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Buying a Mac

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 6:35 pm
by bakechad
I have been debating between an Ubuntu machine and a Mac. At this point I am pretty sure I am buying an imac with Leopard.

Has anyone had any problems running the current version of Oolite on Leopard?

Any idea how it will perform on a 2.0 ghz imac?

Thanks

Chad

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 8:03 pm
by Cmdr James
it runs fin on my macbook pro 2.33 with 2gb ram, and ran fine on the old one 2.16ghz with 1gb ram.

Both on tiger and leopard.

Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 8:44 am
by Commander McLane
On a 2GHz MacBook Pro (Leopard Tiger, stupid me! :oops: ) with 512MB Ram the framerate rarely drops below 99.

So you should just be fine.

Posted: Fri Jan 04, 2008 5:20 pm
by JensAyton
Oolite on a 2.4 GHz iMac performs admirably at HDTV resolution with full shaders. It’s quite nice. :-) I doubt it would be noticeably worse on the 20" with the lower graphics chip option… but I can test it at work next week.

I also run Ubuntu on the iMac, but currently only under Parallels. There’s no hardware support for OpenGL under Linux in Parallels, so the performance there is less than stellar.

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 5:07 pm
by bakechad
Okay – I changed gears. I was all set to get an iMac. Due to space constraints and portability needs, I have decided to get a Macbook 2.2GHz with 4Gb of RAM.

How will Oolite run on this machine? Oolite is the only game I plan on playing and my decision is hinging on this.

Thanks

Chad

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:15 pm
by Cmdr James
Um, it will run pretty much perfectly. That is a slightly higher spec that the machine I am on right now, and I can run oolite with debug and all sort on at a pretty much perfect speed. I dont know about framerate, it looks good enough, and thats all that matters to me. The proper build, without xcode and stuff running will be faster, and more stable.

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 1:11 pm
by Commander McLane
As I mentioned above, my MacBook Pro with "only" 2GHz and only 512MB in enough for a framerate of almost constantly 99 fps.

With a little more processor-power and eight times more RAM I really don't see how you could ever run into problems. So just do it! :D

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 2:49 pm
by bakechad
I figured the processor and RAM were more than adequate.

My concern was the lower end on-board graphics in the Macbooks. I keep reading how bad Macbooks are for gaming.

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 7:28 pm
by Cmdr James
It will not be an issue.

Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 12:00 pm
by nijineko
i've been able to play a surprising number of games on the macbook. of course, i'm mostly interested in older games, not the cutting edge. i've been playing with descent:freespace 2 for a while now with few issues. and that's fairly graphics hungry. oolite should run great!

Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 7:38 am
by mark_au
The only problem you will have if you are migrating from pc to mac is that there is no joystick support.. most annoying

Posted: Sun Feb 24, 2008 11:45 am
by nijineko
that's what usboverdrive is for!!! ^^

Posted: Fri Mar 27, 2009 10:49 pm
by harry747
if you get an analogue joystick to work using USB overdrive, please let me know how.

Posted: Fri Apr 24, 2009 4:38 am
by Zbond-Zbond
I have run Oolite on Leopard (10.5.1) and it was visually very crisp
I liked it -- no probs at all
....although I junked Leopard for work-related reasons: yes, I know, very poor prioritising!

& an almost, but not quite, unrelated Q., what's MacMini like?

Posted: Fri Apr 24, 2009 2:03 pm
by ovvldc
bakechad wrote:
My concern was the lower end on-board graphics in the Macbooks. I keep reading how bad Macbooks are for gaming.
That used to be very much the case. Nowadays, all new MacBooks have nVidia 9400M units integrated, and they manage reasonably. A lot more than the previous Intel GMA units, anyway.

Best wishes,
Oscar