• 640x480 16-Bit Mode: 32.4 FPS
• 640x480 32-Bit Mode: 18.9 FPS
• 640x480 32-Bit Mode/16-Bit Textures: 22.9 FPS
• 640x480 Default Mode/16-Bit Textures: 27.2 FPS

(Update/Note: The reason "Default mode" ran faster than 32Bit mode (both run with the OS X desktop set to millions colors) is that the Z-buffer (depth buffer) is set to 16-Bit mode when "Default" mode is selected, vs. a 24-bit depth buffer setting when "32-Bit" mode is selected. Thanks to Jeremy at ATI for this explanation.)
The desktop color depth was set to the same color depth as the Quake3 mode before each test. Note the audio reverts to high quality after you exit the game and restart - so I had to reset that each time. (I saw the same thing in the previous 1.27 beta.)
16Bit mode had the same poor image quality as seen before with the ATI cards, 32bit looks much better, but takes a big toll on performance with the onboard Rage128 Mobility. Config file tweaks could help boost rates, but the above is just a quick test to show what the PB G4/400 delivered with the settings noted.

Brett, the reader that noted the update earlier today, posted the following comments from Graeme Devine of ID regarding the updated version:

"A new Mac OS X 1.29f Beta is in the process of being posted to the id ftp site.
This fixes some os the issues related to the slow sound code in the first release, many of you had written that timedemos were much faster with sound off than on (more than to be expected).
The filename is quake3-macosx-129f-2.dmg
I'm now working on the Classic release.
Graeme."

See the earlier news item below for the link to the updated version.

" ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake3/mac/quake3-macosx-129f-2.dmg

downloading now. will check version #.
edit: yep, it's new. from the readme--

"Quake3 1.29f for OS X - BETA

Fixed:
- slow sound

Installation:
You need to drag the contents of this mount into your home directory. You MUST also put the pak0.pk3 from your Quake3 CD into the baseq3 directory, and, if you have it, the pak0.pk3 file from your Team Arena CD into the missionpack directory."
Brett "

I checked my IE download manager and the file I downloaded previously was named "quake3-osx-129f-beta.dmg" (but that download was from a mirror, not ID's server). Now www.quake3arena.com's ID FTP filename is listed as "quake3-macosx-129f-2.dmg". I was leery of this post, but with the different filename and date of today, I decided to post this for readers as many complained about the slow performance with sound enabled. (See Oliver's test results posted yesterday for examples of performance with a GeForce3/Dual G4/533 with sound on and off.)

IBM Travelstar 48GH drive, Powerbook G4
Comments:
" This drive is very silent, and a bit faster than the original 10GB IBM drive. Speed is not an important matter here though, I want quiet operations:-) Listen to the difference; recorded (in soundedit, no modifications other than fade in/out) with an external mic placed on the trackpad, . The ambient sound is from a PM 8600 with three Seagate Cheetahs, used for the recording.

Old drive:
http://homepage.mac.com/mammal/org_sound.mov
And here is the new drive:
http://homepage.mac.com/mammal/sound_after.mov
Christian Celius Bj-rvik"

The only source I know of these drives currently is Transintl.com which has them listed at $549. (The had stock a week or so ago when it was announced here, but not sure of current stock status.) [Note: a reader sent a note that OWC also has the 48GB Travelstar drives currently listed for $569.95.]

Prices for their software varied for other upgrades listed on that page - for instance the Newer Tech ZIF upgrades section noted a $29.95 price, but the Newer Tech CPU card upgrades noted a $69.95 price - both available in July.

I can understand they are trying to recover the cost of developing the software and it's good to see more support for older Mac upgrades, but since many older Mac owners are already using either Ryan Rempel's or another company's free cache enabler, I wonder how many will be willing to pay $30 or more . (But that's just my opinion.) For owners of Sonnet's Encore G3/G4 ZIF upgrades, yesterday's news had a note on Sonnet's free OS X cache enabler for Beige G3/AIO Macs available at this page.

See the Sonnet's OS X page for complete details on their OS X support policy on other upgrade models such as the L2/G3 and Nubus upgrades.

" Mike,
I was very excited to hear that the new Que! SuperDisk 240MB FD32 MB was in stock at Egghead.com. As soon as I received my email informing me of the availability of the drive I purchased one. I just received it today via UPS and I've had the chance to test it out a little. In case you're not familiar with the drive, it's much like the First Imation SuperDisk drive that uses LS-120 disks that have 120MB capacities. It reads these, normal floppy disks (740K and 1.44MB), and new LS-240 disks (240MB). The drive, itself, is very small and compact. It is USB bus powered so no external AC adapter is needed and it has a short USB cable that wraps around and tucks neatly into the casing of the drive. This is a Panasonic drive restamped as a QPS creation even though it does not have the typical stylings of previous QPS products. It is plain black and only has a few markings on it. It looks almost like it belongs to a laptop. Imation no longer produces SuperDisk drives. Panasonic now sells the technology. The installation disk that comes with the drive has drivers for both PC's and Macs. Also included is Retrospect Express (PC and Mac versions), the SuperWriter FD32 Formatting software, and Digital Camcorder software to encode Digital Video to MPEG-2 for use on DVDs (Windows only).

