Tech IT Easy » mac

Valve’s Steam and Mac gaming

Kari Silvennoinen — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:27:10 +0000

I was attending a LAN gaming session (aka. real “social gaming”) with a group of friends a while ago. Last time, we spent a lot of time installing (and updating) games and trying to get computers to find each other and I had to borrow someone else’s computer. This time, we were quickly up and running and I could proudly play on my MacBook Pro.

Sure, I had installed Windows 7 using Bootcamp on my Mac, because while VMware Fusion was okay for Tales of Monkey Island and even Torchlight, it just doesn’t cut it for hardcore gaming. The only game that I had any problems running over Bootcamp was, oddly enough, Postal 2. Otherwise, I was equal among my PC using peers. I had dreamed about this day.

But what really made things easy for all of us was Valve’s Steam, a gaming portal/service.

The iTunes model strikes again.

Steam ...for the rest of us

We have passed a long time the point where new games are automatically better than older just due to technological improvements. We were still playing games we played over 3 years ago, and some of them were “old” even by then, like Unreal Tournament 2004. The reasons for this are Windows XP and DirectX. These two technologies have enabled a decade of games that are still playable almost without any emulation. The biggest change is happening right now with multicore and 64bit CPUs.

What Steam has done is basically something that other forms of entertainment could learn a lot about, if they could get over their stone age business logic and hunting down their customers. PC game piracy has always been a problem and one reason why PC gaming today seems to be an afterthought to console gaming. Steam (and other similar services, like Impulse) mostly eliminates the piracy problem with a central authorization structure, but yet provides added value to the customer. You only need to install Steam on any computer and log in and you have access to all your games (provided that you have the bandwidth to download the over 2 GB that most games today use). This is something that isn’t possible with iTunes and only recently was possible with Spotify.

What really sets Steam apart here from other entertainment industry offerings is actual value for users. What Steam has done, is really catch the long tail of ecommerce, even though the concept of long tail has long since gone out of fashion. By being able to sell couple of years old games that are virtually impossible to find anywhere (legally) and for a fraction of the price is just amazing. I was able to buy Psychonauts, the most amazing game ever, for just 2 euros and even at the normal price of 9,99 euros it’s 1/4th of what it did cost on the shelves (and it still costs around 15 euros on Amazon). After the Steam’s holiday sales during Christmas, I found out that I had bought many games, mostly because the price was right.

Other benefits from using Steam is that all your games are automatically updated and even for some games, your progress and settings are saved in the “Steam Cloud” – allowing you to play seamlessly on multiple computers.

But there aren’t any games for Mac

The year 2010 turned to be a pleasant surprise for gamers, especially for those, like me, who have switched to Mac. First, Telltale Games announced that their games would be available for Mac as well. This was excellent news for all Sam & Max and Monkey Island fans who would no longer need to boot up VMware Fusion.

And, sure, there have always been Civilization IV and The Sims 3 for Mac, but having new, native games for Mac was excellent news. Clearly a certain threshold has been breached and the amount of gamers living in self-denial on Mac is now large enough that the market is suddenly viable.

Nothing could have prepared us, the people who still reflexively keep our left fingers on WASD and use multi-button mice, for the announcement from Valve that both Steam and Valve’s game engine Source would be available for Mac.

Now, I don’t see that this will mean that soon Mac OS X would be equal gaming platform with Windows, but it does warm my heart. I know that I still need to boot to Windows to really enjoy gaming. The reason Telltale and Valve have been able to pull this out is based on their choices to use cross-platform frameworks (like OpenGL) instead of Windows-only technologies like DirectX. You also need to keep in mind that both Telltale and Valve seem to have target audiences that use Macs and have both targeted certain niches, the former makes high quality “casual” adventure games and the latter high quality first person shooters for more “hardcore” crowd. It is unlikely that other game developers or publishers will follow suit. For a true revolution, Microsoft would need to not only port DirectX to Mac OS X but also develop it at same pace with Windows. Looking at Microsoft’s track record with Mac software, this is even less likely than playing Left 4 Dead natively on Mac looked a couple of months ago. The more likely scenario is that as hardware gets faster and emulating a graphics card gets more efficient, running even the most recent 3D games in VMware Fusion starts to be feasible. A possible scenario is also that through technologies like OpenCL, PC games aren’t as dependent on GPUs and DirectX as they are today.

