Oolite Bulletins

Making sure the code will run in older macs without problems does restrict the number of features we can use, and has made Oolite code not as readable - or as fast - as it could otherwise be.

For the next Stable release (formerly known as EMMSRAN, maybe rename it to NSRFKAEMMSRAN? ) we are thinking of removing the crud extra support code for platforms that aren't used any more on a day-to-day basis.


A quick preliminary check seems to indicate that Snow Leopard and Lion are well under way to take the - ahem - lion's share of all macs in use today. If that's indeed the case, it would really simplify future upgrades to Oolite.


So here it goes: what system are you guys using to run Oolite on?

NB: This poll has been marked global to increase its visibility: in other words, this one poll is repeated in all our sub forums, whether read-only or not.
If you're reading this on the announcements thread - which unfortunately is read only - please go to a different sub forum to let us know which version of OSX you use for Oolite...

Voted but why this is in Fiction?

pagroove wrote:

Voted but why this is in Fiction?

It's in all the forums, so it gets noticed, I suppose.

Spooky, I did put it in the mac section, it seems it 'grew' all by itself.

10.6 for Mac nightly builds.

Merry Christmas!

Kaks wrote:

Spooky, I did put it in the mac section, it seems it 'grew' all by itself.

Most likely you selected "Global" on the radio buttons beneath the post. That makes it a global announcement, basically an announcement that appears in every forum on the site.

To change that (and please do!), edit the first post and change the setting to something more appropriate...

Hmm, I don't seem to have that kind of power on this board... for the moment being it's in the lap of the gods administrators!

Are the votes, however, gathered centrally or per topic?

Kaks wrote:

Hmm, I don't seem to have that kind of power on this board... for the moment being it's in the lap of the gods administrators!

Me neither - Giles, A_C or Ahruman must wander by...

The votes are indeed gathered centrally, so it doesn't matter which sub forum you use for your vote!

@DH: OK, Administrators gods then!

I made it global because we need as big a sample as possible to get anything close to statistically useful, and we can’t really assume everyone reads “their” platform sub-forums, which tend to be mostly other people’s bug reports.

Global topics aren’t a common occurrence and don’t take up much space. I don’t see it as a significant imposition.

I spotted this poll in the Announcements Forum, and was confused about how to vote until I realized I had to re-load this Topic in another Forum that was not read-only. A brief note to this effect in the first posting might be helpful.

OS 10.4 is the last Mac OS that will support all my Classic/OS 9 software, and that will run on my PowerMac (non-Intel) Powerbook G4.

If future versions of Oolite are to be Intel-only, I do hope "legacy" versions of OXPs will continue to be available (if not produced) that will still run on the last Oolite that's compatible with OS 10.4.

Woopsy doodle time to buy a new mac!
I'll just keep the old ones for sound work no biggie. Might be out of the loop for a bit making wise. I wounder if I can hack together a clone from a cheap pc?

Yep Hackintoshes are certainly one way to get a cheap Mac OSX system together - you'll find plenty of useful stuff on them - netkas is a very good starting point - I used his work to install a stock XFX HD6870 card in my MacPro and burn the EFI onto the ROM.

Do you look at the refurbished pages on the Apple shop? I bought my PowerMac G5 from that, and it has done many years of excellent, allbeit extremely noisy, service!

That aside, it's always a tricky moment when the developer of any software is faced with the fact that the hardware needed to run the next major release of a program in all it glory has moved on, and some users are going to be left out in the cold. I think you will find that this is not the first time that decisions have had to be made about the minimum spec to run Oolite, and I doubt it will be the last.

While Tiger was the last of the thoroughbred Powermac releases (and I intend to keep it), it's probably asking too much of the developers if they're to support four releases in one binary. Given the Xcode iOS upheaval, that has become overly difficult, I reckon, and the time may have come for us Powermac users to accept that. We can always install a second OS, such as Leopard or Debian Linux, and reboot to play the game, just as we did with System 7 and MacOS 8.