SpiceWare's Blog

"I had a situation after one OS X upgrade where Parallels wasn't happy - and Parallels is critical for Stay Frosty 2 as I use a Linux VM for the ARM compiler that's used for Harmony/Melody development."

 

Yikes -- that would drive me nuts. Surely there has to be an ARM compiler that would work for Harmony/Melody that runs under OS X, right?

 

If I ever get a chance to do some more 2600 hacking, I'll probably see what can be done about that. I can't stand having to flip between OSes, especially for something that should be able to work.

I used to use GCC-3.3 Toolchain OS X, but they stopped creating the Mac builds after that version.

 

I switched to Sourcery CodeBench Lite Edition as it optimized the code better (smaller binary so more space left for other things).

 

Switching to Linux under Parallels works extremely well. All the source code is on my Mac's hard drive. I even edit the C files using X Code. The Linux VM is set up so it has directly access the source code directory on my Mac, so there's no hassle with copying files back and forth. As soon as I save from X Code the ARM compiler under Linux sees the changes. As soon as I compile the C files under Linux, dasm on the Mac can merge the results into the 2600 BIN file.

I've told my wife we'll upgrade her MacBook to Mavericks after the first patch. (i.e. next month)

 

I'm waiting for the rumored Hawsell upgrade for the Mini before I pull the trigger to get one (and the 27" monitor) for my "home computer". The iMacs were upgraded outside of the big event, but the rumor sites don't have any new news.

I'm looking forward to the memory compression. I don't need it for the mini, but my (late 2008) MacBook Pro is maxed out with 8GB of RAM and I occasionally exceed that.

 

With the iPad I decided I don't need a laptop anymore, so I'm planning to replace my MacBook Pro in a few months. I'm tempted by the new Mac Pro, though may end up with next update to the mini. I'll be making that decision in January/February.

I'm avoiding Mavericks at home for the time being. I'm running older versions of some Adobe apps which reportedly have compatibility issues, and I don't want to upgrade them (not because I'm a luddite, but because I'm cheap, plus the newer versions of Illustrator break FreeHand importing).

 

We'll be getting some Mac Pros at work as soon as they ship, and we'll start beating them up pretty good in the spring in anticipation of rolling them out over the summer. There are some known incompatibilities there (Media Composer, ProTools among them), so we can't deploy them yet as full production machines, but we can still give them a pretty good thrashing. The bigger issue is how do we secure them in a lab environment? I've seen no evidence of any Kensington slot, and even our Apple rep doesn't know yet. Hopefully, there will be an elegant third-party option that doesn't include superglue or drilling.

 

I suspect a Mac Mini update will be happening soon. They're due. The question is, when will Apple have sufficient supplies to meet laptop demand? They likely won't update the Mini until then.