So, you have a Quadra
840av. You bought it new just a few years ago, and paid
approximately the GNP of any given developing country for it. And
what a computer it was! Powered by a 68040 at a sizzling 40 MHz,
this machine was worth every cent you paid for it.
It served you well for many years, but now that you have a
little spare time, you would like to have some fun with it - play
some games or something. So maybe you pick up the phone and order
one of those new games you have been hearing about, such as Deus
Ex. When the package arrives, you eagerly rip it open, grab the CD,
and pop it into your drive. But what is this? "The software to be
installed requires a Macintosh with a PowerPC processor. Please
check to make sure that your system meets the requirements for Deus
Ex."
"Impossible," you think. "This machine was top of the line.
There must be a problem with the installer. I'll call Aspyr tech
support and see what the problem could be."
And now, back to reality. The plain truth is that the powerhouse
Quadra of a few years ago simply can not run most of today's games.
Even Apple's most powerful computers before the G3 era, such as the
Power Mac 8600 and 9600, will be far overmatched if asked to
run some new games such as the aforementioned Deus Ex.
What is the deal with this? Are developers conspiring against
who can not buy a new computer every year?
I have been in contact with three developers, learning how they
approach developing for older Macs, and the information I have
learned is quite interesting to me. I think it will be to you,
too.
The developers I have been communicating with are David Dunham,
of A-Sharp LLC (King of
Dragon Pass); Andrew Welch, president of Ambrosia Software (Developer
and/or publisher of many Mac games); and Radar Pangaean (Developer
of the GUTS gaming system,
a piece of Mac software used in conjunction with traditional
role-playing games). I also attempted to contact some of the big
commercial names in the Mac gaming world, but I did not get any
response. Though this may be due to their not wanting to respond,
it is also possible that I was not contacting the right people.
All three of these developers are quite low-end friendly. While
some new games require a fast G3 and a powerful 3D accelerator to
perform well, the products designed by these developers will
generally require a PowerPC-based Mac at most.
One of the questions facing any developer is, are they making
their games able to run on as many systems as possible? Would it be
feasible to make a 68K version? Or a version that will run without
a 3D card?
Dunham says, regarding King of Dragon Pass, "We probably could
have done 68K Macs, but I think given its architecture, this might
have been difficult. Not to get into technical details, but I think
our plug-ins would be too big." This hints at another problem in
developing for older computers: while sufficient resources would
allow you to program your game from scratch, optimizing it as much
as possible, developers with limited resources may find it much
easier to build on a product such as Macromedia Director or, a bit
further in the past, Apple's own HyperCard. While using these tools
reduce work for programmers, it also means that games will probably
be much less optimized and therefore require more power to run.
Welch addressed this issue very thoroughly. Looking at which
Macs to support, he says, "With each game, you have to make design
tradeoffs. It is tempting, as a programmer, to take advantage of as
much horsepower is available, for two reasons. First, you can
simply do some really cool things on a G4 which wouldn't be possible on a 68040.
Secondly, you can be lazy. You can spend more time working on your
game and less time worrying about optimizing your code.
"That said, there are some things that simply can't be done on
older machines. If you decide that a game really should support
certain features as a base, there are going to be some machines
that simply can't handle it - no matter how much time you spend
optimizing.
"I will say that some of our games which are PPC only, such as
Mars Rising, could have run on a 68K machine, with some features
turned off perhaps, but the amount of work involved in doing that
wasn't deemed worth it."
How much effort to put into supporting as many configurations as
possible is definitely a big issue for developers. Dunham says,
"(Supporting older machines) is obviously a goal, as KoDP will run
on any PowerPC or any Pentium." However, with limited resources, a
line had to be drawn somewhere, and with the extra effort which
would have been needed to optimize and test on 68K systems, Dunham
and the crew at A-Sharp decided that PPC would be the cutoff.
Ambrosia also places a fairly high priority on supporting older
systems. As Welch says, "We try pretty hard to make sure that our
games are well-optimized and run on lower-end machines. What takes
up most of the processing power in games these days is the eye
candy. 
Nothing wrong with candy, it's tasty, but it isn't
everything. I'm a firm believer that what makes a game fun is
separate from what makes it visually interesting. It is like looks
and personality - there is the initial attraction, and then there
is what keeps you interested."
To some extent, A-Sharp's commitment to supporting a wide range
of systems worked against them. When contacting various publishers
to see if they might be interested in publishing KoDP, one
publisher actually liked the game, but turned down the opportunity
to publish it. Why? Because, as Dunham says, "Their charter was to
develop games which made you go out and buy new hardware. Clearly,
KoDP did not fit this concept." While A-Sharp has since gone on to
successfully publish KoDP themselves, it is nonetheless rather
disturbing, especially to the low-end gamer, to see games being
turned down for reasons such as these.
Money is obviously a big factor in developing games. While all
companies are not as centered on pushing new hardware as the above
example, they do need to consider where their money will come
from.
Supporting older Macs can be a hard sell from a financial
viewpoint. As Pangaean says, "I don't see much of a business case
for supporting older systems. The number of 68K downloads I have
gotten for the 68K version of my program, vs the PPC
version, is very small. Further, it seems logical to me that
shareware authors won't get much return from folks who are still
using very old machines, because the same economic factors that
stop a person from upgrading their hardware will likely prevent
them from registering shareware. For those of us who develop
products in hopes of getting a return from their effort, the
significance of this can not be minimized." The same argument could
obviously be made for commercial software.
However, while this argument is quite valid, it is not without
exception. Take myself, for example. Until fall 1999, my main
computer was the 68040 based LC
475. While I never had the several hundred dollars needed to
upgrade to a substantially more powerful computer, I could
generally find the $30 needed to buy the (increasingly rare) new
games which I could run. In fact, if new games were still coming
out for old Macs like my 475, I could still very well have it as my
main computer. It was not so much that I became dissatisfied with
the quality of games which I was able to run. The problem was that
I had played and replayed most of the games that interested me and
were available to me, and to get new ones, I would have to move to
newer hardware.
As could be expected, the future for software that will run on
Macs of the 68K era, and even early PowerPCs, is not terribly
bright. According to Pangaean, "I made a conscious decision to
support low end machines in my product, in hopes that making it
accessible would increase my sales base. I now see that it didn't
gain me any paying customers, but it did limit the features that I
could provide in the application to stay within the earlier
machines' hardware/software constraints. Future versions of my
product will be targeted at more modern machines and thus able to
incorporate more features."
Dunham and Welch somewhat echo these sentiments, although not
quite as strongly. Dunham says, "I think a 68K version would have
consumed a lot of resources and would not have resulted in a lot
more players. I know there are a few people who would love to play
the game but don't have Power Macs, but we have gotten more
complaints about the lack of a Linux version." Welch notes that,
especially with the longevity of Macs, they are still working on
several products which will support older Macs, but that it is
getting harder to spread the resources so far, especially with new
emerging technologies such as OS X which also need to be focused
on.
While the availability of new software for older Macs is
obviously decreasing, it is not dead yet. The best way to support
the developers who are still making efforts to support older
systems is to pay for their software. Whether this would mean
registering shareware, or buying commercial software
instead of pirating it, I encourage you to support these and other
developers at any opportunity.
Some of the best Mac games ever run well on 68040s and even
older machines, as well as other games which will run on any Power
Mac and do not need the latest 3D card. If you are looking for the
current first person shooter, well, you may be disappointed, but
just about any other genre still has plenty of life even on less
than modern Macs.
