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The News section is maintained by Jonathan Dreyer. Please send any comments or submissions to him.
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Introducing the New MGA!

Welcome to the "new" Mac Gaming Alliance! I hope you all enjoy the brand new look. Of course to go along with the new look we have a brand-new giveaway of Falcon 4.0. You can enter the giveaway from the "contest" link on your sidebar.

As usual, if you have any questions or comments about the new design, you can e-mail us here

Mark Adams on AltiVec (AKA: Velocity Engine)

Mark Adams of Westalke Interactive had the following to say about gaming and the new G4 AltiVec sub-processor:

Its doubtful UT will ship with Altivec in the first round, there just isn't time (we're spending nearly all development time on UT on stability). Its possible we could add some Altivec support later, and the Unreal engine is suited well to it, since it uses a lot of MMX code on the PC. As to whether enhancements will filter back to Unreal, I don't know. Every time we try to do even a minor update on Unreal it seems like it breaks the game for half the users, not to mention its been over a year of updates.

I have no idea on UT release, since I don't know when the PC will ship. Right now the best estimate is that UT Mac will ship about 4 weeks after the PC ships. We have to get the final code sent to duplication from the PC, integrate it on the Mac, and then do up to half dozen rounds of beta test to try to get it as stable as possible on as many machines as possible.

Wednesday, September 1

Cythera 1.0.1 Released
Ambrosia Software, Inc. has just released Cythera 1.0.1, which contains a number of bug fixes and adds a few features.

The following is a list of the bugs that were fixed in Cythera 1.0.1:

• The hard drive is no longer accessed every step you take, thus speeding up gameplay significantly
• Cythera is given more memory by default, easing situations where it would previously run out of memory
• Fixed the "Persistant storage" problem which could result in out of memory messages, corrupted game files, and possibly even crashes
• Sacas conversation bug/last person talking being you bug has been fixed (this would cause the conversation to fly by)
• Possible fix for machines with more than one monitor
• Various typos were fixed
• Buying the building now works (though in light of other bug fixes, not sure you can carry enough coinage)
• Selling stuff multiple times exploit has been eliminated
• Carrying too much coinage from selling stuff has been fixed
• Equiping too much stuff has been fixed
• Trapped by unicorn carcass; these you can now walk over, and additionally, you can destory carcasses by attacking them now
• Random items/monsters carrying weapons/etc... that actually belonged to other monsters
• Berosus moved in the vinyard a bit so it's possible to find him
• NPCs can no longer walk through locks or magically closed doors

Using 16 bits textures with your 16meg video card in Tomb Raider 2
Mark Adams recently posted this to a usenet group concerning using 16 bit textures with new Rage 128 cards:

There may be away to enable the 16 bit textures in the existing TR2, its just a flag in the prefs file. Here's a hack if you are willing to use Resedit:

Run TR2 Setup and make sure you are set to Rave. Open the Tomb Raider II Prefs (in system:preferences folder) file with Resedit Open the 'tr2p' resource #999 Change the byte at hex location 0x29 to 00 (it should be 01 to start)

This is just from a quick look at the code, so I can't guarantee its 100% right. The 16 bit code is in the game, but it was turned off when we shipped because at that time (Oct '98) the Rage Pro was the only RAVE accelerator, and most of those were 4MB cards, which couldn't support all the 16bit textures.

Quake 2 Review!
The MGA has posted it's new review of Quake 2. Check out what MGA Reviewer Marty Dodge thinks of it here.

Some Voodoo 3 FPS numbers
We are working on the full review of a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI video card, but until it is released, I have some early numbers for you:

• On my Powermac 8600/300 with 96 mb RAM:
• 640by480 in software rendering: 10.6 fps
• 640by480 with Voodoo 1 4 mb: 19.7 fps
• 640by480 with Voodoo 3: 28.4 fps

Unreal 2.2.4b6
A beta 6 patch for 224 is now available. This version only works with a previous 224(b1 through b5) already installed. This update mainly has fixes for RAVE (to increase stability) and adds some extra support for VooDoo3 cards.

Please read the read me file that comes with the update (also available here). It contains answers to many frequently asked questions and explains many changes to 224. If you have any problem, check the readme first!

Click here to go to Westlake's 224b6 download page.

GameRanger adds support for 7 more games
Scott Kevill yesterday announced the inclusion of seven new game titles on GameRanger, the Macintosh multiplayer online gaming service. In addition to the 12 previous titles, gamers can now play Age of Empires, Battle for the Universe, Deadlock, Heroes of Might and Magic II, Lode Runner 2, Master of Orion II, and Railroad Tycoon 2: The Second Century across the internet.

Launched in July 1999, GameRanger is the first, true Macintosh online gaming service. GameRanger has spawned a rapidly expanding online gaming community with the popular features of game hosting, text and voice chat, paging, and custom player profiles.

Age of Empires 1.2
MacSoft has released the 1.2 updater for Age of Empires. This new version incorporates numerous bug fixes, but more importantly adds support for the GameRanger online gaming utility. New in 1.2:

• Added support for GameRanger.
• Fixed cursor initialization problem on document launch.
• Fixed AppleEvent timing problems on program launch.
• Implemented new CD check to eliminate interference from Adaptec Toast driver.
• Fixed CD audio bug causing intermittent hanging when starting new games
• Added better error strings for screen resolution problems.
• Fixed startup error messages so the correct string id is passed in all cases.
• Removed hard links to Open Transport libraries.