The first thing I did was check to see that it read and wrote to normal 1.4MB floppies. This it did just fine. I had an original Imation SuperDisk drive and this drive is probably as fast as the newer generation SuperDisk drives. Unfortunately, I have not had the chance to test LS-120 and LS-240 disks yet as I haven't had time yet. What I really wanted to test was the supposed 32MB formatting of normal 1.44MB floppies. The software that formats and writes the floppies to 32MB capacity is pretty buggy and picky. I could only get a disk to format to a 32MB capacity if I first opened the SuperWriter application then inserted a disk WITH something already written to it in 1.44MB format. I had numerous system lockups while trying to get the drive to write 32MB floppies. When I finally did write a 6MB mp3 to the disk it was very slow. To write 25MB to floppy disk it took me around 7 or 8 minutes for formatting and writing to finish. The included documentation tells exactly how the drive reformats a normal floppy to hold so much data. I can tell that they rushed the shipping of the drive because the English is poorly written and can be very confusing. I think i've seen a picture of this exact drive (w/o the QPS stampings) on a Japanese website a few months ago so they probably just did a quick translation and started shipping.
I wish they would have spent more time to perfect the software. Once a 32MB disk is written it is locked (from the OS). To edit the contents of the disk you have to use the SuperWriter software (which is very buggy!). I have used the drive with my G3 350, 512MB RAM, OS 9.1. When trying to use it on my iMac I could only read disks. The SuperWriter software quits everytime I tried to write a disk. (I'm not sure why). I'm not sure if it has to do with the drive being bus powered. I tried to connect the Que 240 to my G3 using the USB ports on my keyboard but got an error stating that there was not enough power available to run the device. I then connected the drive to my Monitor USB ports (I have a Sony HMD-A200) that has powered USB ports and it worked just fine. The short USB cord that wraps around the drive gives just enough slack for it to sit next to my monitor amongst all the clutter.

The drives writing speed to the 32MB was very slow (as noted earlier) but reading is very fast. I can play mp3's just fine directly off the disks. The box says that you can even use the disks to store movies. (haven't tested this out yet either).

I guess this new generation of drives and the software will get better with time but I had to be one of the first to have a drive that writes 32MB to a floppy! I paid $185 plus shipping at Egghead.com. Despite the complaints of the drive I think it shows excellent potential and because I needed a floppy disk drive, this was a reasonable purchase. I'm pretty sure that reading and writing LS-120 and LS-240 disks will be fine. The Que! 240 comes with an LS-240 disk that is Windows/MS-DOS formatted which I will test later. The drives ability to draw power from the USB port and it's small size make this an excellent drive for anyone who wants to take it with them and connect to any computer (as long as the drivers are installed - takes less than a minute and a restart). I bet these drives will be hard to find or already are. Not sure how many were in stock when I ordered mine but they are still in stock at egghead. The drive is listed as LS-240 FD32 BUS POWERED USB INTPORTABLE/ SOFTWARE/ MEDIA costs $184.99.
Jason Wu"

" ASU (http://asu.info.apple.com/) migrates to AppleCare Knowledge Base

On Tuesday, June 26, AppleCare will shut down Apple Software Downloads and redirect URLs that link to it to the Knowledge Base, which now contains all software downloads information. The Apple Software Downloads home page http://asu.info.apple.com will redirect to the following document, which lists recent software downloads by date:

There will be a new downloads page, essentially a knowledge base article, that will list all recent software downloads. It is important to note some of the changes that we've implemented as a result of the migration to the knowledge base.

1) Previously, there was a separate ASU article for each language version of each software download. This made for a number of articles that said essentially the same thing, but pointed to a different binary. However, the text of all articles was in US English.

2) Further, each of these separate articles did not include, but pointed to individual read me files located in the Tech Info Library.

3) With this release, we've incorporated all of the information into a single article. Each article shows the following in a html table:

a) The name of the update and Mac OS version required
b) The release date
c) the version number
d) an icon link to read me (which is embedded in the same article)
e) an icon link to the software download file, noting the size in megabytes.
f) If no update exists for a particular language, a slash appears across the icon.

4) All lanuguage verisons of the read me are embedded into the article.

Overall, we tried to provide "one stop shopping" for software downloads. Below we've provided the list of recent software downloads released by Apple and links to the current ASU articles as well as the new knowledge base articles. We suggest that you update your links accordingly.

Effective Tuesday, 26-Jun-01, we'll redirect all urls containing: http://asu.info.apple.com/ to a specific downloads article in the knowledge base.

Download Name
Old asu.info.apple.com article no.
New knowledge base article no.

