Monthly Archives: February 2008

CUDA for Mac OS X

CUDA is NVIDIA’s architecture and API for GPGPU – general purpose GPU programming. The fact is, those graphic cards are hugely powerful parallel computing units, and everyone stands to benefit by exploiting them to do far more than just outputting images to a screen.

Well today, NVIDIA made CUDA available for Mac OS X. This is a sign that times are changing for Apple when they start to make such a kind of inroad. And of course, everyone in the (probably small) Mac HPC business and in the scientific community is probably very happy about this.

So if you own NVIDIA hardware, go grab it and give it a try!

MPQDraft 1.0

MPQDraft 1.0 is now available, after a ridiculous 6 years of development. This is my second oldest project, second only to MPQKit (and its predecessor, MPQ2K Mac Edition). The highlights are as follows:

  • Support for patching PowerPC CFM programs on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. Mach-O and Intel support are forthcoming.
  • MPQ Loader 0.5 only supports Starcraft. Warcraft III support will be added only if there is demand.

The download is available from the sidebar and on the MPQDraft project page.

MPQDraft has an interesting history which I will be revisiting in an upcoming post. This will bring us all the way back to the days of Classic Mac OS.

In addition, I am planning on releasing in partnership with Campaign Creations updated versions for their classic campaigns using this new version of MPQDraft. Hopefully, people will check out the richness of the Starcraft modding community before stepping into the next chapter that Starcraft 2 will begin.

MPQDraft is now working on Intel Macs for CFM applications

This is probably coming out of the blue, but the renewed interest in StarCraft spurred by the ongoing development of Starcraft 2 has prompted me to take a look at MPQDraft again. As the title indicates, I now have the technology working again on Intel and PowerPC Macs for CFM (that’s Code Fragment Manager, a relic from classic Mac OS) applications (the primary target of MPQDraft, StarCraft, is still a CFM application).

MPQDraft at work

I will be releasing the new version once a few more bugs are addressed and proper testing on Leopard is completed. Once that’s done, I will probably contact old friends at Campaign Creations to have updated versions of all their classic StarCraft campaigns posted.