Converting to Mac but confused...
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Converting to Mac but confused...
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| Hi there, got my first PC game ready to go out the door ! ;o) But I believe it is a good idea to release on the Mac as the Market is smaller and less like the PC's 'wild west' market. So I will need to buy a Mac. Problem 1. Which is the best target platform to aim for? Problem 2. I believe Macs come in two flavours Intel and Power PC only I can't see any of the Power PC ones up for sale now, would this effect the potential sales of the game? Cheers Merx |
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| 1. The Windows market is bigger, but I find the conversion rate of the Mac market to be better, probably because there are fewer options. 2. PowerPC Macs are no longer made. If you buy a new one, it'll be an Intel Mac. There are still a lot of PPC users out there, but their numbers are decreasing. If budget allows, picking up a cheap used PPC Mac to compile on (in addition to an Intel Mac) would be a good idea right now, but it becomes less of a necessity every day. |
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| So would the Mac Mini be a good choice as a development and low end Mac? |
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| I think a Mac Mini would be alright, but it does have one big negative - the Intel GMA 950 graphics. Personally, I use a MacBook, which has the Intel GMA X3100. It's still not a great graphics solution, but more stuff seems to work with it than the older 950. I'd strongly suggest that you check out the refurb section on the Apple Store website. Last time I looked, they had a refurb MacBook for $899 US and a Mac Mini for $499 US. The refurbs have the same warranty as the new ones, so all you really lose is the pretty black box (it's shipped in a brown one instead). Oh, and on the PowerPC side, I use a Mac Mini. It was my primary dev box for a long time, and still works great now. |
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| Cheers jhans0n I'll keep an eye out for a bargain! |
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| I recommend getting a mac that has a `real` graphics card, not integrated graphics. When the newer imacs came out, and just before those the ones that were all-white, they had a 15" model which had integrated graphics - I avoided that and went for the 17" - now I think they all have them. Much better option than a mac mini which is already way underpowered. |
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| I'd have a good think about what your customers are likely to have. What the GMA X3100 (and above) can do is largely irrelevant to you if your target audience are the kind of people who bought Mac Minis. Personally I'd say integrated graphics are the indie dev's best friend -- low-end gfx cards are what keep you from having to compete with the industry behemoths. |
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| My main dev machine is a PC, but I have a MacBookPro (Intel) to do my main Mac testing on and to compile Intel exes. Then I have a really cheap PPC to make the PPC exes on. I then combine them into a Universal Binary on the Intel Mac. |
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| If you are planning to buy a mac then you are planning to target a mac audience, which means you should look at what most mac owners are using, and it isn't integrated graphics. All computers except the entry level mac mini now come with dedicated graphics cards. I would say the mac mini low end market, and possible some older imacs, are a small percentage of the whole and not really worth degrading your graphics just to support. Make your engine a bit flexible in how many bells and whistles it uses - make it scale well, that'll do better to support the low end than to OPT to buy a low-end card for yourself - yes you'd be able to test low end performance but for yourself you might as well have a system that runs pretty fast to develop on. When I was developing on a 1GHz G4 iMac flatscreen, it was pretty decentish performance up to a point, good enough to do all the rotating zooming graphics stuff in most casual games and reasonble good creative freedom, but still limited, and that was even with a GeForce4MX graphics card. If you're going with integrated graphics you've gotta expect it's even slower than that, maybe not even half the performance. I would say that's THE lowest end, not just `low end` but rock bottom. It's just my opinion but I think you'll be much happier working on a mac with a graphics card even if it's going to cost more intially. |
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| My "low end" Mac mini seems to handle everything I can throw at it - insofar as particle effects and what not. I think a 2Ghz Core2 can generally cope well with a lot of work. It all depends what you want to do. I'm sure it would manage to run a card-based golf game... at a push :-p My main issue with iMacs and the laptops is that I already have screens.. which means I'd have to get a Mac Pro tower, which is a large step-up price-wise. Although it would be nice to stick in 8gig of RAM and have 8 cores to play a match-3 game. |
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| A Mac Mini would have been my 'Ideal' choice as it is cheap, small and I already have a monitor/keyboard and mouse! So the only issue is can the Intel GMA 950 chipset handle the 2D and OpenGL lightweight 3D games a solo indipendant games developer can build? |
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| I have a GMA 945 and I'm using Max in my labtop. I'm getting 30-60 fps while on my nVidia I get 120-180 fps |
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| If you are planning to buy a mac then you are planning to target a mac audience, which means you should look at what most mac owners are using, and it isn't integrated graphics. You're assuming that 'most Mac owners' constitute the casual audience -- do we actually know this? Do you not think it is conceivable that Mac owners with better than integrated gfx might, by virtue of having those cards, actually prefer to spend their money on the more mainstream games that they can run? We can't really call this without some reliable stats. It's just my opinion but I think you'll be much happier working on a mac with a graphics card I want to agree, because if you shouldn't skimp on chairs then getting the nicest dev machine you can afford clearly follows. Personally, though, I would not be comfortable splashing out on the more expensive models without AppleCare, so the leap in price for such machines ends up quite significant -- unless the stats mentioned above backed up this decision, I would wonder if the expense would add all that much value. |
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