Apple DVD Player 2.7,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n12272,
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n120022

PowerBook G4 DVD ROM Update 1.0,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n12269
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n120019

MySQL 3.23.32 Update 10.0.3,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n12267
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n120015

Mac OS Runtime for Java (MRJ) 2.2.5,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n11927
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n75097

Macintosh Manager2.0.1,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n12260
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n26162

Network Assistant 4.0.3,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n12261
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n120004

Theater Mode Update 2.0.3,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n12259
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n120012

iBook Audio Update 1.3.6,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n12255
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n120010

Mail Import Scripts 1.1,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n12038
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n25304

QuickTime Streaming Server 3.0.1,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n11851
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n75139

CarbonLib 1.3.1,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n11916
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n120017

Mac OS X 10.0.3,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n12181
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n75134

AppleWorks Update (International English) 6.1.2,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n12184
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n

iMovie for Mac OS X 2.1,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n12204
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n75117

iMovie Plugin Pack- Mac OS X ( Engllish-International) 2.1,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n12208
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n88034

Authoring Support Update 1.1,
http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n12196
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n120006

5) A few other kbase tips.

There are a number of new features in this new version of the AppleCare Knowledge Base, version 2.0, which bear mentioning here. First, the assisted serch, geared toward beginning computer users, has been completely revamped. It uses a natural language type of search, along with an ordered step by step process to narrow the options to get customers answers. We encourage you to try it: http://kbase.info.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/kbase.woa/wa/assisted

However, more than likely, since you've come to a Macintosh affinity web site, you're probably a more advanced user, so we've also improved the Expert Search: http://kbase.info.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/kbase.woa/wa/expert

A) Please note that default search is Boolean AND. While not as full featured as some Boolean AND based search engines, it is fast and efficient. You can also use natural language, Boolean OR or search by Article number.

B) You can also now search for specific text strings. For example, You may be looking for articles on reinstalling mac os. If you'd liek to find every article that has that specific string, just put quotes around the string, like this: "reinstalling mac os"

C) Keywords. Apple has put together a number of keywords that can help speed searches. One you'll want to use is kbdload which is a tag used for all software downloads article. A complete list is available in our expert search help page at: http://www.info.apple.com/help/knowledgebase/advanced_help.html "

The Apple I Owners Club www.applefritter.com/apple1/, founded in 1977 by Joe Torzewski, is back, along with the most extensive reference to the Apple I in existence. The site contains over 120 pages detailing the Apple I computer.
Tom
Applefritter
www.applefritter.com"

• Newer Tech G3/466 in iMac (rated 10)

You can find these full reports by searching the database selecting the indicated Mac model and upgrade card brand/type. If you've upgraded the CPU on your Mac, please post an entry in the database. Search the database for entries from most every upgradable Mac model *before* you buy. (Searchable by mac model/upgrade brand). For detailed reviews with performance tests and install tips, see the CPU Upgrades page.)

Software Updates:

• Quik Floppy Copy
• Coolcam
• REALbasic 3.2.1
• MacSSH 2.1b9
• Lotus Notes
• Mt. Everything 1.5.5
• Escape from Monkey Island 1.1.2
  
  OS X Software
• MacApp

Apple TIL Updates:
• iTunes 1.1/Disc Burner 1.0.1: Third-Party Disc Burning Software Stops Working
  
  OS X TILs
• How to Import Addresses Into Address Book
• Software Update 1.3.1, 10.0.1 Update, and Epson Printer Driver Update Provide Feature Enhancement, Address Issues
• 10.0.3 Update and Before You Install Information
  
  OS X Server TILs
• WebObjects 4.0.1 Patch 3
• One Admin for Child/Parent NetInfo Domains
• NetInfo Child Stops Working When NetInfo Parent Is Unavailable
• Advertised MySQL Not Included on CD-ROM, May Be Downloaded
• How to Locate MySQL; What Is It?
• Automount Home Directories With AFP
• Do Not Set a Home Directory to Mount Statically
• Server Admin Does Not Set Privileges as Expected If a User Connects to Server Volumes
• Mac OS X Server Migration Guide Information

Mac News:
(Note: Rehashing of press releases, repeated news, etc. not listed)

• Cube down the tube (macuser)
• Does Mac OS X Rest On Adobe? (zdnet)
• Quicktime Live 2001 (apple)
• MacHack meeting to reunite first Mac team [Woz included] (zdnet)
• Apple not at AEC show, inexplicable or not? (architosh)
• Apple 'must spin-off QuickTime' (macworld uk)
• Pitney Bowes sues eight firms over printing technology (yahoo)
• RealNetworks unveils standard, tools for Web Media (yahoo)
• C'mon Decide: Which Apple Laptop? (businessweek)
• MacCase (jambags)
• Boa 24/10/40 FireWire CD-RW (EZQuest)

Gaming:
• See main page news for updated Quake3 for OS X (noting sound fix)
• Escape from Monkey Island 1.1.2 (macgamefiles)
• Star Wars Bombad Racing (lucaslearning)
• Neverwinter Nights (neverwinternights)

Misc. Hardware Related:
• Nostromo n30 Game Mouse (belkin)
• Portsmith's Ethernet Cradles (portsmith)