With Knights of the Old Republic approved and prepping to ship out (if it hasn't already), you might be wondering what I've been working on the past few weeks. Wonder no more.
* A Knights of the Old Republic patch. ;-) Turns out that the eMac uses super-high frequency monitor settings and has only one setting for each resolution, 112Hz for 800x600 as an example. As it happens, the PC version of KOTOR disallows frequencies > 85Hz unless you do some crazy .ini file tweaking. We didn't have any eMacs to test against in the lab, and none of the external testers had one either, so this issue went completely unnoticed until a few weeks ago. Rest easy though, eMac owners - the patch should be released the same day it starts hitting shelves (it's already been tested and conditionally approved).
* Patches for Medal of Honor and Spearhead. These roll in a few fixes I made while working on Breakthrough, and in general clean up the apps to be better OSX citizens. Most notably, the patches include a new version of the Miles sound library which once and for all eliminates the random crashes that happen on dual-processor Macs.
* Command-line dedicated servers for MOHAA, Spearhead and Breakthrough. You'll be able to run your own dedicated server from the OSX command-line. I've been working with Martin van Spanje of Configulator fame to make these apps the best in their class, and I'm pretty pleased with how they've turned out. I don't know yet when we'll be releasing these, but it shouldn't be too much longer. They're undergoing QA now, along with the other MOHAA patches.
* A patch for Jedi Academy. The "dynamic glow" feature wasn't very dynamic in the initial release, so I've fixed this. I've also fixed the "MAX_PATCH_PLANES" error that some people were getting with very large third-party multiplayer maps. Finally, I've cleaned up support for 3rd party code mods so you don't have to do the "DLL shuffle" to get them to load like you must right now. As well, a new version of the dedicated server app is coming that cleans up a few minor issues that Martin uncovered while writing his Jedi Academy Configulator.
* MacMAME. I nearly had a 0.82 port ready, then KOTOR hit beta and I was out of time. But I've revisited it, and it should be ready to go within a few days. I've spent quite some time rewriting it to be a better OSX app and removed a lot of old file-handling and joystick code that'd been living in there since the 90's. I'm very pleased with the results so far.
* A mystery project. If I were to give it a codename, I'd probably call it "Unimaginable Revisited", but it's not really worthy of a codename because it's not a big or flashy project. It's more of an escape for me than a curse. I've had a ton of fun working on it, and I'm anxious for it to see the light of day. It's broken into my top 5 list of favorite Mac ports I've ever worked on.
One of the other noteworthy things recently is Aspyr's joystick support in our porting library. John Butler was tasked with fixing some of the reported issues with Battlefield 1942, and as part of this mystery project, I also had to add joystick support. It turns out that we were able to simplify and expand our support fairly easily, so I think users of both games will be happy with the end result.