BMax iMac

I've just been given an iMac and i'm wondering what it'd be like with BMax.

It has a G3-400Mhz processor and 192mb SDRam. I've no idea about iMac display hardware but i'm guessing doing anything 3D is out of the question - but is it going to be sufficient to make 2D games with lots of particle effects and stuff or are the specs just too low?

A mate used to have an iMac and it did have some kind of 3D hardware - Rage Fury or summut - can't really remember.

That's interesting, I guess i'll end up with the 3D module for Max anyway though because of the PC side.

I'm really more interested to know if a 400Mhz Mac is enough, I know Mac-users say you can "double the equivellent cpu speed", but frankly 800Mhz on a PC is still rather naff. Especially as it's only got 192mb Ram which with OSX is already a bit of a burden.

does it have OSX?

aye 10.3 atm but i'm going to put Tiger on over the weekend.

I think it might do better than you'd expect. Download the Mac demo and try it...

yeah... it works fine... i had/have an older iMac G3 with 10.2 and it ran well...

--Mike

(Edit: Note, this is in regard to the video card your Mac may have)

Probably has a Geforce 2 maximum. I had a much more powerful G4 and it came with a Geforce 2.

Returned the thing, ain't paying $500 for such a crappy thing.

Mine came with a new job, so i'm being paid to own a Macintosh.

It's what Apple have had to resort too...

you'd have to pay me to own one ...

I'm very happy with my mac.. :)

me thinks Grey haven't seen or touched a mac since Apple Mac II.. :p

Well... Keep in mind that *everything* in BMax is 3D, even the 2D stuff. Without 3D accellerator 'simple' 2D stuff is going to be slow as well... Although supposedly the system would be 'good enough' to do quite a few things with as well.

Blitzmax runs pretty decent on my old AMD K6/400MHz system (Voodoo3 video adapter)

I have a 300mhz G3 ibook .... it's not fast enough to do anything useful in 2D, but that's possibly partly related to the gfx card with is an ATI Rage Mobility L. It can DO OpenGL, albeit a software renderer, but not very quick. Having said that, the game `bugdom` runs on it which is fullscreen 25fps 3D, so who knows.

My first game is almost playable to an alpha standard (i'm writting it on the PC). Tommorow i'll try it on the iMac and see... *fingers crossed*.

(1 day later)

So... Got it working on the iMac?

I'm descovering the joys of OSX and version incompatabilities, my OSX 10.4 disk on DVD when I dont have a DVD drive, my OSX 10.3.1 set missing disk 3 so not having the dev tools needed for BMax and have just wasted a few hours downloading XCode 2.2 which isn't compatable with OSX 10.3.1 (only OSX 10.4) and then spent some time searching for XCode 2.1, as it seems there is no backwards compatability. This is after having to fix the thing when I first got it because it was set to network boot...

If this is ease of use computing, I want it as complex as possible from now on please.

Hopefully i'll get a Mac compile done tonight. Meenwhile i'll continue writing my game for the Mac ... on the PC.

lol. The good, old Mac stability/ease-of-use myth. My mate's iMac used to lock-up and crash just as much - maybe even more - as a win98 PC. He binned (sold) it after a year.

...and let's not even start on the price Adobe charges for their software. :P

I finally got it working, amongst a chorus of swearwords related to issues with OSX, issues with my newbness to OSX, issues with my newbness to BMax, and most omminously of all issues with the rubbishness of my iMac's graphics card.

It's a little slow and can only run my game at fairly low settings but it does work. I had to lower the background graphic quality (I was trying to avoid putting options into the game at all because I think simple arcade games should just work) to a stretched 512x512 image which was a bit naff, but this thing just doesn't have any graphics memory and it cannot cope with anything more than that.

By the way, congrats on the new job!

If you think an old imac is sluggish, try running OS-X on a PC through the PearPC Emulator. won't do fullscreen OpenGL (only windowed), and I think I get about 1 frame every 5 seconds, but I guess it works for just compiling programs :-?

(Communicate through TCP/IP with the host OS, and you can copy files back and forth between the two environments)

On the bright side, once Apple completely switches to the Intel platform, it should be a lot easier to get a halfway decent 'VirtualMac' environment or whatever running on a PC with little speed loss.