OS is better isn't even an issue. It's a matter of economics. To port a game between platforms, you have to justify the cost by demonstrating that you'll make money from the port after taking on the expense to deal with it. As is the case for many different games, it's not worth the cost. It doesn't make the Mac any less of a machine.
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It's more than just the cost, it's the effort involved. Chris Sawyer is almost a one man team, and the code is written in assembler which is specific to the Intel CPU. It would have to be completely rewritten from the ground up by someone. That's a huge effort and I doubt Chris is interested in either doing it himself or granting permission to someone else to do it.
And nitro, if your Dell running XP has crashed even once in a day, let alone as often as you claim, you should get the problem fixed. It's either a serious driver conflict (did you upgrade from 98/me? That's a frequent source of problems in this area), or a serious hardware problem (marginal or bad memory, cracking in the traces on the motherboard, etc). The problem isn't XP. I have a Dell running XP and haven't rebooted or anything in months. Ditto at work. You should go to Dell support or some other such forum and figure out how to fix your problem. It sucks to have a flakey computer. I know, I had one for a while... it took a while to trace it down to the video driver in my case.
You can have the best of both worlds. You can get Virtual PC for mac OS X and run Windows XP on a mac. A friend of mine has a mac with Virtual PC/Win XP and has no problems running RCT2 and other windows games.
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*** This post was edited by shaggszgn on 1/23/2003. ***
One problem with a Mac and RCT is the lack of a right mouse button. A lot of the game play relies on it. A right click however could be replaced by a shift-click or something similar.
The primary problem that I see however is the economics of rewriting a game. I don't think that it makes very good business sense.
As for the right mouse button thing, all you need to do is get a new mouse with more than one button. I have a 4-button Logitech wheel mouse for my Mac. All the buttons are programmable.
I just started playing RCT for the first time a couple of weeks ago (Can you believe it?). I'm running it via Virtual PC on my new dual G4. It works great until the park starts to fill up with lots of rides and activity; then the motion gets choppy, but it's still very playable. :-) I actually bought the game more than two years ago, but haven't had a convenient means to play it until now. I'll have to go buy RCT2 and see how well it runs, but I'm doubtful it will work as great as RCT1 since the minimum system requirements are much higher.
They don't estimate anything... they research it. The decision on whether or not to produce a game is based on its potential to sell, to recover the cost and make money above and beyond that. If you've read the recent stories in Business 2.0 or Fast Company, you'd see how EA has that down to a system, but that's another topic.
RCT is unique in that it was, more or less, written by one guy, and unheard of thing for any software these days. Even more unusual is that it was written in machine language, meaning the code is interacting with the CPU at a very basic and primative level. That's not something you can just port to another platform.
A lot of other games based on a particular engine, on the other hand, are easier to port, because they're written in some platform-neutral language (like C++), leaving only the plumbing between the code and the hardware to be adapted. In that case, even that can be trivial when they use an interface like OpenGL, which has been written for most platforms.
So there you have my take on things.
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Jeff - Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com - Sillynonsense.com
"The world rotates to The Ultra-Heavy Beat!" - KMFDM
Usually, when people say "Windows XP sucks" they either haven't actually used it and are just saying it sucks because they have a vendetta against Microsoft, or don't know what they are doing with it.
I've been using XP Pro since last spring and it has been the most trouble-free OS I've used since Dos.
Actually, I just installed Windows XP on this machine, as a second OS on a spare hard drive I had. What I was hoping was maybe that I could use Remote Desktop from the Mac to try to play the game. Well, for most things, Remote Desktop works remarkably well. I can even use my TV Tuner on the Mac (though the picture is choppy).
Well I installed RCT2 to the WinXP partition, and unfortunately, it will not work via Remote Desktop, probably due to DirectX.
If I do abandon this PC and get a Mac, would I be able to play RCT2 via VirtualPC? Since I am a student, I can get a discount for it, and I get a free site licence for Windows XP (Plus I have 2 Windows 2000 licences I got for free my freshman year).
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