EQ Mac Edition Beta

[roxyfox]

I'm beta testing the EQ Mac Edition. I loaded ShowEQ on a laptop and there seems to be no problems. The laptop and Mac are on the same hub. But, even though I know the Mac's mac address and IP I still get no response in ShowEQ. Am I doing something wrong or can ShowEQ not sniff the client info because it's a Mac? I would of thought a client is a client.

[S_B_R]

A client is a client, as far as the hardware is concerned... But, The Mac version of EQ is a different version of EQ, it cannot be played on the existing live servers. Which likely means it's packet structure is different, which means SEQ won't know what to do with it.

[roxyfox]

So ShowEQ is for PC EQ only I take it then?

[S_B_R]

It's not really a platform issue. The issue is Mac-EQ isn't the same as PC-EQ.

SEQ really doesn't care what kind of computer is generating the traffic it is listening to. What it cares about is the structure of the traffic. If SOE had decided to allow Mac-EQ players to play on the existing live servers, chances are SEQ would work just fine. The problem is SOE has made the Client / Server communications different between the 2 client platforms (PC and Mac).

All it would take would be someone to sit down and find out where Mac-EQ differs from PC-EQ.

[fryfrog]

how many servers do they have up for the mac eq? seems like a mistake to me to bar all mac players from the old world servers. if i were soe, i would have brought up 2-3 new servers that were mac ONLY... but also let them have the option of possibly joining their friends on old servers.

heck, people who play eq NOW and have a mac somewhere might actually get the mac version just to play... but not if they can't play their existing chars.

Maybe it just wasn't possible to put the mac client on old servers.

[fester]

From what I remember, there were a lot of Winsock32.bind/Winsock32.socket calls in eqgame.exe binary. I don't know the name of the DirectX API network calls. If any of the DirectX calls are made they will be different from the same type of calls on OSX. If they exclusively use winsock "Berkeley Unix API," then there is no reason to have a boundary for a "technology" reason.

At that point, you may need to look at a "social" reason. Say they Mac unit took an old version of PC EQGame.exe to port, and they did not back port edits and fixes from the newest PC version. This would mean that some older version of PC ShowEQ may work.

[Elmo]

My guess as to the reason they don't allow Mac users to play with PC users is the complications it would introduce to the patch/maintenance cycle.

Keeping the feature set implemented consistently across both platforms could be a headache--the PC team might have a bug or feature ready for release on PC, but might have some issues on the Mac client, or vice versa.

You could think of it as the same reason they require you to have the latest version of the client whenever you log in. The current version of the server is only coded and tested to work with the latest client, and if you now require it to work with two clients (PC and Mac), your job just got harder.

By separating Mac Clients/Servers from PC Clients/Servers, they can keep them on different maintenance cycles, so if necessary bug fixes and features can be released on different schedules.

It *is* possible that as mentioned above, the current Mac datastream might match an older version of the PC datastream. However, unless someone kept up with the Mac version and released regular updates of a "SEQMac", chances are SEQ will not work reliably for Mac clients.

[sven]

The macintosh port of EQ is based on a November 2002 snapshot of the PC client. If someone could produce a CVS of what shoeq looked like in November or thereabouts, we could start trying and probably would have it working. How many times did showeq "break" since november 2002?

[BlueAdept]

You can checkout any of the old SEQ (as long as it has been on SourceForge) you just need to specify what date you want to get from the cvs.

Check the documentation of CVS on how to do it.

http://www.loria.fr/~molli/cvs/doc/cvs_toc.html

a little more specific..

http://www.loria.fr/~molli/cvs/doc/cvs_16.html#SEC115


Hope that helps.

[sven]

I think getting this to work with Macintosh is going to be a success, but to do this, we have to have access to the older libEQ.a.

The libEQ.a that was in use during the November 2002 showeq is what I need. The only thing I can find out there is the latest libEQ.a which is not compatible with the November snapshots of showeq. (Macintosh EQ is based off the November EQ(PC) snapshot).

So what do you say, can we get our hands on this?

[BlueAdept]

the november one was with the manual key entry and there were 2 libEQ.a's released in November...you need to find which one.

I have several of the old ones on my web site.

http://www27.brinkster.com/blueadept/

I dont think the encryption has changed since Nov. I think the only thing is the structures have changed and the cracking of the encryption (so you dont need a key). You should be able to incorporate the source of libEQ into the old source code without a lot of modification (I could be wrong though).

[sven]

Blue Adept,

Thanks for the info, I found the libEQ's on your site. The problem I am now running into, is I am not sure which dates were green CVS snapshots. I'll take a shot in the dark, and pull down Nov 1 2002, or Nov 15 2002, and put that with either libEQ.a, but I'll get errors at linking time like:

/usr/src/showeq/src/decode.cpp:169: undefined refernce to `FindKey'

and I have seen stuff like this in the forums, but usually the fix is that there code is out of date and to grab a new CVS.

One I compile, and it fails, I'll swap out libEQ.a with others, and re-make to re-run the linking phase, and I still get the same errors.

[sven]

Is it safe to say that whenever SOE/Verant "broke" seq, thats when a new libEQ.a was released? If I get seq working with a cvs snapshot of say 11/25/2002, can I just keep pulling down more recent CVS's that worked with that libEQ.a up to the most recent for that libEQ.a (to incorporate all the bug fixes/enhancements), or did the CVS code sometimes fix seq not working at all because of a change in servercode?

The other night I was so tired, I was pulling down 09/2002 snapshots, thinking 09 was november! So maybe I'll actually be able to see if this is working now that I am concentrating on 11/2002. I just want to be able to get the best seq that was working in November. It looks like the libEQ.a didn't change again until Jan 2003, if thats the case, maybe I could go as late as 12/31/2002 and still have it work.

Also does anyone have instructions for using the manual key entry system? That was probably in the faq, but since it no longer applies, its not in there anymore.

[BlueAdept]

ooppss...just found that I had a bad link on my page for the 11/01/02 version of libEQ.a. I had it linking to the released in october.

Download the 11/01/02 file again from my website and see if that works.

[roxyfox]

Ok, I got a few tidbits of information. For one, the beta test is over and the servers are being reset for the official release for the Mac which is supposedly going to be up and running tomorrow. Another thing is that there are different servers for Mac and PC, all separated like you thought. Apparently there is no crossings between the two at all. Now, since the testing is over, would getting a copy of the Beta files help at all even though you can't connect with them anymore? There is 2.6 GB of them.

So is trying to make ShowEQ work for the Mac client a work in progress possibility?

[sven]

i think it has a good chance of "just working", so long as we use a snapshot of seq that was based on the same client code as the PC EQ it was ported from. But during that time (November 2002), there was keygrabbers and decoders in use. There are no keygrabbers for mac, and the offset would need to be discovered. So probably, if the encoding is being used, we are looking at crippled seq for a while if at all.

[roxyfox]

Would those Beta files I spoke of be of any use?

[sven]

i already have everything to test mac eq