Tomb Raider 2 Gold release for free, and it's Mac-hackable   Tomb Raider 2 Gold has been released as a free download for PC users [see link in yesterday's news below], and why should Mac users be left out in the cold? I've got proof that the PC version can be hacked up for play with the Mac TR2 engine, as evidenced by the Mac screenshot on the right. I'm going to try and get a better looking pic later tonight, but in keeping with my "lowest common denominator" approach, this picture is about all that you can expect via software rendering. Buy an accleration card already!!!

We still have the save game problem and some of the game's colors were a little off, but TR2g is certainly fully playable. I'm going to wait until Mike hears back from Westlake before posting any detailed hacking instructions, but let's just say that those of you who hacked level one previously need to remember that a rose, by any other name, doesn't smell as sweet. *wink wink*

More news this afternoon... got a busy day I'm afraid! Ruffin Bailey

Quake2 Update: Voodoo2/Banshee Performance: A reader sent some Quake 2 performance scores with a Voodoo2 and Banshee card with the latest MesaQuake2 and updated Q2 lib (mirrored here - see sidebar or yesterday's news). Note: As noted in my review I used Mesa3DfxEngine beta 4, not MesaQuake, and the Voodoo2 card was not overclocked in any of the machines.

"Mike,
Thought this might be interesting, I ran benchmarks of Quake II with a voodoo 2 and banshee. I wish I had a Rage 128 to also run it on. It's interesting to compare the Banshee card scores with your Yosemite 400 MHz and my Gossamer 500 MHz. (From the Orion/Banshee review)

Revision 1 Beige G3/300, 466/233 1 meg XLR8 upgrade, OC'd to 500/250/83 MHz. Voodoo 2 - 8 meg, Voodoo Banshee - 16 meg. 128 megs physical RAM, 129 Apple VM. Mac 8.6. 60 megs allocated to Quake II.

I ran each demo 3 times at each resolution for each card. (Software rendering was soooo slow, don't know why I bothered doing one) The resolution Hz seems to be fixed at 60Hz, the voodoo2.ini file isn't able to affect it, nor did locking the resolution while using the Banshee. It always switches to 60 Hz. I suppose it doesn't matter much though, since vsync is disabled.

I ran the demo's with the old ref_gl.lib and the multitexturing enabled ref_gl.lib for the voodoo 2 card. I used MesaQuake II 3.1B6 since the voodoo 2 and Banshee card both don't have native drivers. (Hail Miklos!)

The voodoo 2 was overclocked to 102 via voodoo2.ini and FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL was set to 0. Else all was normal.

CD music was enabled, but the CD was not in. Sound quality was set to high. Texture quality was at max. 8-bit textures were set to no, as was sync every frame.

Voodoo 2 (No multitexturing)
640x480
Demo 1 : 37.1, 37.3, 37.4
Demo 2 : 35.9, 36.4, 36.4

800x600
Demo 1 : 36.1, 36.3, 36.3
Demo 2 : 35.5, 36.0, 36.0

Voodoo 2 (Multitexturing)
640x480
Demo 1 : 45.7, 46.0, 45.9
Demo 2 : 43.6, 44.2, 44.2

800x600
Demo 1 : 45.4, 45.6, 45.5
Demo 2 : 43.7, 44.3, 44.3

Voodoo Banshee
640x480
Demo 1 : 37.8, 37.7, 38.0
Demo 2 : 36.4, 37.0, 36.9

800x600
Demo 1 : 35.2, 35.6, 35.6
Demo 2 : 34.9, 35.5, 35.5

1024x768
Demo 1 : 24.2, 24.3, 24.3
Demo 2 : 25.2, 25.3, 25.3

Software (Demo 1, ran it once. So slooow)
640x480 : 14.3
800x600 : 11.3
1024x768 : 8.3

Jonathan Ong"

7/14/99 Wednesday's News

TombRaider II Gold (PC) Giveaway: Ruffin Bailey sent a note that www.fgnonline.com is reporting Core and Eidos are about to release Tomb Raider II Gold (PC version) for free. The download link is Here . It's a 17MB PC exe file download that adds 4 new levels for existing TR II owners. Since it's an exe file it would require some hacking and not sure what Westlake's plans are for a Mac TRII Gold package (I have asked).

Randall Markarian sent the following game news:

Myth II Soulblighter 1.3:

Yesterday, Bungie added an update for Myth II bumping it up to v1.3. This adds a deathmatch multiplayer game that sounds like a riot. And according to the Read Me file there is support for SLI. Now whether that means that feature is active for the Mac in anticipation of SLI drivers from 3Dfx or if it applies only to the Windows side, we can only hope (the read me file was for both Mac and PC).

