Edwin

My copy going on ebay tbh

OK with disclaimers out the way I thought I would answer a few questions raised in the article and in the comments. Firstly it looks like everyone likes the game which is great Anyway I thought I would explain the reasons and give a bit more detail to the questions and points raised.

** MacBook / GMA cards **

The graphics in these machines (especially the older MacBooks and the all minis) don’t have dedicated graphics cards, they have a card that shares system RAM with the main CPU, additionally basic features on graphics cards like hardware accelerated textures and lighting are also missing requiring the CPU to do the work instead. The newer MacBooks have an up-rated card but it still is not a dedicated graphics card although it does have a few hardware features.

To make a game popular and sell well it is in our interests to get the game on the largest amount of Mac machines possible. However sometimes it is not possible get every Mac supported if that machine is missing some fairly basic requirements like a dedicated graphics card with hardware acceleration.

We have whenever possible added in GMA support to our games, LEGO Star Wars II & Tomb Raider are two examples, we have even patched some of our older games like Ford Racing 2 and Worms 3D. However Colin has high graphics demands and as a racing game needs a stable and high frame-rate to be playable these two factors together mean that GMA support was not feasible.

Even on the low end supported machines a warning appears, this was done as it will override a few graphics options to ensure the game still runs smoothly. As you can imagine if we have to do this on low end machines with hardware graphics you can see why the GMA is not supported with it’s lack of hardware.

** Gamepad Support **

If the gamepad is HID compliant then it should work, some pads might have issues with the force-feedback options if the Mac has no drivers for them. If you have an Intel machine 10.5 will be required as 10.4 had no FFB support for Intel.

The game was designed for a console first so playing with a gamepad will give you the best experience, however I have completed the game both with a gamepad and with a keyboard. Although I will admit my times are slightly faster with a pad.

The Microsoft wheel mentioned did not follow HID standard spec and differed from 99% of other wheels available in terms of how it defined it’s pedals in particular (as I recall). Although you can get this to work on Windows and Mac it would require special code just for this one wheel as it is different from all other wheels. As support for it has been dropped by the manufacturer, it is I believe no longer in production and finally it was not very popular we did not buy one in and spend time making this work on the Mac. Oh and it never had FFB drivers on the Mac either!

Finally if you use USB overdrive you will override the USB data (as USB overdrive is designed to work with programs that have no pad support at all) so the game will not even recognize it correctly if at all. If you ever use USB devices with Feral games we have dedicated built in support so using third party USB apps like USB overdrive in this case will override and hence break the built in support if it does exist. So always try without any third party apps first. If you have no joy you can then try third party apps.

If you have any further questions feel free to either contact our support team, email me if you have my email, or post a comment and I will do my best to reply, however it can get a bit busy finishing the next few games so don’t worry if I take more than 30 mins to reply.

Cheers,

Edwin

Producer - Colin McRae Rally Mac
Feral Interactive

…and once again MacBook owners get the shaft. They should at least provide a very low graphics quality setting…