Rampancy

Peter Tamte of MacSoft agreed to be interviewed by Tuncer Deniz of Inside Mac Games to talk about the issues some users have been having with the 1.03 patch, many of which center on the anti-piracy features; namely, the requirement that the CD be inserted in the drive in order to play, as with the PC version. The earlier version of Halo for the Mac did not have this requirement.

The real news is the shocking-sounding revelation of the number of pirated copies of Halo Tamte says are out there:

We can only physically track less than 10% of the piracy, and we have physically tracked more units of Halo being stolen on the Internet than have been sold through stores so far.

How it is known that the tracked copies are 10% of the total if only 10% of the total is monitored is a bit beyond me. It sounds a bit like the old wives' tale about cockroaches, that for every one that you see there are ten you don't see. There's something about this statistic that rings true-- even if we have no idea where it came from. However, it is worth noting that the actual sales figure for Mac Halo isn't mentioned. No doubt Tamte simply wants us to imagine a large number, multiply it by 10, conclude that this number represents the amount of Halo piracy, and to recoil in horror.

How is this being tracked? Tamte doesn't say. He does, however, predict that more game companies will use the Internet to track piracy directly:

Yes, it is very likely you will see these -- and other -- forms of copy-protection in the future. It is terribly unfortunate that the honest people will have to waste their time with copy-protection. But, there are just too many dishonest people willing to steal games on the Internet now.

With the amount of estimated piracy compared to the size of the market, there's no wonder companies balk at making Mac ports of games.

Jarvis Badgley, via Louis Wu of HBO, noticed a good, if belated, review of Halo for the Macintosh over at MacOSXHints by robg.One thing I can say-- this review has to be the third or fourth time I've seen a Mac user write that the game actually performs better at higher resolutions than at 640x480, a behavior pretty much the opposite of what I've experienced with Halo on PCs. Today I finally decided I'd try it out, and it seems to be true.

VersionTracker now lists an entry for PPFMaster 1.0, a Mac application created by Scotiasoft Systems for applying PlayStation Patch Files. From their site:

Originally designed for the Halo modding scene, PPFMaster is a simple Applescript GUI wrapper around Paradogs' ApplyPPF and MakePPF3 binaries. Their tool, PPF-O-Matic, doesn't work for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, so ScotiaSoft Systems developed a simple tool to create and apply PPF patches.

Scotiasoft produced saved game editors for the role playing games Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 on the Mac in 2002. You can download PPFMaster 1.0 from their site.

The Mac version of Halo has now reached 1.03, bringing it compatible with the large number of PC-based servers out there that have already been running 1.03 for some weeks now. HBO is running a list of mirrors for the patch. We've also put up our own mirror of the Mac Halo 1.03 Updater. This also means that the HBO-Subnova Halo PC server has also been upgraded to 1.03 once more, bringing back some of the stranger custom gametypes that were hosted on it earlier. Thanks to Frankie for the heads-up over on Bungie.net.

UPDATE: VersionTracker, a site that... well, tracks versions, if you're into that sort of thing, also has a page on the Halo 1.03 Update, and some users have put some quite negative comments on it about the update. This mainly has to do with requiring the CD in the drive to play the game, which is especially aggravating to laptop users (like myself) who don't like to carry a lot of CDs (or use up precious battery life) while on the move. Here's hoping that at least, once MacSoft is satisfied they've sold all the copies of Mac Halo that they're going to, they'll change their minds and remove this requirement in a later patch; currently the Read Me file states:

Previous versions of Halo did not require you to have a CD inserted to play the game. Unfortunately, due to heavy illegal online downloading of the software, this and all future versions of Halo will require a CD to play.

Sympathizing as I do with the all-too-logical desire to get paid for work you've done, I can understand how someone stealing your stuff can piss you off.