Also at the Bungie website is two new maps for Myth II called "Boil and Bubble" and "Toil and Trouble."

Quake 2 updates:

I hope everyone got the news yesterday (posted here) that the Mesa3Dfx has a Quake 2 optimized version available for download. [Link fixed 7/15] And Nate Trost of Logicware has made a new MacQ2refgl_Mesa to work along side the new Mesa driver. [It's mirrored here now, see link below and in sidebar - Mike]

I gave both of them a run through last night, and what I found on initial tests was a 10% bump in frame rates with the new driver, but nothing more with the new MacQ2refgl_Mesa library. I will try some more tests tonight to confirm that.

Also, I played a few games online last night, and I found that the modem networking was slow and laggy. Even on servers that gave decent pings on GameRanger, pings would vary much more than I would like to see. More testing on the modem play is needed to see if it was a server side problem or my computer. Please e-mail me and let me know how you are doing with a modem and Internet play.

I am still pleased with the Quake 2 and its overall gameplay.

Last Call:

Simon and Schuster have announced a new game Last Call. In the game, you are a bartender and your goal is to get the most tips. Sounds like it could be interesting and, judging by the cast of characters that are described, very humorous.

Unreal Tournament:

Brandon Reinhart of Epic Games has updated his .plan file. UT will ship with the ability to track your multiplayer stats online. Pretty cool. [Gamecenter.com has a preview of Unreal Tournament linked on their front page-Mike]

I would think that next week will be the banner week of the summer for cool game news and probably some good hardware news from MacWorld NY. Keep the questions and tips coming so we can stay on top of the gaming news. Email Randall at asenna@accessus.net

Mirror for Voodoo2/Quake2 GL Update: Nate of Logicware sent me the new update that adds multitexturing support for the Voodoo2 (not the Rage128) when using the Mesa2 libs noted in yesterday's news. Download macQ2refgl_Mesa.sit from my Mac mirror site.

More on MacAlly USB Mouse/Unreal Problems: My wild guess suggestion of USB Overdrive works but there are some settings to be aware of. Nike Vatsal sends more details:

" Hi Mike,
I just thought I'd send you what I found out on the incompatibility between the Macally USC iMouse Pro and Unreal (and other games that require Input Sprocket Drivers: see below). Other readers might be interested, esp anybody who is planning on buying a Macally mouse.

The basic problem is that there is no Macally Input Sprocket Driver for the Macally USB iMouse Pro. The Macally website has a beta for the Insput Sprocket Driver for the ADB version of this mouse, but nothing on the USB front. As it stands, this mouse simply won't work with games that require Input Sprocket drivers.

As pointed out to me by Tech Support at Wizworks, Unreal requires Input Sprockets to play, and so won't work with the Macally mouse. Presumably the same is true for other games of this type, but I haven't tested any others.

There are two workarounds:
a) use the round mouse from Apple
b) use USB overdrive, which was your original suggestion. In this case, one has to be careful NOT to mess with the settings in the USB overdrive control panel. The tempting "Overdrive Enabled" button should be left unchecked, and the mouse speed should be set to "System." Finally, the "Pass to MacOS" setting should also be left alone (I got this the hard way: by RTFM.)
-- Nike Vatsal. "

I've added this info to the the Games and Game Controllers section of my Freq. Asked Questions.

Ken Dyke of 3Dfx commented in my forums on a thread that has appeared there and in the front page news in the last week or so on the issue of PCI performance of Macs vs PCs. Ken had mentioned the Intel PCI chipset/CPU support for 'PCI Write Combining' that was one reason why Game/Video card performance was higher on the PC. Here's his latest comments on the Beige and B&W G3's XPC106 PCI/Memory controller, which several readers had indicated supported a feature similar to write combining, which Apple does not seem to have enabled:

"(It's MPC106 (or apparently XPC106 as marked on the chip), btw).

I don't think this will ever be enabled because it is simply the wrong place to do store gathering. Since the PCI controller has no idea what kind of memory is being written to (registers, frame buffer, etc.) it has no choice but to either always do store gathering or not at all. Control registers are just generally not designed to be bursted to. And I may be mistaken on this, but I *think* the MPC106 could also wind up rearranging the order of writes when store gathering is enabled, which is also generally a big no-no for many kinds of I/O. I know that it is unsafe (for example) to enable write combining to the "registers" area of our boards, which is one reason why we report back two memory segments to PCI (one for all of the registers, and another one for the framebuffer memory).

