Classic Environment: The Oldest Applications You Run?

[IJ Reilly]

Hmmmm... usually this is really my wife's game (I like Quake II/III personally), but just for this thread, I'll spend the next week playing this game (at least two hours a day each of those days) and report all issues (of a technical nature) that I've had with the game. I'll start out with a fresh new tournament (I think I recall which of the five saved players was mine, so I'll use that one) and we'll see how it goes.

Always prepared to make the big sacrifice for the greater good, eh?

FWIW, the only OS 9 game I ever discovered that doesn't run in Classic is Combat Mission Beyond Overlord (and its immediate successors). This game was actually developed on Macs, released after OSX was released, and yet there was no OSX version and to add insult to injury, it does not run in the Classic environment. The developer's excuse was that they'd relied on Apple's implementation of RAVE graphics acceleration which was abandoned in OSX and that Apple's Classic RAVE extension was buggy in ways they could not work around. Many of their Mac customers decided that in reality they didn't care enough to work around it.

 

[Eidorian]

Well, I've been running Unreal Tournament in Mac OS X since the native version was released in late 2001 (I'm using version 436x3). I have only ever had it crash in one scenario (Assault: High Speed) and I haven't had that crash since back when I was using it on my iMac.

I've used it on two systems... an iMac G3/350 (with an ATI Rage 128 with 8 MB of VRAM) originally running 10.1 and later 10.2, with 256 MB, 384 MB and 512 MB of RAM. I currently play it on my Beige G3 Mini Tower (G4/533, ATI Radeon 7000 with 32 MB of VRAM) which has 640 MB of RAM and is running 10.3.

I don't care for crashing or buggy things, so that fact that I use it (at all) tells you that I don't experience difficulties with it.


In fact, it crashed a lot more back when I used it in Mac OS 9 than it ever has in Mac OS X... but of course, that was Mac OS 9.



Hmmmm... usually this is really my wife's game (I like Quake II/III personally), but just for this thread, I'll spend the next week playing this game (at least two hours a day each of those days) and report all issues (of a technical nature) that I've had with the game. I'll start out with a fresh new tournament (I think I recall which of the five saved players was mine, so I'll use that one) and we'll see how it goes.

Yes, as I recall. You install it in your classic Mac OS 9, and the Mac OS X (PPC) app references the location of the files for you.

The only thing that doesn't work properly in the OS X version is the smoke effect when you fire off grenades from the rocket launcher. But I can live with that. UT is a classic.

killing spree!

I'd love to get the OS X version even if it's PowerPC. It'll still be lightning in Rosetta. I don't like rebooting to play my PC copy from many moons ago.

 

[axboi87]

Sheepshaver

Wish someone would create an application similar to Parallels running on Mac OS X that would allow a boot into Mac OS 9.2.2 in a virtual Mac.

I would buy it in a heartbeat!

I don't want to give up my System 9 apps. Not just yet anyway.

There are a few. Namely Sheepshaver, which is only compatible up to 9.1, although the difference between 9.22 and 9.1 are really just updates to make it more classic compatible. Most apps that require os 9 seem to only specify "9.x" as the requirement.

 

[RacerX]

Always prepared to make the big sacrifice for the greater good, eh?

Yep... ya gotta be willing to take one for the team! I barely made it through the two hours last night alive (and not even alive if we count the number of times I was killed ).


Of course the biggest risk I was running was deleting one of my wife's tournaments... that would have been pretty bad!

 

[RacerX]

The only thing that doesn't work properly in the OS X version is the smoke effect when you fire off grenades from the rocket launcher. But I can live with that. UT is a classic.

After about 8 hours of playing, the grenade/smoke effect (seems to be mainly when a lot of bots are involved) is the only abnormality I've seen so far.

never could get it to work more than 2 days in a row.

Also, looking at my crash logs on the two systems I've played UT on, it has never crashed on the PowerMac and crashed once (2003-05-11) on the iMac. The PowerMac has been running it since about 9 months ago and the iMac has been running it since late 2001.

Seems pretty stable to me so far.

 

[Rikardo]

I'll miss Classic

I'm late chipping in...
but can't resist

Since 1989 I've used two apps that are quite frankly irreplaceable (as in CAN'T be replaced with modern alternatives in Win or OSX)
Wingz spreadsheet - nobody needs any other reason to choose it when you consider the bloated, obstructive, intrusive alternative that is Excel.

CAT - a contact mangement app that can be used to manage an entire business (has run 2 for me) because it has a built in text layout tool document system that stores every document you prduce for ever! (paperless office since 1989)

If (more likely when) we have to move on I'll miss them like they'd been work colleagues - sad old git I am!

 

[socamx]

UT in OS X is a pure joke of a unfinished beta, I have a bug list so long that it takes too long to remember and repeat it all anymore.

There was a small hope of this guy named Icculus that was supposed to make a proper Mac OS X (He was working with the UTGP guys.) port with functionality similar to UT2003/4. He gave up on it though for some pretty weak reasons. I guess he just doesn't realize how many people would appreciate it to be finished. If you look through the bugzilla on that site you can find people posting about the patch he was working on and it was working quite well.

Also, for you guys that wanna play UT in OS X, install USB Overdrive, and totally disable mouse acceleration. Makes the mouse issues non-existant in UT, took me months to discover that. For you ATI guys, install ATI Displays and turn on VSync, as well as Anisotropic Filtering & MSAA if your card can handle it. Looks very nice once you do so, though the texture composite issue is downright ugly no matter what you do.

As for classic, the old apps I still use are games. Namely Deus Ex, sometimes UT for when I wanna remember how nice it was in 3dfx Glide mode with that openglide extension for Classic. Carmageddon II is probably the oldest, or maybe Warcraft I. I don't remember the dates.

Lack of Classic is a major hinderance in me wanting to adopt a Intel Mac as well, but the thought of booting up into and playing the original UT in Linux makes me drool a bit. If you like the original UT, Linux seems to be the only OS that does it proper justice. Windows has awkward driver issues, mouse sensitivity, framerate problems and my list goes on...