F.A.Q

Subject: 0. A word about flaming. Every now and then some moron posts something along the lines of "Mac games suck!!!!! Get a real machine!!!!!" And immediately 30 or 40 people take the bait and post long, vitriolic replies and exhort everyone to mail-bomb the perpetrator. Please, please, please don't waste your time and our bandwidth replying to this kind of idiocy. More often than not it was posted as a practical joke from the account of some hapless user who left themselves logged in in a public computer cluster. The owner of the account then logs back in a day or two later to find several megs of hate mail and uuencoded core dumps in their mail spool. If you feel that you absolutely have to share your witty, concise flame on the complete superiority of the Mac above all other gaming platforms, take it to comp.sys.mac.advocacy, where it will be appreciated. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: 1. Where can I find Mac games available for anonymous ftp? The 2 major sites for ftp'ing Mac software are sumex-aim.stanford.edu (usually referred to as "info-mac") and mac.archive.umich.edu. However, these two sites are so incredibly busy that they are nearly impossible to connect to (in fact, info-mac no longer accepts direct ftp connections), so you will need to use a mirror site such as mirrors.aol.com. A mirror site is a site that contains an exact copy of the contents of another site, in the hopes of diverting some traffic away from the more popular site. Mirror sites are usually updated 1 to 3 days behind the "mother" site. Other mirror sites of info-mac and umich exist at grind.isca.uiowa.edu (North America), archie.au (Australia) and nic.switch.ch (Switzerland). It's more polite and generally faster to connect to a site that's on the same continent as you are. Wherever this FAQ points to a file at info-mac or umich, the URL (Universal Resource Locator) given is for that file's location at the AOL mirrors. This is because the AOL mirrors are fast, reliable, and frequently updated. It's also because the FAQ maintainer enjoys the idea of Usenet taking advantage of AOL for a change, instead of the other way around. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: 2. What does .hqx mean? What about .cpt and .sit? Files ending in .hqx are binary files which have been converted to BinHex format so that they can be transmitted as ASCII text files via the Internet. There are various utilities that will BinHex and de-BinHex files, among them Compact Pro and StuffIt (see below). Some Mac ftp clients such as Fetch will automatically de-BinHex files when you download them. Files ending in .cpt have been compressed by Compact Pro; files ending in .sit have been compressed by StuffIt. Compact Pro by Bill Goodman and StuffIt Lite from Aladdin Systems are shareware; they can be ftp'd >from any of the major Mac ftp sites, and the registration fee for each is $25. Files ending in .sea are self-extracting archives; just double- click on them to extract their contents. StuffIt Expander is a nifty free utility from Aladdin Systems that will uncompress StuffIt, Compact Pro, and Applelink archives. It will also decode BinHex 4.0 files without requiring you to first strip the headers. It's available at info-mac in MacBinary and binhex formats -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: 3. Where else can I get Mac games? Well, you could buy them. Most software stores have a section for Mac games, but you can usually get better prices, a better selection, and a better return policy from mailorder sources. Each issue of MacWorld and MacUser contains many, many ads for mailorder companies, between which they occasionally sandwich articles. The phone numbers for the biggest sources in the USA are: MacConnection: 1-800-800-3333 1-603-446-5555 MacWarehouse: 1-800-255-6227 1-9