Download: Age of Empires 1.2 update 1.02mb from ftp.wizworks.com
Download: Age of Empires 1.2 update 1.02mb from ftp.gtinteractive.com

Jazz Jackrabbit updated to 1.2.6
Logicware has updated Jazz Jackrabbit 2 for the MacOS to 1.2.6.

It has full InputSprocket and GameRanger support. And they've fixed all known bugs in the game and made it more tolerant to badly created user levels.

Download it from: ftp://ftp.logicware.com/pub/Jazz2Update/Jazz2Update1.2.6.bin

If you want to update your demo version get: ftp://ftp.logicware.com/pub/Jazz2Update/Jazz2Demo1.2.6.bin

The demo on their site is already version 1.2.6, only people who have already downloaded the demo should download the patch.

Numerous Unreal tidbits from Mark Adams
On Saturday Mark Adams posted this concerning future Unreal updates:

As far as I know, Tim still plans for all future Unreal 1 patches to be compatible networking-wise with 224. Whether he tweaks or changes the networking, hopefully 224 will still work.

At this point my plans for Unreal Mac are to roll stability and performance enhancements from Unreal Tournament back into it after UT is nearly done. If Unreal 1 on the PC does go through another round of massive changes and breaks networking, I'm afraid its going to be a very hard case to make for us to continue doing major updates on Unreal 1 Mac. I'd like to fix Mac-specific bugs and get stability back to where it was in 1.0, but I can't afford (from a time, money, and sanity standpoint) to put in another 6 or 12 months trying to keep the Mac version up to a rapidly moving PC target.

And then, way back last Wednesday, he had this to say about Unreal's options for higher resolutions:

VooDoo2 in SLI or Banshee support higher than 800x600. So Unreal has those options. Normal VooDoo2 only supports 800x600 (with zbuffering, which Unreal requires), which is why it falls back to the default (512x384) when you pick high resolutions.

Whenever I get a chance to roll fixes from Tournament back into Unreal for the (hopefully) final patch, I'll roll in the code to support 1024x768, 1200x1024, etc for VooDoo3 cards.

Mac Games FPS Database
Accelerate Your Mac has opened it's Mac Games FPS (frames-per-second) database. With this database, Mac users from all over with different systems can post their FPS scores from popular games along with their system info for you to browse and search.

This is a very good system for instance, if you love Quake 2 but want to know if it is worth it to get a Voodoo 3 and what kind of improvement you can expect with your machine, you can search the database for people with a machine like yours but with a Voodoo 3.

You can enter your FPSes or search the database here.

Battle for the Universe 1.1
Misty Software has released version 1.1 of it's popular real-time networkable space battle game, Battle for the Universe. This new version adds support for Scott Kevill's popular online gaming utility, GameRanger.

Some background information of BFTU:
Strap in and prepare for battle against your interstellar enemies as you enter your galaxy-class fighter ship. Battle for the Universe is an action-packed game filled with weapons and goodies. Play against the fierce computer or have a great time with a friend over the Internet. Weapons include bullets, fireballs, and the deadly missiles! Power-ups are so numerous you can't name them all. The game is definately worth the download. Prepare for battle with Battle for the Universe!

Battle for the Universe requires a PowerMac, color monitor and 5.1 megabytes of free RAM and features 3D rendered graphics, digitized sound, and fantastic gameplay. If you are looking for a networkable space game, this is it!

Bug fixes coming for Civ 2 Gold
MacSoft programmer Brian Nesse posted this to usenet yesterday:

We received the Civ II Gold 1.0 and the PC 1.3 sources from the original porting group last week. Our source code control system has corrupted itself twice since then putting a damper on progress, but...

We are wading through 29 items culled from customer support and the newsgroups... some of which are bugs, some that are not, and some that we have yet to reproduce. We have rolled in the 1.3 updates which fixes a couple of bugs and fixed some Mac specific things. We have fixed a number of items (file sharing issues, scenario loading & editing issues, goto bugs, democracy bugs, revert issues, and apparently the network game stability problems.) We still have many items on the list that we haven't gotten to yet however.

Beta 2 of the reference Voodoo 3 drivers
3Dfx Interactive has released the second beta of their Mac reference drivers for use with Voodoo 3 2000 PCI accelerators. Bug fixes and new features included in this release are:

• Crashes related to resolution changes in Quake2 have been fixed.
• The "black screen" syndrome with many 2D games has been fixed.
• The trashed audio problem with MacAmp has been fixed.
• The signature of the NVRAM variable that controls saved 2D driver information has been changed to eliminate the possibility of conflicts with other 2D drivers.
• The FlashROMVoodoo3 utility has been fixed to *properly* save and restore x86 BIOS images, and to make it harder to overwrite backup images.

Please note, if you have used earlier versions of these drivers, you must flash the ROM of your card again, with the new image file included with this release. Go to http://www.3dfx.com/view.asp?IOID=306 to download the newest drivers.

Beta 2 of the reference Voodoo 2 drivers
3Dfx Interactive has released the second beta of their Mac reference drivers for use with PC Voodoo 2 accelerators. Bug fixes and new features included in this release are:

• Bugs with downloading very small mipmap levels in Glide2.x and Glide3.x have been fixed. This fixes the "black surfaces" problem in games such as Quake3 and Unreal.

Go to http://www.3dfx.com/view.asp?IOID=276 to download the newest drivers.

¥ Check our Archives for an older news item