erm ... Spec who? Whaaaaaaat? ... ehm ...

MARRY CHRISTMASS TO EVERYONE !!!
And a happy new year! A good take-off in 2009!

-> testing for Mac-Version: will there be a Mac-Version? Never read about it. I'm playing on my PC but I would freakingly god damn appreciate a Mac-Version running on my PowerPC! Havn't found a running Mac-Version of Uplink yet though. Dozents of rips and cracks for PC but no serial-file for that stupied Mac-Version to get past the trial. *grrrrrrr*

Have you tried http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com? That's where you buy a license (aka, legally own normal access to).

Please learn to not stunt the gaming industry's growth; because investing in their work, especially if you enjoy what they make, will only ensure a better chance of more great games in the future. Furthermore, programmers need food too ya know!

I should note that per an agreement with Ambrosia, you will require a vaild Uplink license for Mac.

Well, I have looked on Ambrosia and I find the game a little overpriced for beeing more than 3 years old, and a copy purchased running only either on Mac or Windows. Why isn't there a CD, that contains the game including versions for all OS's like Linux, Mac AND Windows?
Secondly, I'm not happy with the terms of the license and registration code. You can't transfer them to a second person or resell on e.g. a flea market.
Thirdly I find the guys from Ferrous Moon do a far greater job nowadays in maintaining and further developping the game. So I'd rather send them money for there altruistic efforts.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean to sabotage the gaming industry. I appreciate what they do sometimes. But as most big industries -such as the movie and music industry as well- they tend to be a little gready and old fashioned (inflexible to market changes - such as the system and the ways of free-market economy changing and maybe beeing obsulete...).

If they would offer a CD including PC, Linux and Mac version all together with a license code attached to the copy and not to one person and one person only, beeing transferable whenever you feel to give your copy to someone else as a gift or resell (as change of ownership) and wouldn't expire after time, and that CD costing not more than 5 to 10 $ on the software pyramide, THAN a would happily and screamingly run to the next store or order on amazon and get one !!!!

It's a fine product but it's not worth the price anymore and definitely not worth all the strings and hassles attached to it.

MIAH: you are right! I should wait a while longer, till the price and terms are more reasonable. So I will.

you could try using vmware fusion

I would love to, but as far as I know VMware fusion still only runns on Macs with Intel-core and I guess there is no appeal anymore to change that. But maybe it will still happen.
I, on the other hand, happened to have the rare honour and privilege to call one of the last PowerPC Macs my own. And I love it.

The price and terms won't change any time soon. The most probable time it would happen is, say, never. Besides, the reason you can't give it as a gift to someone or sell it on the flea market is because there is no physical version of the Mac game.

And 25$ isn't that unreasonable.

Also, I don't think that's what Miah meant.

Oh and, what strings and hassles are there? You purchase the game, they send you a validation code, and you type it into the program. No strings there. There are only two real hassles I know of at all: A. Dev mods can't be used (except for Onlink, when 0.2.0 is released), and B. Mods have to be installed in /users/<usernamehere>/library/applicationsupport/uplink/mods, and those really aren't much of a problem.

On another note, if a cd with all versions was 5 or 10$, Ambrosia and Introversion would each get 2.5 or 5$ per purchase, and that's not a good buisness strategy.

VMWare is never going to cater to your needs. The reason it's so fast is that it uses Virtualization, not Emulation.

If you don't know the difference, I'll be happy to tell you. You want something called Virtual PC. See if there's a demo.

I actually have a license I can sell for it. My father got a copy without consulting me first and the box didn't say that it doesn't work on his shiny new intel-based Mac. He still has it somewhere.

Hope you had a nice Christmass eve you guys.

Yep. Thanks Miah. I had the same in mind. I'll check wether it makes things work on my Mac and report. Havn't found time and motivation yet

By the way, some questions back on onlink:
Is there some newer version of the unofficial 1.6.0 or will there be one with the new release of Onlink? (Your Uplink laboratories sites are out off service with 404's if you hit on any of the above slides)
When will Onlink 0.2.0 be ready? I'm not asking seriously, it's more rhetorical but a question that is on everybodys mind, I guess. I know, it's done, when it's done *g* BUT is there an approximate timeframe, a goal on when to be finished? Wouldn't it be nice to put something like a counter on the announcement page? (Maybe not, because than it's fixiated, and who knows what obstacles still have to be overcome)


And yet another issue on preformance things. I happened to make my cousin addicted to Uplink/Onlink. Interestingly Onlink in SSE2 mode runs somewhat slow and bucking on his AMD Athlon 64 x2 dual core 4000+ with (only) 1 GB RAM, using Windows XP service pack 3 and a ATI Radeon 9600 256MB VRAM. Are there some known issues on that?
Is it the SSE2? Should I rather run it in SSE or even x86 mode? Or is it all due to the small RAM?
Uplink should run on a 300 MHZ CPU and a few (32) MB of RAM, but I don't know about Onlink and your advancements. But I recon they are still minuscule to nowadays performance of super-home-computers.
The mouse is really reacting slow and almost bouncing or hopping when I drag it over the screen in Onlink.

