Thinking about buying a mac

I've have about ten engines, and I'm sick of them all. I've noticed Unity's glowing reviews for the past year, and I'm finally going to break down and buy a mac just for Unity. I know nothing about them (besides the fact that they look really cool), but I saw this on their site http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

Does this really work? If it does than I should be able to run Unity on the same machine as my PC programs? Also, I already use maya and photoshop, so there should be no learning curve there (sweet!). I'm assuming they pretty much work the same on mac? Thanks

 

Boot camp runs wonderfully even on my Mac mini.
I think there are a few differences between the Mac and Windows versions of those apps, but nothing significant I should think.

 

Boot Camp allows you to reboot your machine into the sexiest PC you've ever used - everything is perfect, there are no driver hassles, and games run fast.

The best part, however, is combining with Parallels - when you do that, you can boot on to the PC when you want to play games, and just run the same install inside MacOSX for if you just have that photoshop filter.

Welcome aboard!

 

Boot Camp is a miracle. It's very cool to just reboot and be in Windows. Plus, when you boot back into OSX it feels so.. shiny and smooth compared to XP.

 

If you already own PhotoShop and Maya for Windows and want to transfer your licenses to the Windows partition of Bootcamp, you can do that.

Bootcamp is "real" WIndows -- it's not emulation or virtualization, so those apps will run at full speed.

The only caveat is that right now the Windows and Mac OS partitions don't see each other, so you would need an external drive formatted so both Windows and Mac OS can read and write to it (FAT32, not NTFS) to put files you want to share between the two OSes.

 

Yes, buy a Mac. Get one like the mid-range 20" iMac with a decent video card (the 256MB X1600 still works well) and up the RAM if you can (although mine's outfitted with 1GB which is fine) and you'll be happy.

Bootcamp runs flawlessly. Under BootCamp I can run HalfLife2 with all setting maxed and get 30-40fps. I play Titan Quest and run Studio Max 9. Eveything works well.

Maya works the same in both platforms as does Photoshop (again, I use them both, Photoshop daily at work).

And Unity flies even on mid-range Macs like the iMac.

You'll really like Unity. A lot. The asset and workflow pipeline to get a game made are second to none (and like yourself I've tried lots and lots of engiens over the last 15 years).

 

Sweet! Thanks for advice, I look forward to getting a mac and the engine then.

 

You can install Mac Drive 6 on the XP install to give you read and write support from XP to your Mac Disks. On the Mac side you can install MacFUSE (free!) to be able to write to the NTFS disks. Once you have both of these installed and running you can read and write to all drives/partitions on your computer in any operating system. Might come out cheaper than an external FAT drive, seeing as the only thing you need to purchase is Mac Drive 6.

Jeff

 

It looks like Leopard will come with bootcamp. This may be the only way I get to run Zbrush 3 on a Mac. Seems like Zbrush no longer likes to support the Mac that much.