Spritle,
I would welcome players into the game regardless what kind of hardware they are using. The more, the merrier. I am just saying that making the software for different platforms is difficult and expensive. Look at WB - it's two games, not one - one for PC and another one for Mac.
So rignt now it is apparently not possible to port AH. If it was, I wonder if MacOS would be the first platform of choice. You have plenty of other nice platforms, like BeOS, Linux, etc. that allow you to run multiple processors for example.
For all we know neither Hitech nor Pyro may even know how to program for Mac and may be too busy to learn.
As for buying four top of the line computers, yes - you have to do that at least every 3 years to be able to play flight sims, plus interim video upgrades. Thank Lord that the price of that kind of system has dropped from $4500 to under $3000 over the last 6-7 years. Still a lot of money, but it is a game, after all - not a necessity.
A little bit of history - Mac, not PC was/is a monopoly, completely closed system. When they came up with a nice operating system and interface, they did not license the technology to anyone, instead they advertised amasing systems for completely ridiculous amounts of money that only corporations dared to buy and sold crappy systems for twice the money of a comparably equipped PC (I did my shopping). So the public bought atrocious but cheap PCs that were produced by hundreds of companies for less then IBM brand. And you could buy peripherals dirt cheap compared to Mac from thousands competing vendors.
And anyone could write an operating system for a PC - there are many commercial UNIX ports, Lunux, BeOS, etc.
Everybody knows that the issue is not hardware, but software.
Why wouldn't those Apple guys port their wonderful (no irony here) OS to a cheap and plentifull PC? They wanted to be the only wendor of all Mac Hardware, Software and Periferals and they almost lost their shorts.
Then a few years ago they licensed their stuff to a few other companies and in a few months we had plenty of Mac clones better and less expensive then the ones from Apple. Thw whole market for Mac revived and what did they do? They yanked the license from those companies who invested millions in production facilities and became a monopolists once again.
The PC and Microsoft stuff was not as good but more accessible to the people and we were buying it and voting with our $$. We elected windows as "The OS" and PC as "The Platform" and Bill Gates as The Reachest Man in the World completely democratically and fully aware of their shortcommings (Yes, Macboy, just like Germans elected Hitler in 1933).
From where I stand, (UNIX and X) both Windows (all flavors) and Mac are almost equally crappy systems. I know what a real OS should be like - I had to work on many flawors of UNIX and several models of hardware. Not a single one of them I could use for gaming. The fact that I currently have a Sun running Solaris 2.7 at my disposal does not give me arrogance to demand that everything be ported to it.
I feel sorry for the people that have access to Mac who cannot obtain a real gaming computer.
I do not even suggest to them to wait for the port because I want to see them in the arena now. Most of them are great guys. PCs get cheaper every day, AH is very tolerable to the older equipment. I cannot believe that it is preferable to play WB in 2D to running WB or AH on P2/333.
miko--
