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System requirements

by Markus Nuebel · in Torque Game Engine · 09/24/2004 (2:21 am) · 3 replies

Hi guys.

I am currently a "non-Mac" guy.

After having ported our Torque-based game from Windows to Linux, I want to port it to Mac as well.

The torque system requirements for Mac as specified as:
Quote:G3 +, 64 MB RAM
OpenGL Compatible 3D Graphics Accelerator
Supported Compilers: Project Builder (OS-X only)

Now I am thinking about getting a cheap used G3 system for the port (hey we have no funding ...).

The questions are:
-What is needed besides the G3, to compile and run a torque based game?
- Is the standard G3 graphics card OpenGL compatible?
- Do I need to purchase a compiler?
- Do I need OS X, or will OS 9 do, as well.
(Older G3's will often come with OS9)
- Anything else, that I need to know as a future MAC-newbie?

Thanks a lot.
-- Markus
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Torque Owner Nicolas Quijano
#1
09/24/2004 (4:02 am)
Get an used G4 : G3s are too borderline performance wise when you couple them to the resource hog that MacOS X is :)

Also, the blue G3 Towers came with Rage 128 vidcards, which we all know suck badly :)

You want a used G4 tower, and make sure it's AGP, so you could spring for another vidcard... (beware, there is a markup on mac vidcards. a big one, alas)

Whatever the performance, all Macs that have the specs to run TGE have an OpenGL card, and those that don't can use the software OGL renderer included with every mac since Apple adopted OGL.
Again, this doesn't mean any such mac can run any TGE games...

No need to buy a compiler : if you're using Panther (MacOS X 10.3) or more recent, you can get xcode (Apple's IDE + gcc) for free.
If you're using an earlier version of MacOS X, get Project Builder (xcode is an incremental rebranded version of PB)

You need MacOS X if you want to do 3d games (for audience size reasons), and MacOS 9 is definitely becoming even more a fringe market for games than the Mac is in general.

Hth

Torque Owner Scott Coursey
Yellow Duck Software
#2
09/24/2004 (6:43 am)
I definitely agree with avoiding the G3s. Especially since the new iMacs are now G5s, the G3s will become a niche.

Now, once they make the PowerBooks and iBooks into G5s, then you can consider the G4s toast, but that won't happen any time soon.

(I have a DP 2.0 PMac G5 as a server and develop on a PowerBook G4 15")

Torque Owner Kyle Goodwin
#3
09/25/2004 (5:16 pm)
I've stopped supporting G3 for my torque builds, the huge benefit of adding altivec blending was the death knell for the G3 for me since it has no altivec support and the gap was now huge even between quite slow, old G4 systems and the fastest G3-based systems. If IBM comes through with their altivec-enabled G3 and its actually used in any major hardware I'll consider supporting it again.