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As promised recently by soon-to-be Aspyr employee Brad Oliver, the company has released a patch to their popular 3rd person action/adventure title Alice.

The update makes a large number of additions to the game, modernizing it for OS X with features like Full-Scene Anti Aliasing (FSAA) and multiprocessor support, as well as fixing crashes and speeding up the game overall.

Here's a full list of fixes in the 1.1.1 update:

• The tones for the 3-door puzzle on "Beyond the Wall" should play properly now.
  
• Alice sports new icons.
  
• Fixed problem with movies not being centered correctly in some cases.
  
• Rolled in many fixes and improvements from other Quake3-based Mac ports, including FSAA support, anisotropic filtering, texture compression and SMP support.
  
• Added HID Manager support.
  
• Fixed various crashes when loading levels.
  
• Fixed sound corruption/crash when changing sound settings.
  
• Removed dependency on OpenTransport, so Alice should launch and run on systems that have OpenTransport disabled now.
  
• A few new code optimizations are in place, so Alice will in general run faster now.
  
• Fixed issue with OpenGL and MacOS X that caused gridlines in the various menus.
  
• Alice would not start if your game monitor was set to 256 colors before launching the app under MacOS 8 & 9.

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Download Alice 1.1.1 Update (3.9MB)

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Amy Torres of Aspyr Media passed along word of a new beta patch to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets yesterday. There are a number of considerations before heading out to download the update though, as it's only necessary for OS 9 users and one of the known issues is that performance can seem to suffer.

The beta does make a few crucial fixes for those who much be stuck in the game though, and they expect to have a 1.0.1 final patch out soon which addresses the remaining problems. Here's the full scoop from Aspyr:

Note: Mac OS X users do not need to update, as this is an update for Mac OS 9.x users.

To install this update for Harry Potter CoS, simply copy the new application (titled "HP OS 9") to your game folder for Chamber of Secrets.

Fixes in 1.0.1:
• Doors that were supposed to be locked are now properly locked (ie. Going
into challenge doors before the challenge).
• Loss of video does not occur after Skurge challenge.
• The door to get the Bicorn horn in the dungeon works properly now.

This patch does not address the issue with the Silver Wizard cards sometimes not unlocking the Gold wizard challenge properly. We are still working on that issue, and when that is fixed, we will release a new update (1.0.1
final).

One known issue with this beta version of the update is that the performance seems to suffer at times (the game will get somewhat choppy). This will also be addressed when the final version of the update is released.

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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (add to watch list)

Download Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 1.0.1 Beta

Download Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 1.0.1 Beta (Mirror 1)

Buy Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Fans of the ever popular MacMAME should be pleased to know that a new version of this highly lauded emulator has been made available. For those who may not know, MacMAME makes playing all your favorite retro titles as easy as using your Mac.

According to their website, many new features are included in this release:

• In sync with the Win32 0.74u2 build.
• Somewhere between 0.60 and 0.66, the application icon was damaged, resulting in some wacky shadow effects (most noticeable when viewed at 128x128). This is now fixed.
• Now uses OSX-savvy CFPreferences to load and save its settings.
• Converted chunks of the code to use CarbonEvents, and started ditching resources in favor of nib files.
• MacMAME once again creates files in the proper location.
• Fixed issue where renaming MacMAME would cause it to not launch properly.
• Fixed some bugs with the PPC 68k core. [Andreas Kromke]
• Added new and improved OSX icons. [Nathan Strum]

MacMAME.org

Downlaod MacMAME

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Wolfpack and publisher Ubi Soft have released a large new patch to their Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG) Shadowbane. The update, which brings the game to version 1.0.10.12 features many bug fixes, both major and less significant, game balancing changes, along with new features.

Of the new features, the most important to regular players is the addition of new chat filters, which are able to be able to screen the amount of text "talking" that flies by on the screen based on a number of variables. For info on the chat system, check out their chat filter tutorial, also linked-to below.

Here are a few other changes in the update:

- Added Nation Channel, which nation leaders can use to communicate to their followers, and Commander Channel, which is used by guild leaders only.
- You can now toggle whether or not you want sound to center around your character (the old way) or your camera (the new way). This can be found in Options.
- City Asset Management now offers a reserve function that can be set by anyone who can manage the asset, establishing a cut off value for gold in the strongbox below which hirelings will refuse to purchase items (for fear of exhausting the reserve)
- Amazons have taken over the Bandit Wetlands on the Mainland! Seek out the Palomi Wetlands for all sorts of new High-Level Monsters, Including many brand new Foes!

Shadowbane Patch Notes

Shadowbane Chat Tutorial

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While the word from LucasArts has been pretty much mum, Gamespot is reporting the president of the company has resigned. In his position, VP Mike Nelson will be in charge. Here's what the report had to say:

With little warning, LucasArts president Simon Jeffery resigned today. The company issued a brief statement this afternoon saying that Jeffery "has decided to leave the company and return to his native England with his family." No official reason for the exit was given. Mike Nelson, LucasArts' vice president of finance and administration, will serve as acting general manager until a replacement is found.

LucasArts

GameSpot: LucasArts President Quits

Graphics card maker Nvidia recently announced its election by unanimous vote into the role of a permanent voting member of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board. Headed by nine well-known tech companies such as Apple, IBM, and SGI, the ARB has governance over OpenGL specifications.

“We are very proud to have been elected a permanent voting member of the OpenGL ARB,” said Kurt Akeley, co-inventor of OpenGL and a 3D graphics architect at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is committed to the OpenGL specification and we look forward to helping the ARB respond quickly and flexibly to evolutionary changes in computer graphics technology.”

NVIDIA (add to watch list)

NVIDIA Elected as Permanent Member of OpenGL Architecture Review Board

The folks behind the SpriteWorld Animation Library recently announced the release of SpriteWorld 3.0. A collection of programming routines, SpriteWorld 3.0's intention is to allow programmers to create smooth, fast sprite animations for whatever uses are necessary.

A feature list for SpriteWorld includes the following:

• Support for Carbon development while still supporting "Classic."
  
• Hardware accelerated drawing (through OpenGL in Carbon and RAVE in Classic).
  
• An unlimited number of sprites of any size.
  
• Time-based animation making it possible to have smooth animation independent of frame rate.
  
• Sprite storage in variety of formats (PICT or RLE resouces or any type of graphic file that Quicktime can handle).
  
• Pixel-precise collision detection.
  
• Special effects via. custom blitters, including alphamasking, rotating, scaling and additive blending.

SpriteWorld 3.0

Donohoe Digital has announced the release of War! Age of Imperialism for both the Mac and PC. Based off the board game by Eagle Games, Age of Imperialism offers up to eight players the chance to create a world-dominating empire by use of warfare, development, and technological advancement.

The computer version is a faithful implementation of the board game's advanced ruleset. The computer eliminates much of the complexity of the advanced rules (tracking PPs, what you can buy and where you can place them, etc.) such that a beginner could be comfortable.

War! Age of Imperialism

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