Once again, it's time to play catch-up on what I've been doing.
First and foremost, it's been announced (more or less) by Aspyr that we're publishing The Sims 2 for the Mac, which I'm sure will come as a surprise to no one. For almost a month now, John and I have been slaving over the code, pushing it further and further along. This has been a fairly monumental task, and I'm frankly shocked at how far we've been able to move it. In general, it's hard to have 2 people working on the codebase during the early set-up, but Sims2 is so huge and so broad in scope, that there are plenty of opportunities for us to focus on two wholly separate parts of the code at the same time this early on.
Internally, the game uses DirectX 9, along with the high-level shading language features, which will shortly prove to be a very thrilling part of the porting process. :) One of the stipulations of working for Aspyr is that I'm somewhat limited in what I can say publicly, particularly if it could be construed as negative, so I'll probably have to word my statements carefully. :) Suffice to say that Sims2 will probably be the most challenging port I've worked on to date. I'm grateful that John has a firm grasp on DirectX vs. OpenGL concepts, because left to my own devices, I'd probably be white-haired and throwing cats at strangers by now.
Aside from that, I had hoped to have a new MacMAME release out last week, but I was simply overwhelmed with Sims2 work during the days to want to spend much time at night to clean it up. However, I have finished the joystick code rewrite so it won't be too much farther off, I think.
A few people have asked about the Jedi Academy patch. To be honest, I haven't given it (or anything else) much thought since I started on Sims2 a few weeks back. In a day or two, I'm going to have to re-visit the Medal of Honor/Spearhead patches to work around a massive deficiency work with an ever-so-delightful implementation detail in Stuffit InstallerMaker. Just when I think I'm out, they keep drawing me back in!
In other news, Beth and I celebrated "Year 2" at the Melting Pot on Tuesday night. It was great. Don't say "Fon-don't" - say "fondue!"