Which versions of OSX should I keep for testing?
Archives Forums/MacOS X Discussion/Which versions of OSX should I keep for testing?
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| I have Panther 10.3 on a PPC so I can still make old builds. I have a Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard 10.6 I have a Macbook Air with Lion 10.7 I need to get Mountain Lion to test out the whole gatekeeper crap but not sure if I should upgrade one of the old ones. Don't want to buy a new machine for obvious reasons. Do people dual boot different OSX versions on Macbooks? I've never tried that. Is it easy? Last edited 2012 |
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| I have snow leopard, and Lion on dual boot - it was very easy to do it - I just follow some guides on the internet and was good to go. I have no intentions to upgrado to Montain Lion anytime soon - dont want to 'break' everything - and as long as my builds still get approved on the app store, I'm keeping just Snow Leopard and Lion =P ~ |
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| I have Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion dualboot on my iMac. For dualboot I use rEFIt. |
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| Thanks for the info. If I set up Dual Boot now will it screw up my existing OS or will that be safe and the new OS is effectively in a new partition? (I'd have thought it would want to defrag first to get a nice clean partition of a fixed size). |
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| Easiest way to dual boot for basic testing IMO is to install the OS on a flash drive or external hard drive. Doesn't take away from your main system, no chance of booting the wrong one accidentally if it's unplugged, and you can use it on other computers for recovery, or testing etc. just handy to have. That said to anyone running Lion, I would urge you to upgrade to Mountain Lion. It's just lion with a LOT of fixes and features that should have been in Lion from the start. THAT said, snow leopard is still way better as a power user OS, but the times, they a-change or so I've heard. P.S. anything PPC based at this point is definitely legacy hardware and shouldn't factor into your targets unless you have a specific need. It's a headache of legacy management (especially across architectures and legacy OS versions) and paying users (generally speaking) have newer hardware anyway. Once apple officially drops something it's safe to move on in the Mac world, and they killed off the last bit of PPC support in Lion when they axed rosetta (stupid move IMO since it was install on demand in snow leopard and meant much better legacy support for those that might need or want it with no real development cost for Apple, just let it sit there...) |
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| Wow that's a great idea about the external drive, didn't know you could do that. Well maybe I'll try and do that for Windows 8 (on my Windows 7 PC) and I'll just upgrade my Lion machine to ML. A couple of years ago we compiled a version of Fairway Solitaire at BFG for Intel Mac only but lots of customers complained so we had to add the PPC build back in (as a Universal binary)! Perhaps lots of those people will have upgraded now. Didn't know Rosetta was removed. |
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| What ima747 said. Simply start your Mac with the Option key pressed, in order to display all the possible bootable drives, including the external ones. ;-) http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343 |
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| Yea, rosetta was axed in Lion. Apple has officially discontinued PPC support, and a few years is a LONG time in the OS world :0) I've always been a huge fan of supporting everything possible (larger customer base is always a good thing), but you need to go 3 major OS versions back to even have PPC app support. and 4 versions back (10.6) PPC was dropped from hardware support. so unless you explicitly support leopard (10.5) users will only be on Intel hardware anyway, and on leopard most users will be on intel regardless. Anyone who Bought an OS (not just hardware, but even OS upgrades) since august of 2009 is running intel hardware. Anyone who bought hardware since 2006 probably has intel. Also looking at the specs of PPC based hardware they're all pretty darn old and dated, obviously the OS is way behind. It just doesn't make sense to spend development time and effort on a dead platform, especially one where people aren't buying new software (they can't no one makes PPC software any more). Macs have always loved external media as a boot option, unlike windows where it requires quite a bit of hacking (although windows 8 supposedly can do USB installs now finally, thought I wasn't able to get it working last time I tried). Take advantage of it! A full system on a nice fast USB stick makes fixing things SOOOOOOOOOO easy. You can run the drive tools etc. but since you've got the full OS you can also move files around easily, get on the internet to get help, etc. Much easier than a repair console, or utilities boot where you need another computer to look up instructions. RIP PPC, was a nicer architecture IMO, but it's time in the mainstream has passed. Interesting side bar: Microsoft switched from x86 in the Xbox to PPC in the Xbox 360 right around the time Apple switched from PPC on macs to x86... In fact the first Xbox 360 dev kits were just Apple PowerMac G5's since they used the same processor it was as close as they could get until they finalized their hardware specs. Last edited 2012 |
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| Well, looking at Unity3D webplayer stats, PPC Mac users are no more: http://unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats/pages/web-2012Q3-cpu.html |
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| Wow Corum, that's cool about the option key, didn't know that. Yeah I sell casual games so the Unity stats aren't much use to see PPC players, they are out there in big numbers. |
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| According to those unity numbers there are over 5.5 times more users running mac pro's than PPC users. considering apple has considered discontinuing the mac pro as a line because not enough people buy it (and righfully so, it's obscenely expensive... that said you can pry mine from my cold dead hands, and only then after I buy a new one...) granted yes this is for 3D games through their web player interface, but still, your typical mac pro user isn't going to spend a lot of time gaming in a web player. they're either professionals with crazy budgets who demand peak performance on Mac OS, or just really rich people who can afford the shiniest of toys. The former don't game at all, and the latter can afford better gaming experiences than a unity web player... and again, that number of visible users is >5.5 times that of PPC users... Certainly there are other factors, but I would be shocked if 1 sale in a thousand of even a casual game, and ONLY looking at mac as a platform, was PPC... when you factor in windows as well where you're majority of sales will typically come from for just about anything because there's 9 to 1 more PC users... 1 in 10k might be PPC mac? how much development and testing time is that worth? I love me some legacy support, but there comes a time where you just have to spend your resources on something more productive. RIP PPC. |
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| Exactly. I'd be willing to support older installations of already delivered games, but considering to publish a brand new game right now, for a dead architecture, even abandoned by its developer, in my eyes it looks like a waste of money and effort. |
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| Ah yes I totally agree with that. I support my old games on PPC but not new games, they'll be Intel only. Btw, I upgraded my Macbook Air to Mountain Lion and then XCode as well. It seems to have gone well but BMax won't compile yet due to sh: gcc: command not found. Looking into it. |
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| Make sure you're using newest BMax and you install the command line tools inside XCode (in the preferences) |
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| Yep did all that and it worked. Thanks. |
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