[OT] Quake III for OS/X

[martins]

Hi all

Firstly apologise for the odd place to put this question, but it didn't really fit in the other forums :)

I have a PC version of Quake III, and I'm keen to have a bash on my new iMac. Has anyone successfully managed to get the demo Mac version to take the full 'baseq3' files so the full game can be played?

Many thanks all

Martin

[tsugaru]

Nope but I got Quake III the other day with Team Arena for $34.95 Canadian, which were hybrid discs (Mac + PC Compatible).

So if you really like that game that much, pretty sure you could fork over about 20US to get it.

[griffman]

It's an interesting question, assuming one bought the game for the PC in the first place. I'm pretty sure the license wouldn't allow you to use it on two machines, but if you removed it completely from the PC and only played it on the Mac, are you violating the license agreement (probably you are when viewed from a legal perspective, but if you've paid for one game and you're using one game on one computer, is that piracy??). It is possible to make this work, though I honestly don't recall what I did (nothing fancy, though). BUT ...

... if you've got the extra cash, I'd recommend buying it -- I did so, even though I owned the PC version, as I wanted to show some support for the Mac gaming market. Without $$ sales, then there won't be other ports, and we'll all be whining about the lack of Mac games.

-rob.

[martins]

Nod, I'm a strong believer in buying software and supporting various platforms, but I was under the impression that once you have bought the game 'Quake III' with the maps and everything, the engine you used wasn't important (hence the Linux version when I don't believe they produced a boxed linux licence for a long while).

I'm yet to really take this mac seriously as a gaming platform yet though, so the interest was more to see quite how stable and fast it was on the full game with online games and then if impressed go and buy Castle Wolf etc.

Thanks for your comments so far though!

Cheers

Martin

[griffman]

I believe all I did was create a directory structure that matched what I saw on the PC, and then everything just worked.

It plays quite nicely on my G4/733 with NVidia3 card (at 800x600 for max in game speed, also decent at 1024x768) ... should do great on anything newer/nicer than that. It ran OK on a G4/350 with an ATI 128 card, but only at 640x480.

-rob.

[tsugaru]

Wow Griff. Nice VDO card.

Do you think it would be worth it for me to get a GeForce4Ti? I have an MX already. Do you think I would get a noticeable speed boost?

Castle Wolfenstein owns on my Mac. It runs faster than on my Athlon, and my Athlon is a little more powerful, video and megahertz wise.

I love MoH. Rocking game (too bad I stink).

[griffman]

Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com) is my favorite source of video card information, with the general assumption that what holds true on the PC should also hold true on the Mac. Tested on very fast PCs, this chart (http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20021218/vgacharts-06.html) shows the advantage of the 4600 over the MX running Jedi Knight II.

Some of the other charts show even larger differences in other games, so they might be worth a look as well.

In short, if you've got the cash, it's probably worth it (though I'm also tempted by the ATI 9700, if it works with the Mac (does it?)).

-rob.

[blendesign]

I'm wondering if you guys run Quake 3 in Classic or in OSX? A buddy at work found a fix where it runs in Classic, but it is waaaaay choppy. There is a GeForce2 MX 32MB video card in my G4 now, but I'm thinking it's running so choppy because it's running quake in classic mode. Thanks.

[RacerX]

I'm yet to really take this mac seriously as a gaming platform yet though,
:rolleyes: This begs the question: Should any platform be taken seriously based on gaming? ;)

Maybe you could take John Carmack's word for it. He is (and has been for awhile) a big supporter of Macs and Mac gaming and made sure that Quake III was released for the Mac at the same time as for other platforms (and all the prerelease testing for Quake III was done on Macs as I recall).

He also helped with the ports of Quake II and Quake III (unfinished) to Rhapsody as he was also a Rhapsody user too. I still play Quake II on my Rhapsody system.

As for Quake III Arena, I play that in Mac OS X a lot too... when I'm not playing Ghost Recon. :rolleyes: