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12/13/06
I’ve really been amazed at how little information is out there about Director and Intel Macs. At first, I assumed that Director didn’t work on Intel Macs at all. Intel Macs use something called Rosetta to translate commands from PowerPC programs into Intel processor commands. But Rosetta isn’t perfect and I read that Director used things that Rosetta didn’t handle. Without a machine to test Director on (plus I was unwilling to go through the activation process just for a test), I had to assume that Director didn’t work.
But then I heard that Director did work. So all that early information was wrong. But I also heard that while Director worked, 3D would not. Makes sense since you couldn’t expect something as complex as Shockwave 3D accessing OpenGL to work. I mean, OpenGL on Intel Macs would be made for Intel processors, while Director would be made for PowerPC processors and translated with Rosetta.
So a friend of mine got a MacBook Pro and had Director on it. I had a chance to try it out, so I tried opening one of my 3D games. I wanted to see what nature of error message or crash happened. Instead, the game ran like a charm. Ah, I thought. It must be using Software Rendering mode, and the Core Duo processor is fast enough to make it work well. But no, it was rendering in OpenGL!
So, basically, Director works perfectly fine on Intel Macs. But try to find that information at Adobe’s site. You can’t. They really should be doing a better job of keeping developers informed about this sort of thing. I would have gotten a MacBook 6 months back if I had known.
Now if only Shockwave worked in Safari in standard mode, or Firefox at all (Firefox doesn’t seem to have a Rosetta mode).
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December 15th, 2006 at 2:09 am
Better yet, even the latest Macs come with a copy of Shockwave preinstalled. It does not work untill you switch your browser to Rosetta mode, but after doing so, Shockwave works ‘out of the box’, no install required.