The CPU is simply the only device that would have enough knowledge to be able to correctly do the write combining stuff. This could either be done via a set of MTRRs (Memory Type Range Registers) as is done by Intel, or it could be done via new bits in the MMU page tables. Personally I favor the first approach since it is simpler. The BAT registers on PowerPC might be a good way to do this as well.
-Ken "

I noticed that today 3Dfx has a press release that their Voodoo 3 3500 (fastest model) is now going to be an option in some Compaq machines. I never liked Compaq's personally and considered them barely a cut above the 'packard smell' line. Looks like they'll have a decent video card though.

If you missed yesterday's late post of my Rage128 vs Game Rocket Review check it out. I'll try to update it later this week for Voodoo2 performance in Quake2 with the newly released multitexturing library. The Rage128 has multitexturing in hardware but the new lib only adds mulitexturing support for the Voodoo2.

7/13/99 Tuesday's News

Rage128 vs Game Rocket: I've posted my review/comparison of these two cards, tested in a B&W G3/400 (both 66MHz and 33MHz PCI slots), a 9600/350 (overclocked to 400MHz) and PowerCenter Pro 210. Tests included 2D, 3D/Apps/Lightwave 3D, Games (Quake 1, Quake2, Q3Test, Unreal and Falcon 4) and Movie playback. The 7 page review is organized by topic and includes hardware design and software control features. Sorry it's late but I had to retest to verify some puzzling results in the PowerCenter Pro 210 (ie Rave Quake 1024x768 scores were almost identical to the B&W G3/400's) that were verfied in repeat testing.-Mike

[Ruffin Bailey sent a news update after today's initial post-Mike]

" You would probably not see much of a FPS increase with a Voodoo3 vs a Voodoo2. To be honst, there's not a huge difference between the two even on my G3-400. Where the Voodoo3 wins is in the ability to do higher 3D resolutions, and you get 2D and 3D in one board. If you're happy with the Voodoo2 on your current system I really don't see a major reason to upgrade."

" The problem [regarding the speed of a Voodoo 2 vs. a Voodoo 3] is that many of the more popular games tend to be more CPU bound rather than fill rate bound. Thus, the extra fill rate of a Voodoo3 or Voodoo2 SLI isn't going to double your framerates unless you start to run things at high enough resolutions where fill rate becomes an issue." *And Ken, if you read this, are we going to be able to 'reflash' the ROM in a V3 in case we want to pull it and throw it into a PC? "Theoretically, yes, although I don't have anything implemented to do that yet."

Howdy! I am happy to report that I have made significant progress on Mac Descent 3. The game currently runs under glide/3dfx so far as to allow navigation, item pick up, bot killing, and door opening. Input sprockets have been implemented. There is still quite a ways to go but it is moving forward. I will be at MacWorld Expo with GSC to demo what I have running. Hope to see y'all there!

• Civilization II Gold
• Dark Vengeance
• FutureCop
• Jazz Jackrabbit 2
• Quake 1-3
• Railroad Tycoon 2
• Unreal
• Warcraft II

Peopleater: Curious how this was released hours after L4Q2, the Java Quake 2 server browser. ;)
Evill: Coincidence.
Peopleater: How do you know, Evill?
Evill: Because I wrote this :P [Notice Kevill -- Evill. Just thought I'd ask -R]
Peopleater: Well shucks. I wrote L4Q2
Peopleater: Looks great Evill.
Evill: Ruffin? [Hey, he did get those emails! -R]
Peopleater: Nods.
Evill: Ahh.
Evill: Sorry I had to keep you (and everyone else) in the dark
Peopleater: So you do this all yourself Evill? Or is there a team of Gamerangers?
Evill: There's just me.
Evill: I have had some people testing it, and giving opinions.
Evill: So that has helped.
Peopleater: Welp, Evill, great job. I'm glad you've got something [ie, advertising] that cheapskates can't rook you out of!
Peopleater: And next time... PLEASE let me know. ;)
Evill: Thanks.

• Finding someone by their nickname.
  
