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Which games are better on a Macintosh?

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First post, by robertmo

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Prince Of Persia 1
Prince Of Persia 2

Wolf Pack
Comanche
Werewolf vs. Comanche
F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter 2.0
Falcon MC (3)
Chuck Yeager's Air Combat
Red Baron
Terminal Velocity
Bill Elliott's NASCAR Challenge
Vette!

Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra
Might and Magic: World of Xeen
Ultima III

Populous
Populous II
Powermonger
Master Of Orion
Castles II
DinoPark Tycoon

Lemmings
Oh No! More Lemmings

Alone In The Dark 1
Alone In The Dark 2
Alone In The Dark 3

Wayne Gretzky Hockey
4D Boxing

Last edited by robertmo on 2023-06-18, 15:33. Edited 18 times in total.

Reply 1 of 261, by dr_st

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Prince of Persia I and II (I think first one used better graphics and the second one a higher resolution)

https://cloakedthargoid.wordpress.com/ - Random content on hardware, software, games and toys

Reply 2 of 261, by leileilol

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Everything. Mac is just the superior gaming platform. There's no bat autoexecs or sys configs to edit. You don't need to buy a "sound card" or a "video card". You don't need a complicated two button mouse. Everything just works. How can this be?

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 3 of 261, by luckybob

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leileilol wrote:

Everything. Mac is just the superior gaming platform. There's no bat autoexecs or sys configs to edit. You don't need to buy a "sound card" or a "video card". You don't need a complicated two button mouse. Everything just works. How can this be?

go play Starcraft with one mouse button. Or diablo for that matter.

That said, simcity 2000 and Lemmings were much better. At least from my perspective.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 5 of 261, by luckybob

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yes. I have several boxed copies. It ran better, at least on the machine I had. It might seem arbitrary and empirical, but it also "felt" faster. Sound in lemmings was so much better on mac and amiga compared to dos. Those are the two I have PERSONAL experience with at least. I've played Civ2 on both, but i never noticed a difference.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 6 of 261, by dJOS

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Lemmings is best on the Amiga, simply no contest imo!

It helps that Lemmings was developed on the Amiga first and ported to other platforms.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

Reply 8 of 261, by filipetolhuizen

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Don't forget about Lucasarts adventures. All except Indy3 and Loom (which ran in 16 colours) had an option like a super eagle filter for smoother graphics, since they all ran in hi-res.
There's also Terminal Velocity which can be run in 1024x768 and looks amazing.
Dark Forces for the Mac certainly feels more natural running in hires than the crippled PC version stuck at 320x200.
Duke Nukem 3D however has a texture corruption issue that forces you to save, quit and load in order to look right again.

Reply 9 of 261, by luckybob

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Anything made by Ambrosia was glorious on mac. yes, quite a few were just ports of common games, but Apeiron and Maelstrom were glorious compared to the PC counterparts. Escape Velocity has no peers in the PC world I found.

I almost forgot Star Trek 25th was on both (and I played both) The two were equal imho.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 10 of 261, by filipetolhuizen

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luckybob wrote:

I almost forgot Star Trek 25th was on both (and I played both) The two were equal imho.

I forgot about that one. It has digitized sounds, which the PC version doesn't.

Reply 11 of 261, by luckybob

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Well, admittedly, the last time I played star trek 25th ON THE MAC I was 9-10 ish. Sometime in 1994-5. But when I replayed it much later, I didn't notice any difference. Save for having a right click, which was a LIFESAVER.

I'm sure if you put them side by side NOW, I'd likely hear a difference, and from what I know of mac, I'd wager it would probably sound better on it.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 12 of 261, by Dystopia

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luckybob wrote:

I've played Civ2 on both, but i never noticed a difference.

Civ2 is basically the same on both, but Civ1 is a world apart. The sprites are higher quality and the UI uses the standard Mac OS interface, so it scales nicely on higher res monitors (a lot of older Mac games did this, especially strategy games). On a more modern monitor you can pretty much see the entire map on screen at once. Managing your saves is easier because you can have 31 character file names, sort them in the Finder and launch them by double clicking the save files directly.

You might not think much of that, but back when I did a retrospective of the Civ series in the Ars Technica forums (not the crap ripoff posted on the front page by one of the staff) in the lead up to the release of Civ 5, I used the Windows version and the 8.3 filenames were a total nightmare compared to playing it my childhood. The Mac version's default save filenames have a structure of 2-4 letters indicating difficulty setting, your leader's name, and 6 characters for for the ingame date. The Windows version gives you 2 letters for leader name, 6 characters for date and a useless extension. Even playing on Vista enforce the 8.3 names. It makes it near impossible to keep your saves in any sort of order without making a separate subfolder for every game. Plus you had to load your saves via the ingame Windows 3.1 style dialog box. The Windows version does at least have the Mac version's other improvements and thus is superior to the DOS version.

Here's a screenshot of the Mac version from Moby.

188762-sid-meier-s-civilization-macintosh-screenshot-sending-out.png

If you allocate it more RAM you can drag that map window out to fully cover a 1920x1200 display. It's fantastic.

Only downside is there's less music, but what there is is high quality.

Last edited by Dystopia on 2018-03-21, 11:05. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 14 of 261, by filipetolhuizen

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DarkForces was indeed meant to be run in hires, I wonder why they made the PC version stuck at that horrible low-res. Civ 1 looks amazing!

Reply 15 of 261, by leileilol

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Because in 1994 when they did the bulk of their development there wasn't really any reliable 640x480x256 double buffering available for most video cards that aren't S3 Trio32/Mach32/etc.. 1995 games barely had SVGA modes

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 16 of 261, by dr.zeissler

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...but the "mac-platform" had some compared to the pc "miner" problems. first the architecture-transition from 68k to the ppc.
So I think you have to have both architectures., but what machines? there are lot's to choose from and they are all great 😀

within 68k you sometimes need 32bit-adressing, some games do not like it. Faster 68030+ do not work or have speed-issues
on older games. (some adventures for example). Some older adventure-games do not support the mt32, lot's do indeed,
and the "sound" (mostly the music) does not sound very well on a mac with "no-opl".

to me the early ppc's 60/66 are slow, compared to a dx2/66, but that might be wrong because I tested later ppc-games,
that need much more power. My 7300 with G3/500 is very fast, but I lot's of cases to fast for 68k/games and the early ppc-
titles. For 3D the pci-banshee I currently use in that 7300-G3-pimped machine I better have to put a real V2/V3 in it, but the
image quality is perfect on that banshee.

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines

Reply 18 of 261, by robertmo

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filipetolhuizen wrote:

DarkForces was indeed meant to be run in hires, I wonder why they made the PC version stuck at that horrible low-res.

They should already make it look like this 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ue35ago3Y

Reply 19 of 261, by filipetolhuizen

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leileilol wrote:

Because in 1994 when they did the bulk of their development there wasn't really any reliable 640x480x256 double buffering available for most video cards that aren't S3 Trio32/Mach32/etc.. 1995 games barely had SVGA modes

They could at least leave us a choice or made a later patch. The rendering looks like Duke Nukem 3D. Even lameduke, from the same year, had a SVGA mode. Some games like Hi-Octane took 2 or 3 PC generations to run fast enough in SVGA mode, NFS would only play smoothly in SVGA mode with something close to a Pentium 200MHz.