Tetsuo Time

IntroductionThere's one thing I want to talk about today and it's the state of 3D sound for games on Mac OS X… but first some background. Warning, this is fairly technical and you should know your way around a config file or in-game command line console although an increasing number of games don't need such "arcane" trickery. You might also want to make sure that if you are using surround sound speakers rather than headphones that your speakers are setup correctly such as in the example picture shown above. A relatively simple guide can be found here at Dolby's site. Subwoofer placement is more tricky and should be done via a "subwoofer crawl" rather than just placing it front center or tucking it in any old corner. There are also other resources on the web to help you with speaker placement if you need more in depth information.

It also goes without saying but if 2.1, also known as regular stereo is good enough for you then this article does not apply to you at all.

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Apparently Cider can be hacked to run Windows games other than the one that came with it. The compatibility is hit or miss with that kind of hack because those games weren't tailored for Cider but if I had an intel Mac I'd be trying out all kinds of games.. including some made by the community that haven't got Mac versions out. Like WinROTTGL or eduke32. The sky is the limit actually.

Transgaming just announced a program that will let game makers more quickly and easily bring games to the Mac. It's called Cider. It'll be cool if it works well and it means more simultanious games releases for PC/Mac (as in, every new PC release also has cider to allow it to run on a Mac as well). A great thing is a number of AAA PC titles use a proprietary physics engine called Havok which the company who makes it has been deliberatly pricing out of the reach of companies who bring games over to the Mac so this might be a way around that as you'd be running pretty much the same game on the PC/Mac. The idea is sort of like Wine or Cedega for Linux but for Mac and I guess the companies compile their game using Cider which creates an executable for the Mac... though at this point it doesn't seem like they are going to have a version that lets you run pre-existing games with it you have to get new games that use it and that's because they want to work with the game makers to bring their titles to the Mac simultaneously in the same disc instead of appearing to be working behind their backs I read.

BTW, games using Cider would pretty much just be for the new intel macs because of the way it works. It implements a version of win32 (the program running under all windows applications), directx etc. to run natively in OS X and doesn't emulate any hardware. So that means it wouldn't work on the old PowerPC macs unless they add in intel emulation which would make things much slower than they should be.

They said "TransGaming already has agreements in place with a number of the top tier video game publishers to bring their titles to the Intel Mac. Mac gamers can expect the release of these titles in the next few months." I am very curious as to which publishers and which titles are a part of these first agreements.