We didn't really have plans to. It there something absent from 1.6.0? The links work fine on my end; you were looking here, right?
I have no reasonable way to answer this, sorry.
There's two things I can say to this. First, try to set the affinity of Onlink to use one core. Barring this, use the generic version.

The thing with AMD is that we can't exactly support it. It's not that it's any better or worse than the Intel sets, but it does mean the chips are built differently, meaning that we would need to optimize it in different ways. We don't have the info we need to manage this, so when we say "SSE2" in the release, we mean specifically Intel chipsets that use the SSE2 instruction set. I'm afraid that as AMD goes, it's going to be trial and error. We'll continue to research way to improve this, but for now, there's your explanation.

Not that I know of except the performance issues.
No, I wasn't looking on onlinks mainpage: there everything is fine and the download works just fine. I -for some reason completely out of my mind- I hit the link to the right within the explenation: http://www.uplinklabs.net/old/tosser2/
That's the one with the 404's.
Hmmmm, I thought AMD's were as much x86 as Intel's and with having this huge power nowadays, they should run low performant games still flawlessly even if they are not necessarily optimised for that very structure?
Ok, feat back for solving that:
I installed the full onlink-mod including x86, SSE and SSE2. SSE2 was bucky and has micro-freases every two minutes or so. And so has also the x86. When micro-freasing it intensely accesses the hardrive
Interesting is that this could be explaned with the AMD-structure, BUT -HERE COMES THE BUT- but I have at home the same problems on my Intel Core2 Duo 8500, with 4 GB DDR2 RAM, Nvidia Geforce 9800 512MB VDDR3RAM and Windows XP Service Pack 3.
Also constant cyclic reappearing micro-freases.

Could this be due to the Dual-Cores?
How do I carry out this solutions you mentioned "set the affinity of Onlink to use one core. Barring this, use the generic version"?
What's the generic version and how do I set it to use one core?

Thanks in advance
-----
Some other issues on onlink, that might already be handeled...

-Sometimes the CPU-usage controlls of programms are covered by screens so it's hard to get to them or a crack-prog settles behind the hack-screen (such as it is with VDPIN and VDPIN-cracker).
-We found a bug that reproductively let onlink crash when you hit the map to enlarge, if you had still your first Standard CPU installed on an Multi-CPU gateway and bought some of the Async-hyper-CPU's from Uplink-Laboratories (the ones to be installed to fit multiple CPUs in
one slot). What happened is, I guess, the asyn-hyper CPUs are meant to be installed with already CPUs attached to the slots. That wasn't completely clear, we thought they are just fast and you could fit from singles to multiple of them in one slot. So we bought three to be installed on our 3-core gateway. The old CPU wasn't replaced as we had first thought (of course). So there was an old CPU with a second new one in one slot and secondary CPUs (that were meant to by additional to an existing) just as such in the others. I think that braught the system down crashing.
-You can't figuere out, if you have bought an upgrade or patch already. You can buy it a second third or thousendst time. It would be nice to be shown in one of your documentations on your current system or say "you already own a copy of that" if you try to rebuy.

I'm running a Pentium D, which is basically 2 P4's stuck into a single chip, and I have no issues with Onlink. Although, there IS the fact that I have 3GB of RAM (32 bit limitation)...

Check your RAM usage before and after you stark Onlink. Try the software mouse, or maybe windowed mode in the options. The only other difference is that I'm on Vista and not XP...but I'm not sure if that has any bearing.

Thanks. I tried that.

No changes. It appeares, that the Computer has the biggest processing toubles with the world map oben. In window mode objects are cut off or slightly out of center (such as buttons beeing displayed only two thirds or the dotted or full squares appearing on some of the worlds map target servers are out of center.
The software mouse produces a second arrow slightly off the reall mouse arrow. It sometimes limping behind as massive processing is used (for some unknown reason) like for rendering the world map. There seams to be something odd with producing that map.
I realised that if you run time faster, also the names on the world map replace and reinitiate themselves wildly.

The micro freases still appear every few cycles, accompanied by a massive access to the harddrive. What is onlink trying to read so desperately that contains such huge amounts of data, so that thegame is forced to slow due to massive reading on the harddrive (with loud read/write noises as if deleting a huge file)?
Tha game is just a few meg's big. It should run from RAM and barely need any hardrive accesses, shoudn't it? And if, not as massive to stop running processes, or should it?
Maybe a bug in code structure or operation procedures?

That all appears using the unofficial 1.6.0. Havn't checked with 1.5.5 yet. Will report back.

Rockin' an AMD 64 FX-57 at 2.8GHz (you can see my hardware specs in the computer specs thread... they haven't changed, sadly), and x86 runs fine... except for, yeah, on the World Map. Frame rate drops horrendously there. Thank Christmas Onlink isn't an FPS.

ghost_sypher, I think the micro-freezes you're talking about is Onlink's autosaving feature. Miah's said he's added an on/off option for autosaving come 0.2.x.

(Note: only really glanced at all the posts for the "important" stuff, also I'm not really all here in the head at the moment, so I'm assuming y'all are talking about 0.1.2F Onlink.)

-- Griffinhart