Searching for Mac Power PC players

[BlueTemplar]

Since Spring currently doesn't support "cross-processor" gaming, I wondered if some people would be interested by organising games for Mac players that don't have an Intel Mac, but a Power PC Mac.

DONE:
-Find out how to make Spring work in single player on PPC Mac.

TO DO:
-Find players

-Learn how to start multiplayer games via command line
OR
-Try to compile one of the available game lobbies under mac

So, are there some people interested here?

Previous threads:
Mac binary Release
Spring on Mac

[Vadi]

I'm confused. Windows 32/64bit amd/intel and linux 32/64bit amd/intel games work okay

[BlueTemplar]

PowerPC is a RISC microprocessor architecture created by the 1991 Apple├óÔé¼ÔÇ£IBM├óÔé¼ÔÇ£Motorola alliance, known as AIM. Originally intended for personal computers, PowerPC CPUs have since become popular embedded and high-performance processors as well. PowerPC was the cornerstone of AIM's PReP and Common Hardware Reference Platform initiatives in the 1990s, but the architecture found the most success in the personal computer market in Apple's Macintosh lines from 1994 to 2006 (before Apple's transition to Intel).

The AIM alliance was an alliance formed in September 1991 between Apple Computer, IBM and Motorola to create a new computing standard based on the PowerPC architecture. The stated goal of the alliance was to challenge the dominant Wintel computing platform with a new computer design and a next-generation operating system. It was thought that the CISC processors from Intel were an evolutionary dead-end in microprocessor design, and that since RISC was the future, the next few years were a period of great opportunity.

The generic term x86 refers to the instruction set of the most commercially successful CPU architecture[1] in the history of personal computing. It is used in processors from Intel, AMD, VIA, and others, and derived from the model numbers of the first few generations of processors, backward compatible with Intel's original 16-bit 8086 CPU, most of which were ending in 86.[2] Since then, many additions and extensions have been added to the x86 instruction set, almost consistently with full backwards compatibility.

RISC and x86
However, despite many successes, RISC has made few inroads into the desktop PC and commodity server markets, where Intel's x86 platform remains the dominant processor architecture (Intel is facing increased competition from AMD, but even AMD's processors implement the x86 platform, or a 64-bit superset known as x86-64).

[Peet]

I'm confused. Windows 32/64bit amd/intel and linux 32/64bit amd/intel games work okay

PPC + x64 =

No sink

[Vadi]

I'm aware what a PowerPC is, but didn't realize that they were incompatible with... everybody else.

[Auswaschbar]

I'm aware what a PowerPC is, but didn't realize that they were incompatible with... everybody else.

Its because they store numbers in a different way. PowerPC is big endian, while x86 and x86_64 are little endian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness).

[LordMatt]

Does that mean it is impossible for them to sync with x86, or just a lot of work to make it happen?

[Kloot]

"Just" a lot of work (any part of Spring that reads or writes
binary data needs special attention when running on PPC
hardware, and there are a few).

[jackoverfull]

if you're still interested i'm here (ppc g4@1.3ghz, 1.25ram) and i think that i can manage to set up a game without the need of a lobby (using a startup script).

i can play most days from around 18 to 20 (or, sometimes, 21), utc+1.

[CarRepairer]

What about new smarter macs that use intel?

[jackoverfull]

i think that they can play with linux and windows pcs, if the latters have the right version of spring, but i'm not sure. anyway, they'll have to play with x86 macs or ppc ones using rosetta (a ppc emulator bundled inside the os).