Articulate Vlish Shaper Shaper Posted April 16, 2011 Share Posted April 16, 2011 I have a Mac OS X 10.5.8 and I'm not able to play Geneforge 2. See, whenever I try to run Geneforge 2, there is a message that says that I need a 800x600 screen and a thousand colors. I have a screen of 1280x800 and million colors. Why isn't Geneforge 2, then? Even when I used to be able to play the game before? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Understated Ur-Drakon Tyranicus Posted April 18, 2011 Share Posted April 18, 2011 Do you have Intel integrated graphics? Some of the Intel GPUs do not support 16-bit (thousands of colors) resolutions. You have a resolution high enough, but if it doesn't support 16-bit color, it won't work. Why older Spiderweb games require you to use 16-bit color instead of 32-bit color is a question for the ages. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Understated Ur-Drakon Earth Posted April 18, 2011 Share Posted April 18, 2011 16bit was mostly used last century and also cheaper for gamemakers (i guess) to make graphs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Niemand Posted April 18, 2011 Share Posted April 18, 2011 Actually, I think that this requirement in the games may date from when old Macs would run by default in less than their full possible color depth (glancing at Wikipedia it seems likely that this was for memory reasons; at higher color depths machines with only a small amount of VRAM could only support lower resolutions than at lower color depth). My parents' old LC II did this, it would boot using 8 bit grayscale (if I remember correctly), so for various uses it had to be manually switched to color mode, which could be at either 8 or 16 bit depth. The issue with Spiderweb games is that Jeff seems to have overlooked the possibility that there could ever exist a machine which would support only greater than 16 color depth, and so the check (which used to exist in the BoA editor, for example) looked for exactly 16 bit color being supported. On new machines which only use 32 bit color this check failed, causing the program to erroneously conclude that it couldn't run. Of course this had been causing annoyance for years anyway when it would try to switch color depth from 32 bits down to 16, but it becomes a real problem when it completely stops the software from running. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hatchling Cockatrice Slawbug Posted April 18, 2011 Share Posted April 18, 2011 Yeah, this is a pretty common problem for older Mac software, particularly games, due to their reliance on color graphics. I don't think it was an issue of not ever expecting > X colors support, so much as the system architecture that made a 256 colors game run faster in 256 colors than in "thousands of colors" aka 32768. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Spidweb Posted April 19, 2011 Share Posted April 19, 2011 Download the newest version of Geneforge 2 from our website. It should run fine. - Jeff Vogel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Understated Ur-Drakon Tyranicus Posted April 21, 2011 Share Posted April 21, 2011 Oh hey, I had no idea that the first 3 Geneforges had been updated. Not only do they support 32-bit color, but they are also universal binaries. The SW site even says that original Avernum trilogy is being updated to universal binaries. Color me excited. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Understated Ur-Drakon Earth Posted April 21, 2011 Share Posted April 21, 2011 its been public info that 1st Avernum trilogy will be remade in future. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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