• Buddy lists
  
• Changing the number of simultaneous pings on each pass
  
• PC version not ruled out
  

" One astute gamer emailed us with a possible workaround for the error some people get when loading single player save games. This apparently is also a bug on the PC side. If you get a 'server at capacity' error when loading a saved game, try this: Open the Unreal.ini file with SimpleText, and in the section Engine.GameInfo, change MaxPlayers from 16 to 32. I haven't been able to repeat the errors on my test machines, even with known bad save games, so I couldn't verify it, but its worth a shot. "

Optimized Mesa3Dfx for Quake 2: If you got the B5 version yesterday they say it's buggy so get the B6 download now. Randall Markarian writes that he's seen a definate increase on his voodoo2 card:

"Mike,
I just tested the new MesaQuake 2 engine and I got an increase in framerates on the demo 1 and 2 maps. At 800x600 max detail, I got 36.3fps (from 32.4) on Demo 1 and 34.5 fps (from 31.6) on demo 2. So about another 10% bump in speed. Not bad. I wonder how much more he can milk out his driver?
Randall "

Randall had sent a late update for yesterday's game news but I missed it until now (I'm strangled in a review from hell and even the AC power seems against me)

Quake 2:

Miklos has updated the Mesa engine to Mesa Quake 2 3.1b6 status. This update provides multitexturing in Quake 2 to be allowed on Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 cards. This update is only for Quake 2 and not any other game. Nate Trost, from Logicware, posted to Usenet:

"I've got the updated ref_gl.lib for Mesa ready, BUT, when I downloaded the MesaQuake2 lib Miklos put up and tested it, it didn't seem to be reporting GL_ARB_multitexture to Q2, which was one of the main points of the update. I've emailed Miklos (for all I know I installed it wrong), but I want to make sure it's ready to go before uploading the ref_gl update. :-)

Speaking of which, I don't have a ftp server that can handle any kind of significant traffic to host it from at the moment. I'm planning on uploading it to the MGL hotline server, but any other game site people who want to mirror it, please drop me a line (the lib update is only 120k stuffed). [we will be mirroring it here as soon as I get it-Mike]

The degree of speed improvements will depend on if you have a Voodoo 1 or 2 card. The Voodoo 1 will see a little bit of a nudge, but you need the V2 to do multitexturing, and that should see quite a bit of a speed bump, from what I've heard from Miklos.
Nate Trost "

So the multittexturing may now be enabled for better framerates on Quake 2. [see above for his test results]

Game Ranger beta:

Scott Kevill released the first beta of his multigame finder application.Game Ranger supports an interactive chat feature ala Hotline and the ability to look for several different games. Currently eleven games can be located, including Quake 1, 2 and 3, with future support for over 20 more many of which are unreleased or just announced. Another program for locating Quake 2 games is the finder developed by our own Ruffin Bailey.

7/12/99 Monday's News

I am sorry that this update is late and will be short, but I got in well after midnight from a vacation to see the CART race at a track in Wisconsin, Road America. After seeing the race, I was lamenting the lack of racing games for the Mac. Sure I like Carmageddon and C2 as much as the next guy, but a revamped IndyCar or something else would be greatly appreciated. Hopefully with the gaming resurgence that we are seeing on the Mac, a great racing simulation will be one of the next beg announcements coming. Well we can only hope. Quake 3 Arena Test:

The people at id Software have been updating their plan files to let us know that the next test release will be "soon." Sure it will be. ;-) I think that there will be a release in the very near future from them and it looks like there will be some improvements to the current levels, and it will have a new level in it try out.

Quake 2:

With the recent release of Quake 2 for the Mac, I have gotten some e-mail about whether PC add on packs can work with Mac Quake 2. I will be trying to see what can be done to make those mods work, or if its even possible. Also there have been questions about the modem performance of network games. I will do some…uh research on that tonight. :-).

Misc:

One quick note, please include a valid e-mail address if you want a reply to a question. Some questions are better answered directly than on the Game news page so just keep that in mind. Thanks, but do keep those question and tips coming.

[This is from the front page news - which also has some interesting Mac PCI tech info today-Mike]

ATI Updates Rage128 Status: I cringe at even posting this but here goes:

"Hi Mike,
Well I know you've advised me not to take ATI's price page information too literally, but FWIW, they just today updated the shipping status on the Rage 128's. They are suddenly showing the ORION shipping date as "NOW". They also have changed both the Nexus and Xclaim VR status to "Summer '99". Until today the Nexus was shown as "June '99" and the Xclaim VR was shown as "August '99".
See for yourself:
http://www.atitech.com/ca_us/buy_ati/prices.html
Regards,
Tony Pierry "

I know there are a lot of frustrated readers who've been waiting on these-Mike