On the other hand, this shows how Apple’s decision to invest in cross-platform frameworks like OpenGL, OpenCL and WebKit can really pay off in the long term. It also shows that being nice and having something like Bootcamp can be an advantage. I was really surprised how easily I could install Windows 7 on my Mac and how Apple had provided drivers for everything.

What Steam proves is that to succeed on the internet, you really need to be familiar with your customers and understand their needs and truly deliver superior experience and added value to them. This is nothing new, but somehow the rest of the entertainment industry seems to think that they can still get away with last century tactics.

[Mac] 5 quiet Mac services that I dig day-in and day-out

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:26:19 +0000

What all these apps have in common is that they do their work with very little involvement from the user and thus make the computing experience a little more… as it should be. Just discovered the 5th, hence this post

Eversave (free): will auto-save your documents in whatever application you’re using. Most useful settings for me: don’t ask for every new application + save front-most window only.
Windows Live Sync (free, previously Foldershare): autosyncs your files with other computers, regardless if they’re a Mac or a PC, or what geographic region you’re in.
Hazel (payware): auto-cleans folders that you don’t always feels like cleaning. My downloads folder / desktop is organised at last! It also uninstalls all settings with an app when you remove it.
F.Lux (free): A new one for me, auto-adjusts the temperature of your monitor according to the time of day it is. Since I already turn the brightness down at night (also using Nocturne ), as I notice it keeps me awake otherwise, this is a welcome addition!
Last.fm (free): To be honest, I was really struggling to find a fifth (there’s a few Firefox extensions perhaps) and I’m also not 100% sure how useful it is for me to track what music I play (especially since it doesn’t feed back to iTunes). Still, it’s been my loyal *quiet* companion for the last few years, which should mean something. And I can make up beautiful graphs of my annual listening habits.

Curious if anyone else has a *quiet* background app that they “use” every day? Drop a comment if you do!

Vincent

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My webcam adventure and why Mac audiences are so valuable

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 06:52:25 +0000

Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro for Mac

In case you didn’t know, most Macs come with cameras built-in, excluding the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro, and every Mac before Intel came on board. Last week, I went searching for a camera + microphone, because during my other little adventure of unscrewing and re-screwing my Mac 39 times, I managed to somehow break the inbuilt mic (and there’s no way, I’ll open up my Mac for a mic.!). So, I went searching for a solution that was cable-efficient. Like most Mac-laptops, mine only has two USB-ports and no line-in for a mic., so my choices were:

getting a USB-mic & a separate USB-webcam (using both USBs)
getting a USB-webcam with a mic. built in (in theory: 1 slot)
getting a USB-webcam & a separate Bluetooth-headset (1 slot)

Whatever would happen, I would end up using at least 1 USB-slot, so my decision would be somewhere in-between quality and cost.

The search

Enter a consumer-electronics store (Mediamarkt is no. 1 here in the Netherlands or Germany), and you will likely be confronted with a whole bunch of Logitech, some Microsoft, maybe some Philips, and some other, possibly cheaper or more upscale brands. Of these, none but one (I’ll get to it later) actually mention anything like Mac-support.

Luckily, my Mediamarkt also had an internet-connection (through the Apple-section) for me to check the many confusing brand-designations (I want to shoot whoever thought a combo of letters and numbers was a good way to sell products to consumers!).

Turns out, getting a webcam or a USB-mic that works on a Mac, isn’t a problem. Plug it in and it usually works. The webcam just needs to be UVC—a Universal USB 2.0 Video Class Cam. Getting a webcam & a built-in mic, however, and we enter complex territory. First of all, hardly any sites really discuss the mic factor (you can find Mac-compatible stuff here). I guess, because most laptops have a built-in mic or line-in, hardly anyone considers it. I’ve had a couple of adventures, such as a Microsoft one, where the mic. wasn’t recognised and a for-Macs advertised webcam, which, 1st of all, had horrible video-quality and second, came with a headset that needed a line-in (eh, not really useful for many Macs).

So, one camera in the whole store, offering ca. 30 webcams, is advertised as 100% Mac-compatible: the Logitech Quickcam Vision Pro for Mac. It is the only camera that is 100% designed for Macs. It is also the most expensive in the store, at ca. €100 euros, though offering a 2-megapixel sensor and a fairly good in-built mic. Everything else, in that store at least, doesn’t “officially” work for Macs (you can find a few more on Amazon). Btw. if you do need anything like a driver, check out macam or iUSBcam.

