Mac PPC users, please read.

That's a crossposting from my blog. Please see details there.

Some thoughts. I was more or less playing with the Mac viewer to see if I can get it done. A number of people had serious problems to compile it but that has been solved. Hyang Zhao is making the Mac version (universal binary) of the Cool Viewer and it doesn't make much sense to invent the wheel twice . From reading through the forums I however found that there is a number of people who have difficulties with the official Linden viewer. Also there seems to be a big community of Mac users with older non-Intel machines for which the 1.19.0.5 CV may just be the best and fastest they can find. If there is enough interest, I would offer to make a PPC only 1.19.05 Cool Viewer, eventually with all optimizations and fine tuning to make it running well on older hardware LL doesn't want to support anymore. But I would need your feedback and of course someone who helps testing as I dont have a PPC Mac myself. Please leave some comments for me .

Boy
http://my.opera.com/boylane

Either (or both) of you doing something that would work on an older box would be great!!!! Especially if it eventually gets optimized for older hardware, but any PPC re-compilation right now would help considerably! Before they locked things out I was able to use my 10.3.9 1-GHz G4. It sits next to an intel mac, but I like to be able to run 2 SL sessions on different machines for various reasons.

Given the number of people that screamed when 10.3.9 got locked out I am a bit suspicious of LL's usage numbers. It would be interesting to correlate mac users with active accounts, as I suspect many bots and campers use windows hardware.

If someone with a "real" PPC Mac wants to try to build a Cool Viewer, I'm more than happy to provide a fully patched tested working source tree (big!) and to host the resulting binary on my blog. As I said I'm not in the possession of such a crucial toy but try to build on PC hardware. Please let me know.

Boy

I have a G4 Mac mini running 10.3.9, if you have a source tree for me to build on it I'll be more than happy to apply duct tape and silly putty as needed.

Let me know if you need a tester. I think my version of xcode on that machine went into never-never land at some point, but given it is right next to an intel iMac I can do comparison testing.

@Argent

Cool . I just made a new CV R35a universal build and uploading it now. The source is about the same size, some 70MB, will upload it afterwards. Hope my Opera has enough space left...

You need XCode 3.1.1 to compile it, older versions don't work. Just in case.

The universal build is up, new in this only saveloadscripts to harddisk. The Intel version is still there but I removed the links. Please give it a shot. I still need to figure out how to upload the sources, need to split them too.

XCode 3 only runs on Leopard. I can't even run that on my Macbook Pro let alone my PPC Mac mini. I would have to get it working under XCode 1.5 to eork on it on my mini.

Alternatively, you should be able to build it for the Panther SDK, and I can test that for you.

@Argent

You have PM

@Argent, Did you have a chance to take a look at it?

@All
Anyone else with older PPC hardware/software and a compiler, guess XCode 2.4 is the latest available, is also invited to give the full Cool Viewer 1.19.0.5 source a try. Please send me a PM here and I give you the link. The full source tree including all libs and artwork is 400MB in size, so I don't want to post it here for everybody to download and to ultimately kill my account .

Boy

Since I lost my disk with the dev tools I needed to browse some readmes on the Apple Dev Connection site a bit. Xcode 3.1.1 can compile for 10.3.x .... but the latest Xcode that will install on 10.3.9 for native development is 1.5.

My Mac development was back in the CodeWarrior days .... I assume you can do Xcode 3.1.1 development on an 10.5 intel targetting a 10.3 PPC using a universal binary?

I won't be able to look at it until this weekend. I'm pulling all-nighters as it is.
If it won't build on XCode 2.x or 1.x then it possibly depends on details of the Leopard SDK, and attempting to build it for the Panther SDK under XCode 3.x isn't likely to be any more successful.

Oops, seems an earlier screen refresh here lost some replies I should have seen in the thread. *blush*

I have an active Apple Dev account and know a few tricks with Xcode, would you like me to use XCode 3.1(Latest one) to compile it for you guys and then upload it to my site so you can download it? I have a several terabytes of bandwith

Hyang built a Mac version with 10.3 (Panther) support. So I think you should all have a look on her blog and watch for the things to come.

http://hyangreflections.blogspot.com

I think I will slowly drop out of the Mac scene here again and concentrate on the Windows part

Is it possible for us to work on a truly native version of the Sl viewer? I think it would be beneficial for Mac users if we could replace as much of the LL proprietary technologies with the Mac OSX specific elements. Rather, get rid of LL interface in favor of a quartz interface and that sort of thing. I wanted to hack the viewer, but the documentation is virtually non-existent.

The SL viewer is as native on OS X as on any other platform.

It's technically more native than a Windows viewer as Windows normally uses DirectX for 3d rendering whereas a OS X uses OpenGL (the same technology as SL)

It would be nice to have an Aqua style UI tho...

OpenGL is just as "native" on Windows as DirectX. OpenGL was native on windows BEFORE DirectX. The whole point to DirectX was because Microsoft was seeing an API they didn't control becoming dominant on Windows, and they couldn't allow ANYTHING to detract from their control.

Disagree Argent.

OpenGL was provided as an extension to Windows 3.1 from September 1995 by a third party company (TGS). AFAIK it was not part of Windows 95 until 1996.

DirectX on the other hand was released with Microsoft Plus! for 1995 on the very same day as Windows '95 to allow the 3d Pinball game supplied to work

Before Windows '95, for complex 3D games, you generally quit Windows back into MS-DOS and ran them in protected mode using something like DOS4GW

So neither of them were native on Windows 95, but OpenGL was available on Windows 3.1?

Regardless, calling OpenGL "not native" on Windows is like calling the UNIX-style API in DOS 2.1 "not native".