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The News section is maintained by Jonathan Dreyer. Please send any comments or submissions to him.
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Quakeworld Announcment...
In a recent mac gaming newsgroup post, MacSoft spokesperson Nate Birkholz gave us this message:
...we should have an announcement about Quakeworld one way or the other in the next couple of weeks. This time I'm promising. <cringe>

New Reviews at the MGA!
We've posted some new reviews in the last couple days, MacSoft's Deadlock and the Duke Nukem 3D add-on Duke it out in D.C. Also I'm working on a review of MacSoft's just released Top Gun: Fire at Will, I'll post a couple of preview shoots when I get the time. Stay Tuned...

Complete list of Quake Bug Fixes

• Chance of Quake preferences file becoming corrupted has been reduced.
• Some crashes when attempting to bring up the Options dialogs have be fixed.
• You can now hold down the Shift key while starting up Quake to disable
• the automatic monitor resolution switching, in case you somehow selected a mode that isn't valid.
• When Quake automatically switches your monitor color depth to 256 or Thousands of colors, it no longer changes the monitor's refresh rate.
• The Quicksave feature has been made more reliable.
• The name of the save game when you choose "Save As" is now correctly set to that of the last game you saved.
• You may now select new auxiliary commands for your mouse/joystick/gamepad buttons in the Input Sprocket configuration dialog. Simply select AUX28, AUX29, etc. from the popup menu for each button. You can then use the "bind" command in the Quake console to bind these functions to any command you want. For instance, if you assign your second mouse button to AUX28, and then type "bind AUX28 +jump" in the console, pressing the second button will make you jump. This feature is useful for assigning multiple and more complex commands to extra buttons.
• Trying to open a map or demo file that doesn't exist now immediately reports the error, and doesn't leave the "loading" screen up forever.
• Alias files are now handled better. Specifically you can put an alias to the .pak or .cfg files in the "id1" folder and they will be correctly resolved.
• G3 and other systems with IDE CD-ROMs correctly play music.
• AppleTalk games work correctly now, and no longer just start up with infinite "server to client keepalive" messages.
• The "Find Local Games" button for AppleTalk network games now works correctly.
• The "Find Local Games" button for TCP/IP network games now works correctly.
• CD Audio playthrough under OS 8.1 now works correctly, it no longer sets the input source to "none" on quit.
• Side stepping via joystick/gamepads now works correctly.
• You may now select a desired monitor refresh rate in the Video Options control panel when you select the "Auto-Switch Monitor" option.
• Quake 3Dfx now supports multiple resolutions (512x384, 640x480, 800x600). You must have a 3Dfx with a 4 MB frame buffer to support 800x600.
• Quake RAVE now no longer looks specifically for ATI cards. This may allow other RAVE compliant cards to work, although the only other card it has been tested with is the 3Dfx card in RAVE mode.
• Saving a game with too little disk space now gives an error and doesn't create a corrupt save game file.
• Several crashes on startup on PowerBooks have been fixed.
• Sound problems on PowerBooks have been fixed.
• An option to enable/disable shadows in Quake RAVE has been added. Some cards do not support shadows, and turning them on will decrease performance, but at least now you can decide whether to have them or not.
• Some of the problems with sound stuttering when you hit ESC to access menus have been fixed.
• TCP/IP network games are now more reliable.
• Running Quake RAVE on a 3D card with less than 4MB of video ram now gives a warning. Quake RAVE can not run at any reasonable speed on 3D cards with less than 4MB of video memory.
• Quake RAVE turns off mip mapping on ATI cards, so you don't have to change the ATI displays settings.
• Removed "brightness" slider from Quake RAVE video options panel. The slider was never hooked up correctly and didn't do anything in 1.08.4. Brightness is set as high as it can be for RAVE (which may still look a bit dark).
• An option to toggle filtering in Quake RAVE has been added. Turning off filtering will result in increased speed at the sacrifice of some graphic quality.
• Quake RAVE now allows you to run in any of the standard video modes, not just 640x480.
• Modem/serial games have been made more reliable. When playing a modem/serial game, make sure you wait long enough for the net game to start up, as it will attempt to connect to a LAN game first, and then go on to the serial/modem game.

Quake updated to 1.08.5!
Mark Adam's and Westlake Interactive have released the first update to Quake for a long while! This new update fixes over 30 (Yes 30!) bugs! This update has made Quake (which was very unstable for me) one of the most stable games on my HD. This patch will only update 1.08.4. All three (Normal, RAVE, 3Dfx) are included in a single archive you can download here

QuakeFinder 1.5 Released
This is a major update for the best/only Quake server finder of the Mac. Changes/Updates in this version included:

• Player listings (in the Quake font)!
• Server Rule lists!
• Reverse DNS lookups for server addresses!
• Significantly faster in many areas (particularly opening large lists)!
• Contextual menus
• Cursor key navigation
• Timeouts (number of retries) for servers now listed
• Numerous user interface improvements
• X-Men and Malice filters added

You can download QuakeFinder 1.5 here, or learn more about it here

X-Men Quake TC updated to 1.11
Westlake Interactive recently posted an update to the X-Men TC for Quake, the 1.11 update fixes a net play bug that was introduced in the 1.1 update. You can download the update here

New MacCarmageddon Web site
A new Mac specific Carmageddon web site has sprouted up, it doesn't have that much info yet but their working on it... You can check out the site, Macinkill

Remeber, you can read our review of Carmageddon here, or check out our mirror of MacCarmagedit here

Westwood's cold answer to Mac gamers
The MGL has posted the following quote that was recieved by one of their readers in response to an inquiry about problems with Command & Conquer under MacOS 8.1

"We have had numerous reports of problems with MacOS 8.1, though 8.0 and under seem to work fine. Westwood supports all of its previous Mac products, but we are not going to be producing any more for the forseeable future. We will also not likely update current products if the problems are caused by changing OS's (such as problems caused by 8.1)."