Why Mac audiences are so valuable

So why are Mac-audiences so valuable? Well, you can literarily charge more. Whether it’s a webcam, a usb-mic, software, etc. You can hike up the price by at least 10% and watch the less price-sensitive consumer roll in. You frequently hear the “Windows = bigger market” argument, and I wholeheartedly agree. But my argument that Windows is a big market for commodities rings more true. For every super-upscale model you offer in hardware, there will be dozens of cheaper knock-offs eating up your market. And for every upscale software, you can be sure that a million pirated versions are floating around on the networks.

The closed system, which I am as critical of as the next guy, is what makes Macs attractive for technology-companies, because at whatever small scale you do end up producing, demand will most certainly exceed supply.

And the consumer? Well, he did decide to buy a more expensive machine in the first place, and whatever you can say about Mac-pricing, he will, most of the time, get a better machine and accessories than on the Windows-side of things.

What was my solution?

Being a cheapskate (a previous Windows-user and I’m Dutch), I found a free bluetooth headset lying around, I got with my mobile phone once. Turns out, all of those are compatible with Macs that come with Bluetooth (pretty much all of them). And now, having 2 free USB-slots, I can take my time and pick a UVC-compatible webcam that offers reasonable video-quality for Skype.

Were you ever in a similar situation? Probably not, but if you were, let me know how you solved the problem!

Vincent

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Favourite official & unofficial Mac-plugins

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:17:11 +0000

I decided to make a list as many of these help in my productivity. Feel free to suggest some of your own in the comments.

In no particular order:

Quicksilver (systemwide, free): the mouse-killer. I use it to launch different apps, look up words in the dictionary, search google, and search for apps (it’s quicker than Spotlight). I could write a book on the many ways this app has improved my life.
TextEXpander (systemwide, payware): for correcting my terrible spelling and changing all instances of ‘movie’ into the British ‘film.’ It also helps with long usernames like Kari’s @ksilvennoinen on Twitter .
Skitch (systemwide, beta so far): a replacement for the regular screencapture, which allows you to add text, etc. quite easily to your pictures.
Quicklook (systemwide, comes with Leopard): adds preview-functions to just about any file and can be added too by third parties.
Growl (systemwide, free): notifications for different apps, ranging from iTunes to Adium.
Secrets (Sytemwide, free): allows you to hack your mac.
Default Folder X (Systemwide, payware): adds things like favourite folders and history to your save-this-file dialogs. Huge time-saver!
Genius (free with iTunes): I cannot count the ways that I love this addition to the latest iTunes, but it’s really made my listening experience a 100 times better.
Saft (Safari*, payware): How I love thee. it allows me to add my own shortcuts for bookmarks (the default ones have already been reserved by Quicksilver). It also adds a number of tab-management functions, like focus on last selected tab.
Safari AdBlock (Safari*, free): it’s free and you can add publicly available lists to it from Firefox’s Adblock. Works better than Saft’s for-pay adblocker.
MailActOn (Mail, free afaik): adds short-cuts that you can use to shift mails to different categories.
Bookmarklets (for any browser, mostly free): my current favourites.

That’s about it! Which little gadgets do you use to improve the MacXperience?

Vincent

*: why I prefer Safari to Firefox (which supports more plugins): it launches insanely faster.

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Getting HP LaserJet to work with modern Macs (and PCs)

Kari Silvennoinen — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:09:29 +0000

This is once again a post “back to the community”. When I encountered this problem, I looked aroung the net and I found many discussion in different forums, but couldn’t find any solutions. This is how I got things working, your mileage may vary.

I recently got a new computer, but I totally forgot that the printer I use (HP LaserJet 1100) only has a parallel connection while the new computer only has USB ports. Okay, you can get new black/white laser printers for less than 100€, but I happened to have a spare print cartdrige for that too so I’m not in a hurry to get rid of this rather nice printer, which was discontinued by HP in 1998 and which has this really lousy paper tray so that half of my prints end up with noticeable skew. Also, I noticed that there was several different kinds of USB-adapter cables available, which could solve my problem for just 20 – 30 euros!

After a long Google exploring session, I found out that there were some problems and lack of sure knowledge if this worked, especially on Mac OS X.

The Cable

I ended up getting Aten/Deltaco USB-parallel-adapter with DB25 female to USB connections. This cable probably is sold under different names around the world, but I guess the main thing is that most (all) of them has the Profilic Technologies’ IEEE-1284 controller in them. In addition to the old HP LaserJets and DeskJets, it also supports many other printers from other manufacturers (like Epson, Canon and Lexmark).

