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today i'm trying to get this thing running UT2004 so i can deathmatch my girlfriend
didn't quite get there today, but it turns out the Windows version that can be bullied into working on a built-this-year gaming PC is the same version as the last PowerPC and Intel Mac OS X versions.
also turns out that you can't buy UT2004 anywhere in 2024. delisted on Steam, delisted on GOG, presumably it was on the Epic Store at one point but it sure ain't there any more. the other Unreal games seem to have met the same fate. wtf? good thing i still have my install discs and CD key…
(you can still find it ofc but that's not the point)
i wasn't joking about the discs. plural. i wasn't one of those posh girls with a DVD drive
also i had to write my own utility to install the Mac version from the Windows discs and the Mac demo and patches
i don't know why i was expecting this to have some sort of exotic hard drive. at least a laptop form factor. that is just a regular-ass 3.5" desktop SATA guy that holds your bits. i wonder if Mac OS X had TRIM support this far back.
AirPort Extreme card installed. i'd have installed the BT card along with it but apparently i need to find an antenna part and some screws first. i wonder if i have any RAM for that second slot…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_(computing)#:~:text=10.6.8 TRIM support seems unlikely since it was added late in 10.6. oh well.
okay i don't get the hype for Sorbet Leopard. it's just some guy's random changes to a 10.5.8 install. like he turned off IPv6 and Spotlight and added some themes and copied some system utilities from 10.6. with that much fuss i figured someone had built a new Darwin kernel or at least some drivers from Apple source releases… i mean i used to "optimize" my childhood IIci by deleting random shit too, but i was like 12 and had very little idea what i was doing.
the phrase "Replaced original network performance optimizations with revised configuration, increasing network throughput and reducing kernel resource usage even further" in conjunction with "Renamed 'System-wide Ad Blocking' to 'Universal Ad Blocking'" has me mildly concerned like did you just fuck with the hosts file or am i gonna find out that my ethernet driver is now somehow flammable
otoh it's probably a huge pain in the ass to update whatever version of 10.5 i have to 10.5.8…
i may not be a very productive retrocomputing user but it keeps me out of trouble. also that G5 was $20 so it's a relatively cheap hobby.
that GeForce FX 5200 is pretty nice huh
but ultimately girls want one thing and it's ONS-Torlan
still got it 😎
still working on that Mac OS X installer script. also on getting this updated to something that isn't Chinese 10.3. meanwhile, here's the best game ever made
fun fact: Power Mac support for booting from USB is very spotty, and the newer ones aren't necessarily better at it
another fun fact: it's been so long since i've tried to use an optical drive for anything that i'm not 100% sure i still have one, let alone dual-layer DVD-R media
hoping booting from FW is still as well supported as it ever was, but i won't be testing that for a few days
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@vyr Good luck. Worse still is classic MacOS needing a special boot-sector thingy and it feels like a catch-22 situation of needing a classic Mac to create a bootable CD in the first-place. Good luck!
(wanted to dual-boot a lampshade G4 and replace the HDD with an SSD took me on quite a journey searching for a viable OS9 CD set)
@irix oh i've actually had very little trouble getting classic Mac OS machines running with the assistance of an emulated classic Mac. i do have a nice collection of both first-party and third-party SCSI bootloader partitions now though.
@irix the easiest scenarios have been the ones where i can pop the drive out or put it into Target Disk Mode, connect it to a modern Mac (ATA), old Mac (FW) or my Linux bridge box (SCSI), and mount an image into an emulator to fuss with it
@vyr Nice! Thats clever 🖖🏾
@vyr Ah, fantastic! It felt like I'd lost all my Mac-chops from 25 years ago when trying to resurrect an old Mac (I used to use Toast to create a bootable install CD for our Uni campus Mac supplier which contained a bunch of useful utilities & licensed s/w for staff using VISE Installer). Great to see a revival of new techniques to keep the old stuff running.
@vyr I never tried booting from USB, but booting from FireWire was very reliable. The XServes of that era used the same firmware and I remember instructions floating around for creating a bootable partition on an iPod that would dump diagnostic data and then reinstall, so you just paused your music, plugged the iPod into the crashed XServe in the datacenter and rebooted it.
