Spuzzum wrote:

LordJR wrote:

I'd like to see a port over to MAC. Not that I'm a mac owner but of all the other OS I see being support, why not MAC?

Two reasons:

One, Macintosh systems don't use the same kernel as Windows systems, requiring substantial effort in porting it over.

No more effort than porting from Windows to Linux or FreeBSD. Mac OS X is unix as much as either of them. Well-written C++ code should be portable among any system that has a standard C++ compiler and a standard set of libraries, regardless of the underlying kernel. Thus the core of BYOND shares the same code in all three versions. Only the user interfaces differ.

Linux and Windows (and FreeBSD and other derivatives) are designed to use the IBM/PC line of CPUs and motherboards, which makes porting between them relatively simple (emphasis on relatively).

The fact that the currently supported operating systems (Win, Linux, FBSD) all run on Intel-based systems is completely irrelevant. Porting to a similar OS architecture running on a different CPU is primarily a matter of recompiling the code under the target OS. The biggest issue in porting between similar systems is usually accounting for the integer byte order of the different CPUs. x86 is little-endian while PowerPC, used in all Macs, is big-endian. Thankfully BYOND was designed with future portability in mind and this was never an issue. It took all of about an hour to get the unix text-mode version of BYOND compiled and running under Mac OS X. About the same amount of time it took for the FreeBSD version when it was first created.

Two, while Air Mapster has access to a Mac, I don't think Dan or Tom do. Thus, there'd be a major pain bringing up the rear as they tried to port it over and then test it.

This is true. The major issue (aside from a general lack of programmer manpower) is that a text-mode version of BYOND for Mac OS X is useless to the vast majority of Mac users. Only the unix/Linux people who switched to Mac would possibly be interested, probably to run servers. A gui port is a wholly different animal, and something that Dantom won't have the resources to tackle until they start making some money to pay the bills.

Oh, and MAC stands for Media Access Layer, not Macintosh. It's just Mac.

digitalmouse wrote:

Air Mapster wrote:

Oh, and MAC stands for Media Access Layer...

Huh? Come Again? Usually MAC stands for Machine Adress Code - or something like that. Often a MAC address is the machines unique identification, regardless of what it is.

So where does 'Layer' figure into it?

=)

Must have been a forum glitch or something. What I wrote (I swear, really!) was Media Access Control. That's what MAC stands for. "Layer" is often used along with Media Access Control, as a google search will verify. The forum must have gotten confused and stored the wrong word.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it!

Goku72 wrote:

Air Mapster wrote:

Must have been a forum glitch or something. What I wrote (I swear, really!) was Media Access Control. That's what MAC stands for. "Layer" is often used along with Media Access Control, as a google search will verify. The forum must have gotten confused and stored the wrong word.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it!

Right...and I live next door to little green men =p

You to? Wow, and I thought I was crazy.

RaeKwon