His blog entry (http://www.brad-oliver.com:8081/~boliver/blog/archives/001025.html)

I'm still trying to work out whether this is good news, but I do wish Brad all the best back in his old patch.

[PS] Maybe a word of explanation is in order for those who haven't been watching closely ...

Brad Oliver was responsible for the original port of Civ3 to the Mac OS, done by Westlake Technologies for MacSoft. He then moved to Aspyr, where he was lead programmer when they ported Civ3 Compete and Civ4 to OS X. Warlords was also ported while he was at Aspyr, though I believe he was not directly involved.

Brad moved to Apple last year, and since that time there has been no real news of a Beyond the Sword port from Aspyr. He's now back at Aspyr.

Good for Aspyr, bad for OpenGL.

Good for Civ Mac fans? ...

I have no idea what is good for Brad Oliver, but I can say that I always liked how responsive and helpful Brad was by participating in these forums through the years. I hope this means he got a nice fat pay raise and bonus from Aspyr to lure him back to bring us BTS!! :D

I hear BtS works great under Crossover and Steam (except the leaderheads are just eyes and teeth - I bet that gets fixed). I may go this route once I have some free time. I wouldn't hold my breath for an Aspyr port of BtS, Glenda has all but squashed any hope that will ever happen.

Sorry Apple didn't work out for Brad! Hopefully this means he'll be porting some AAA games for us again soon. And a big big big thank you Brad O for being so accessible and all!

What's Crossover and Steam?

Steam is an online store where you can buy PC software for download. The Windows versions of the Civ4 games are available there.

Crossover is a commercial version of the WINE/Cedaga "Windows emulator" that allows you to run Windows programs on an Intel Mac, without a copy of Windows. Crossover supports a range of Windows games, including the Steam versions of Civ4. I believe the reason it doesn't support the DVD versions is because it can't handle the DVD copy protection system used by Firaxis.

Thank you Alan, that's really REALLLY interesting as I have been considering getting the PC version of BTS. I played Pirates! in bootcamp, but I really hate not having access to all my stuff while I play. I've been considering Paralels instead.. but this Steam and Crossover idea interests me a lot.

I just don't have enough interest in BtS to pay $ for another app to run it.

I really hope that with Brad coming back we'll see some new interest in Civ4 from Aspyr. At this point I won't even buy Warlords for Mac until I see some better support for Civ. I'd much rather play in my native OS then having to jump through hoops, reboots, or VM tools.