April 21, 2006 by Santaduck.

Tactical Ops:Crossfire Interview: I just interviewed my long time friend Petterf regarding the upcoming Tactical Ops: Crossfire release. TO:C is the free mod for UT2004, an updated of the original mod for UT99 which was the most popular mod for Unreal. Of course, the prerelease begins today (see April 2 news below), with the server version being released, as well as a client encrypted with a password– the password will be released in one week (Apr 28), so that servers will be up, running, and populated from minute one. Petterf is the official Mac member of the TO:C team, but I also know him from his earlier roles as TO:AoT [rm] server admin, and an official Mac betatester for UT2004, the original TO and TO:AoT, as well as for TOST. Petter also gave us some exclusive screenshots, and Province looks very nice indeed. Check it out here.

XIII Review: Our reviews editor just finished up his review of Feral Interactive’s XIII. Now I saw this game before on a Feral preview disk, and it was beautiful– it’s a FPS based on the Unreal engine, but omg, it’s beautiful with severe tweaking of the engine which results in beautifully cel-shaded (think comic) graphics. They did a great job on this, much better than that old Robin Hood cartoon mod. You’ll see comic panel headshots, and POW! hit damage, and the like. The thing is, now I want to buy this game, after reading his review. The storyline is apparently Robert Ludlum-esque, with the conspiracy theories ratcheting up a notch at every step, and of course, you wake up with a loss of memory and the world after you. Check out the review here.

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April 21, 2006 by Santaduck.

Robert Cringley, host of PBS’s Electric Money and former columnist for Infoworld, wrote today in his blog regarding the relationship between OS X and Windows.

One of the most attention-grabbing topics was the possibility of running Windows applications on Apple Macintoshes, without installing Windows XP, and without Windows virtualization:

“I also believe that Apple will offer in OS X 10.5 the ability to run native Windows XP applications with no copy of XP installed on the machine at all. This will be accomplished not by using compatibility middleware like Wine, but rather by Apple implementing the Windows API directly in OS X 10.5…

‘m told Apple has long had this running in the Cupertino lab — Intel Macs running OS X while mixing Apple and XP applications. This is not a guess or a rumor, this something that has been demonstrated and observed by people who have since reported to me.

Think of the implications. A souped-up OS X kernel with native Windows API support and the prospect of mixing and matching Windows and Mac applications would be, for many users, the best of both worlds. There would be no copy of Windows XP to buy…”

Cringley begins by thinking through Apple’s strategy regarding Windows, given its latest moves. He comes to his speculation based upon Steve Jobs’ 1997 $150M deal with Microsoft, where Apple may have obtained some legal rights to the Windows API, which could enable Windows apps directly in OS X.

Granted, Cringley simply makes several speculations and offers these all up as possibilities to think about, but the legal issues and the impact on users as well as the future of Apple are far-reaching.

Read more here: Robert Cringley PBS blogarticle

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April 14, 2006 by Santaduck.

Well, I’d nearly forgotten all about it, and guess what popped into the mailbox this week? It’s good for either the Apple online or brick-and-mortar stores, but only on Apple branded products. What to do with fifty dollars. . .

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April 14, 2006 by Santaduck.

I forgot to mention, we just published a XXXX-load of benchmarks on the new Intel-based iMacs and the MacBook Pro, in comparison with the Macologist staff’s machines, from an iMac G4 all the way up to a quadcore PowerMac G5. The article is HOT apparently– we’ve only had it up three days and it has gotten almost 30K (yes 30,000) unique hits. See the secret is quantity = quality =x. Haha, Actually it was such a bear to do all of these benchmarks, and coordinate the staff, I’m happy to have what we have, and just left it at that, but the FUN part is that I’ve tried to provide crystal clear instructions so that you can run all of the benchmarks yourself. I’d like to do an update soon, as Cinebench got updated (for the 3rd time since we began testing for this article: we had started with CB2003, then we had an internal Universal Binary, then they came out with the UB 9.5, and now they have some OpenGL optimizations), we also had some tips on running a compiled SciMark (rather than relying on Java’s JIT– just in time– compiling), heard about an interesting benchmark called GeekBench(MBP results here), and need to finish up some more rigs on the Photoshop benchmark. Man, the iTunes vs. QT player finding was really neat too…

Go take a look: Macologist’s Intel Mac Benchmark Smorgasbord.

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April 2, 2006 by Santaduck.

Well this is actually April 1 news (I’m a day late), but it’s not April Fools. Do any of you remember the alias MadOnion? He was the head of TOST, that Tactical Ops anticheat app way back when, and I had lots of chats with him back in the day. Anyways now he’s the lead coder for TO:C, that’s Tactical Ops: Crossfire for UT2004, the mod that was announced on April 1 of last year. Well on year later, they are ready to go. They have announced an April 28 launch date for their first public release. Actually it will be a slam BANG of a release, since they will prep the community to be up and running from the first minute. Here’s how: Downloads of the server app will be made available one week earlier, on April 21. Also the client will be made available for download on that day via bittorrent, but it will be password-encrypted. The password will be released on the official launch day, April 28, when the normal http and ftp download links go live.

In case you missed the original Tactical Ops, it was a semi-realism shooter, that became the most popular mod for the old Unreal Tournament (UT99). TO:Crossfire, like the original, will stay true to its action-oriented roots with well-planned multipathed maps but with beautifully updated looks for the UT2004 engine– that maps are just stunning. Updated screenshots are available at the official site, and the Mac member of the team, Petter, let me know of the ModDB feature URL on TO:C.

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