Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic - Re: Shocked and appalled.

Forum Overview :: American McGee's Honda Civic

by Mood: Perplexed 06/25/2003, 4:00am PDT

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:

Someone please indulge a question from someone who has not used or had access to a Macintosh in six years: Will all applications currently available for OS X and the G4 work on a G5?

I'd imagine they would. This is an incremental change, not like the 680x0 to PowerPC architecture switch (which went surprisingly smoothly, actually) or the Ye Olde Mac OS to NextStep switch (which, if playing old games is important to you, is problematic).

(I ask, as Intel and AMD are putting together CPUs that would still be able to run a copy of Zork from 1980...

An old copy of MaxZip ought to run Zork on OS X, albeit under the Classic emulation layer for old Mac stuff. Most of the other old games I've tried have had no such luck, and they're not even that old: Fallout 1, Baldur's Gate 1 and Majesty gave Classic fits when I tried them.

... and it is my understanding that Apple has not particularly cared about that level of backwards compatibility over the last twenty years.)

The switch to OS X has broken more things than any other transition in Apple's history. Programs that didn't break "the rules" by, say, writing to low-memory globals, using undocumented APIs like the Layer Manager, or assuming you'd forever be using a 1-bit video display stood a decent chance of working in newer Mac OS releases. That's very much out the window with OS X.

id and Blizzard have been great about updating older games to play nice in OS X -- the Quake 3 update released just last week boosted my framerate by like a third -- but most game developers just won't bother, so I have to make do for now without Battle-Girl.