This is the cable you’re after if you’ve got one the HP printers with just a small connector in the back

This cable goes between your current cable and your computer’s USB port. Because my printer is LaserJet 1100, which doesn’t have the normal-sized connector coming out of it, but a smaller version (like many other HP’s printers of this time), you can’t use a a bit cheaper cable that connects your printer directly to USB. Of course, it doesn’t matter.

If your printer has it, the huge thing in the printer’s back is called Centronics-36 or Cen36 (also known as IEEE-1284A) connector. HP has instead used the smaller version, Mini-Centronics. I’ve no idea if there is a Mini-Centronics <-> USB cable, but because you can extend the Mini-Centronics <-> DB25 (the normal cable, that you used to connect the printer to your computer) with the DB25 <-> USB -cable, I don’t think so.

The box my cable was packaged said that this cable was supported on Win 98 to Win XP and on Mac OS 9 (and it came with one of those annoying tiny-format CD with drivers for Win 98). So, no mention of Mac OS X, but I figured that it would be really odd if a USB-thing would work on Win XP and an earlier version of Mac OS, but not on Mac OS X, so I took the risk. At home, I connected the cable to my printer cable and my computer and everything seemed to work, OS X recognized instantly the “new” printer. This was too easy!

The Problem and a Work-around

There is, unfortunately, one problem. For some unknown reason, after you’ve connected the printer you can only print once on Mac and. After that your jobs won’t get through and you’ll get an interesting error message “GenericClass: Waiting for device” instead. The only known workaround on the net was to reconnect the printer after printing (or restart your computer). The whole thing might be a problem with CUPS USB backend or somewhere (that’s the last operation CUPS logs in Console show before the job gets stuck), Google search doesn’t give a consensus.

Anyway, this isn’t really an acceptable workaround – especially, because it looked like every time you reconnect the USB cable, Mac OS X finds another instance of your printer, which is rather annoying, and you still can print only once. Also, if you have the printer manufacturer’s drivers for Mac OS X, try those instead of using Gutenprint-drivers or some others. The problem with LaserJet 1100 is that HP discontinued the printer way before Mac OS X was released so there aren’t any drivers on HP’s website for it.

Anyway, after a burst of reconnecting madness, I noticed that I had three devices (see image below) listed in the printers. One of them is the Printer-USB-cable controller and you definetly can’t print to it (in a moment on desparation, I tried). I’ve not tried what happens if I print to LaserJet 1100-1 printer, because, for some strange reason, I can print as much as I want with the first, LaserJet 11000! I’ve no idea what happened, but it works and I’m not going to touch in case the voodoo wears off.

This is probably a problem that could be fixed in a later version of CUPS (and some people say that things worked fine before Mac OS X 10.5), which means you might have this exact same issue in other OS running CUPS, like Ubuntu. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though, because we’re talking about 10 years old not-that-well-working-anyway hardware with a mystical adapter. New printers are cheap, but the old HP LaserJets seem to be made to last.

So, I hope this works for others, just reconnect the cable couple of times and don’t mess with the printer setup screen. It’s stupid, but so far I’ve not had any problems in over a month. Please let me know in the comments if you have some suggestions or improvements.

One way to easily fix this problem, I guess, is to get your hands on an old HP JetDirect-printer server (or any other pinter server with parallel connectors). This way you could add the printer directly to your LAN using Ethernet, which is a nice bonus. You should be able to get them off eBay or something or your company’s IT departments closets. The only thing is that these things probably cost more than a new printer, so they probably aren’t worth your while.

PS. I know it’s a miracle in itself that I got a working LaserJet 1100. Many of those didn’t last a year before breaking. HP printers before and after it, though are good, but my earlier LaserJet 6P was just way too slow. The good thing about that one, though, is that it’s network-able with the right, HP first-party-accessory, cable (which I believe is really, really hard to find these days). It is also rumoured that you could shoot a 6P with a shotgun and it still would work.

PPS. If someone has done this same thing by connecting an old printer using this USB-parallel-adapter to a Airport Express/Extreme’s (or other WLAN router’s) USB port and got it working, my congratulations. I’ve not tried it, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.

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Tech IT Easy » mac

Valve’s Steam and Mac gaming

[Mac] 5 *quiet* Mac services that I dig day-in and day-out

My webcam adventure and why Mac audiences are so valuable

Favourite official & unofficial Mac-plugins

Getting HP LaserJet to work with modern Macs (and PCs)

[Mac] 5 quiet Mac services that I dig day-in and day-out