Brian Rumsey - Dec. 8, 2000
Chances are you have complained about the rapidly rising system
requirements of games. I know I have. One has to admit, though,
that with all the power available, developers have been able to
come up with some pretty impressive graphics. While many of these
new games are very good overall, it is easy to find yourself
wishing that your favorite classics were able to take advantage of
all these goodies like video cards with up to 64 MB of VRAM.
Depending on which games you list among your favorite classics,
this wish may be reality. These transformations have a wide range
of origins, from patches released by the developers of the game to
open-source projects allowing anyone interested to help work on
adding support for 3D accelerators to various games. Some of these
patches are more well known than others, but I'll try to hit
several in hopes of spreading the word as much as possible.
For those who are not sure exactly what I'm talking about, the
use of 3D acceleration in games, especially action games, has risen
greatly over the past few years, to the point where it is required
for most new games of certain genres. 3D acceleration uses a video
card to render enhanced graphics, taking the burden off of the main
CPU. 3D accelerated graphics cards have been included in all recent
Macs and can also be added to Macs with PCI slots.
The biggest names in the Mac 3D acceleration world are ATI
Technologies and 3Dfx Interactive. The terms Glide, RAVE, and
OpenGL indicate 3D acceleration. ATI and 3Dfx cards both support
RAVE and OpenGL, and 3Dfx cards also support Glide.
One of the most popular games a couple of years ago was the
original Quake. The 3D patches for Quake are fairly well known. If
you need them, you can download them from Westlake
Interactive. These patches are official and should be quite
stable. They support Glide and Rave. Also available is an
unofficial patch to allow Quake to be used with OpenGL. This patch,
called GLQuake, is available from p0x's
Playhouse.
Westlake Interactive, which developed the 3D accelerated version
of Quake, also has the patches needed for another game, Shadow
Warrior. As far as I know, there is no support for ATI cards with
Shadow Warrior - only 3Dfx. The patch, which is available from
Westlake,
only supports the full version of Shadow Warrior, which I do not
have, so I can't comment on how well it works.
Shadow Warrior is closely related to another game, Duke Nukem.
Duke Nukem does not have an official 3D accelerator patch, but that
has not prevented an unofficial one from being developed. The
patch, glDuke, uses OpenGL, so it should be compatible with most
modern graphics cards. Personally, I have had some trouble getting
glDuke to work well with my Voodoo3 card, but since this patch is
still in early beta, some inconsistency is to be expected. glDuke
is available from glDuke's Official Web
Page.
Possibly the most popular series of games for the Mac in the
mid-nineties was the Marathon series. None of the entries in this
series incorporated 3D acceleration at the time of their release,
but thanks to the Marathon Open Source project, called Aleph One,
various people have been working to create a version of Marathon
which can take advantage of 3D acceleration. It is doubtful that
Marathon: Aleph One will ever be an officially supported project,
but it is certainly worth checking out. Information can be found on
Bungie.org.
In addition to Aleph One, which is still Marathon through and
through, some Marathon fans have also taken another route to
modernizing Marathon: Modifications, or mods, for the more modern
game, Unreal Tournament. Modifications do not make one game into
another one, but they can create the feeling of a different game.
One mod, Marathon
Rampancy, is available. Another modification, Marathon
Resurrection, was reportedly in the works, but seems to have
disappeared recently.
Yet another series of games for which patches are available is
the Descent series. Descent 3 has 3D support built in, but Descent
1 and 2 need patches. These patches, unofficial but written by the
same person who worked on parts of Descent 3, are available from
Descent2.com. These patches
support Glide and OpenGL.
These games are all very good, but the game which has been
occupying me recently was never even officially released for the
Mac: Hexen II. However, the Hexen II engine has become Open Source,
and the same people working on GLQuake decided to see if they could
get Hexen II working. They have been quite successful, as their
unofficial port is nearly as good as many commercial ones. To play
the full version, you have to buy the PC version and copy certain
files onto your Mac, along with the Mac
application available on Planet Quake. A demo is also
available. As with GLQuake, the Hexen port, GLHexen 2, works with
OpenGL.
In addition to bringing back old memories, another nice thing
about these games is that, for the most part, they should perform
decently on relatively old hardware (compared to what many modern
games are demanding). I'd expect that most of them will perform
acceptably on almost any 603- or 604-based system with a 3D
accelerator. Since I can't make thorough tests of these games on a
wide range of systems, I would be interested to hear reports of how
they run on pre-G3 systems. I would also be interested to hear of
other older games which I may have missed which have 3D patches
available.
Hopefully these updates to several classics will provide good
entertainment for a wide range of people. As for me, I'm just going
to try to pull myself away from Hexen II for long enough to survive
finals.
