[Sesquipedalian]

With the arrival of the new intel macs (I'm saving up my pennies), I'm wondering what work will need to be done to get fs2_open running on them.  Will it just be a simple recompile, or will there be more work involved?

[Taristin]

Why would you want an intel mac? I could see an AMD mac... but why intel?

[WMCoolmon]

Sothat you can run Windows XP instead of Mac OS X, I guess.

Possibly games.

[Sesquipedalian]

They switched to Intel because IBM was dropping the ball on future development for the PowerPC architecture.  As for why they picked Intel over AMD, I have no idea.

At any rate, the new Macs are the first computers to use Intel's new dual core processors.  Gives a pretty dramatic speed boost.  Apparently the new laptop is the fastest laptop on the market (for the next few months, until other companies start shipping laptops with the Core Duo in them).

And yes, one could dual boot XP (or run it in a virtual machine), but why would one want to do that? *shudders*


Anyway, none of this is relevant to my question.  My guess is that it will be simple to recompile the tarball to run on the x86 version of OS X, but I was curious to know what taylor had to say.

[taylor]

Future OS X versions should be universal binaries, the same APP should work on both platforms (PPC Macs and new Intel Macs).  I haven't had any time to get that done yet though.  I've had time to really do only one thing for SCP lately so I opted to fix bugs instead of working on the OS X version more.  There will be more nightlies of OS X and Linux builds as soon as I get the time to work on it again.  I'll make the switch to UB not long after I start those up again.

[Sesquipedalian]

  Good to hear.  Thanks muchly, taylor, for all your work.  It is greatly appreciated.

[CaptJosh]

As for why Apple has chosen Intel over AMD, Intel already had the manufacturing capacity. If they had gone with AMD, they would have had to wait for the new AMD chip plant to go on-line. (Also, there are a few features Intel will be implementing regarding copyright protection that they wanted so as to be seen as being friendly to the music and movie industry, IIRC.) In any case, this is going to be interesting. Some people have already gotten betas of the x86 version of OSX to work on regular IBM compatible PCs with no emulation.

[Ulf]

Intel makes every piece that Apple needs.  If they went with AMD, where would they get the motherboards from?  Intel offers a complete solution.

As regarding to Windows/OSX, right now it can't happen because the new Intel Macs use Intel's BIOS successor called EFI.

Windows XP doesn't support EFI, so it doesn't work on the Intel Macs.  With no EFI motherboards available (Except maybeItanium), no one can boot OS X on a non-Mac.

[CaptJosh]

Noone can boot OS X on a non-mac?  HAH! You need to do a litlle detective work with Google. OS X has indeed been made to run on current IBM compatible PC hardware without emulation. It took some work, but it has been done.

[northtwilight]

My landlord is a big Mac fanatic, though not a computer geek as such. He had a great idea - wait 'til the second generation of Core Duo-powered machines come out, and then lease one of them.

I have to say, that's probably the best idea I've heard all week. I'd want to run virtualisation software like Xen on it though ...