Upgrading to Leopard for Mac games?

[Hydragoon]

Dear Macforums community,
I have read posts at this site for a long time, but I decided to register because I have a concern I really hope you can help me with. I've tried to research, so don't think that I'm just coming up with this on the spot.

Here's my issue: I love Tiger (10.4.11). It does everything I need it to do right now, and the performance and stability is impeccable for my needs. However, I see that future games will be Leopard-only (biggest example is Spore), and I really don't want to be left behind for that.

So, first question is, how well does Leopard handle a lot of the games that you guys play? I've been to the link of games that run in leopard vs. not at Insidemacgames, so I assume that SoF2 and AvP2 and SW:GB don't work. The games that do work, though... How are they?

Games I care about the most: The Sims 2, Starcraft, WarCraft 3, Guitar Hero 3, Age of Empires 2 and 3, C&C3, and Civ IV.

I was wondering about booting into Tiger, also. I would rather not install Windows to play all the older games I already own that don't work or don't work well. Do you guys know if I can use my SimpleTech drive to boot from Tiger, and if I do, will performance be abysmal coming from a crappy external hard drive as compared to the internal HDD?


To summarize: Assuming I refuse to give up on my beautiful collection of older mac games, what's the cheapest / most effective way to play newer games for Leopard while being able to use my older ones? I hope this post makes sense and I appreciate the advice.

Sincerely,
Hydragoon

P.S. I've heard some no-cd cracks don't work in Leopard, and I love being able to play my games over a LAN at home, so any info about that would be appreciated as well!

 

[spyker3292]

Well for starters. What computer do you have?

 

[Hydragoon]

My Mac

I didn't realize my particular computer was important info. Here it is:

I have a MacBook Pro, 2.16 GHz, Core Duo, 2 GB RAM, 256 MB Radeon X1600, and a 100 GB HDD down to about 10 GB capacity left. Thanks!

 

[SmartIndianKid]

P.S. I've heard some no-cd cracks don't work in Leopard, and I love being able to play my games over a LAN at home, so any info about that would be appreciated as well!

As far as the most recent Blizzard games (WC3, SC and D2) go, they've all been patched by Blizzard to require no CD to run.

I wouldn't worry about installing Leopard until you find a game that requires it though.

 

[Hydragoon]

Thanks for the reply. Does anyone know how serious of a performance hit games in Leopard have? Overall, is it about the same, or better, or worse?

 

[204353]

I've had Leopard and Tiger on my MacBook Pro, and I haven't seen any difference in game performance. I've tried Quake 4 and Battlefield 2142. Quake runs really well on both (and the same can be said for my old MacBook Pro which had nearly identical specs to yours). Battlefield 2142, however, has been very badly optimised for OS X and is very jerky, even on the lowest graphic settings. If you like 2142 and you have a half-decent Windows PC, play it on the PC!

I've also tried Age Of Mythology (PPC through Rosetta, of course) which runs well except for when the unit count gets high. Again, it runs well on both Tiger and Leopard equally, and the same can be said for Age Of Empires 3 (Universal binary).

I'm clinging onto Tiger because I love the haxies like ShapeShifter, but depending on how good Spore is, I may have to pop in the upgrade DVD once more...

 

[hankolerd]

The only difference I have noticed, is that games seem to start up a little faster in Leopard. And one game, Rally Shift, became much more playable(a jump from about 15fps to 25fps), I think that was when the graphic update came out. I honestly don't see why some people don't upgrade to Leopard. It is all around improved over Tiger, in my experience anyway. Startup and app launch times both seem to be improved, as well as productivity enhancements like quicklook. I have had Leopard pretty much since launch, so I don't even really remember what Tiger was like anymore. But as far as your question goes, I only suspect that you will see nothing but no changes to slight performance gains while gaming by upgrading to Leopard. But at this point, you have to ask yourself if you just wait one more year for Snow Leopard. Guess it depends on your budget.