Quakecon '99

John Carmack & the Macs

Deserving of no less than his own paragraph header, idSoftware's John Carmack was obviously present at Quakecon '99 and we even got a chance to play him in a game of Quake 3 Test. As you can imagine Carmack taught both Mike and myself a lesson, although Mike worse than myself (losing 10 to -1 is worse than 10 to 2, but not much worse) but Carmack is truly a man worth respecting, very few individuals in his position would be as level headed and dedicated as he is. Not only is he, in my opinion, a brilliant programmer but he's also a good guy to top it off, I was very impressed.

The Techman's ill fate

When Mike and I found out we'd be competing in the press tournament against other webmasters and editors we kind of liked the idea, but when we found out that we were too late to register we decided to go elsewhere while the rest played :) With all the Athlon systems just sitting around, you'd expect that we'd be able to play a few games of Q3Test without much trouble, right? Wrong.

Our first complaint (our only compliant, we loved the show) was that at any given time, we couldn't hop on a system and frag the people around us, we usually had to wait around until someone got tired of playing and jump on their system where the press tournament was to be held. The press tournament machines were unfortunately not the Athlon 550 machines we were expecting, what were they? See for yourself.

Here we have Mike (in the lovely cowboy hat...don't laugh, I had one too, we were such tourists :)...) and John Carmack going at it on a pair of G3-400s, the machines the press tournament and the general free for all was played on. I'm in the blue shirt watching Carmack's screen hoping to pick up a few pointers, I had a brief chance to talk with Carmack while Mike was configuring his controls and then after Mike crashed the machine and had to reboot. For those of you that are interested, Carmack has visited AnandTech a couple times which is an honor I am very pleased to have, the guy is amazing.

Back to the Macs, luckily we didn't play on the stock G3 mice that we all "love" to use. Logitec supplied the tournament with their 3-button USB mice, which were plugged directly into the Macs and used USB to PS/2 converters on all the PCs. The mice weren't bad, but they didn't have the wheel we were so incredibly used to so they weren't perfect. Q3Test on the Mac looks very nice courtesy of the Rage 128 that powers the 3D graphics in the systems, the gameplay was generally smooth and there were very few times when the systems couldn't handle all the action on the screen, the times that it did start to slow down were obviously due to graphics card limitations.

We also had the opportunity to look at the iBook, Apple's latest in laptops. While we didn't have the opportunity to play Q3Test on it, the iBook is powered by a Rage Pro (not the Rage Fury Pro, the regular Rage Pro) which should translate into some very low but playable frame rates. Once ATI pushes the Rage 128 into laptops things should begin to move forward for gamers that use laptops.