I never booted from an iPod, but external FW disks and other Macs in target mode (hold command-T at boot time) worked great.
@david_chisnall i used to use my iPod for all kinds of maintenance stuff! but i haven't had a working FW iPod in a while, so hopefully the FW ATA drive enclosure i ordered does the job as well. i'd be surprised if it doesn't; it's from one of the old Mac accessory brands.
@vyr Apparently the old iPod Microdrives used a connector that was pin-compatible with CompactFlash. There used to be instructions for replacing the drive with a CompactFlash card, which significantly improved battery life. I gave mine away to someone who was going to do that surgery because I had been meaning to for over a year and never quite got around to it.
@vyr I love that title screen so much.
@vyr wow that loading screen is indelibly engraved into my brain. what a game, what a map
@vyr Any idea if anyone has archived UT anywhere?
@rmi https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/unreal-gold-and-unreal-tournament-are-now-free-on-the-internet-archive-and-epic-says-thats-a-okay/ UT99 is apparently legitimately available on archive.org (or at least "we're not going to sue you this time" available) and someone uploaded all of the GOG installers for the whole Unreal/UT series here https://archive.org/details/Unreal-GOG-Collection
if you need PowerPC or Intel Mac binaries they're on Macintosh Garden https://macintoshgarden.org/games/unreal-tournament-2004
i'm not sure what the dedicated server situation is. there's https://archive.org/details/ut2004-server but i haven't tried it yet and don't know if it'll activate with a retail CD key. some GOG forum thread mentioned that the GOG key tends to get blocked anyway, which raises the question of what's doing the blocking and what happened to it when the Epic servers went away a few years ago
@rmi oh, and i just found out about this, but surprisingly someone managed to talk Epic into allowing a source port of Unreal and UT99 https://www.oldunreal.com/ and it may even work on ARM Macs now
That G5 had a happy life in the data centre running webobjects apps.
One of the webobjects apps that i used to run on it.. may or may not still be running in a sad lonely linux vm…
I may need to turn it off, since i can't find the people who used to pay the bill..
Dear god WebObjects was fucking magical and fast compared to what ever we call it these days...
@vyr wow she’s beautiful :ms_robot_blushy_4_mastodon:
@vy she sure is
@vyr when I ordered my going-away-to-college computer the summer after high school, I had the choice of a DVD reader or a CD burner. I absolutely thought I was making the right choice by getting the family's first device that could play DVDs. Catching up with the future, right? Little did I know that I'd want to spend the next 6-8 years constantly burning CDs for music to listen to on various discmen before I eventually could afford a mp3 player, or burning ISOs for pirating games. Buying Riven on a single DVD instead of seven CDs or whatever was no comfort whatsoever.
...I miss UT2k3 and 2k4. UT99 was my favorite, but I liked the follow-ups as well. I should hunt down my own discs.
@hexwren i had to make that same call! i got the burner and learned about VCDs. and then next year or so i got a SCSI-2 7-disc automatic CD changer at a computer show swap meet and enjoyed Riven the way it was meant to be played: still with frequent disc swaps 😄
@vyr In the long run, the real epic game was installation
@rezmason tell me about it, i still gotta get Sorbet Leopard on this thing
@vyr Nice, I also still have my UT2004 CDs in my giant CD binder.
@bridget heck yes, twinsies
@vyr how many hours of installing mods and mappacks have you planned?
@mxk hah, "has to work on a PowerPC Mac" is probably going to keep the mod count down. maybe. i never learned UE2 mod development; were mods native code or UnrealScript?
@mxk if there was a ChaosUT port for UT2004 i kinda want that
@vyr afaik there was something like that....
Yep, I definitely played this:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/chaosut2evolution/images/melee-weapons#imagebox
@vyr the mappacks certainly should work (if not the installers prevent it. I have good memories of those Ultimate Community Map Packs
https://www.utzone.de/forum/downloads.php?do=file&id=2350&langid=2
@mxk i remember the UT binary itself having a subset of editor CLI commands for extracting things from Unreal archives, and most of those installers were just Unreal archives with Windows executables taped to the front
@mxk (and if not i do have access to Windows machines)
@vyr IMPRESSIVE
@vyr as a good partner does :)