This Old Mac Episode 10
Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the ongoing saga of using Macintosh stuff. Well since the previous episode I have been using the Mac Pro a little bit more due to moving it to a new location in my house.
So what have I been playing with at the moment. Well as you know I was playing with Minecraft last episode. I'm still no better of a player but occasionally I like to noodle with the modpacks.
So on the side of El Capitan I have been playing two modpacks recently using the MultiMC launcher. Both are large extensive kitchen sink type modpacks with over 200+ mods in each.
The first pack is All the Mods 5. Now All the Mods 6 does exist and works with Minecraft 1.16.1 but I am running All the Mods 5 which is running under version 1.15.2 because ATM5 is more complete and also the Yogcast are currently playing with the modpack in their current series so I thought I would have a look to see whether it is worth messing about with.
Minecraft 1.15.2 doesn't require Optifine which is a mod to take advantage of modern day graphics cards, getting them to do some of the heavy lifting. Minecraft is an amazing thing but because it is based in Java can sometimes take forever to load.
However with Optifine it offloads some of the textures to your video card allowing you to run the modpack with a much better FPS when entering areas of block generation.
ATM5 is an interesting pack but not for people with 8GB or less of RAM as the amount of memory for all the mods is quite big. It doesn't contain All the Mods for all the name but it does contain most of the main ones used by other packs which have been updated.
When not using ATM5. I have been playing with the Plunger modpack once again this is a kitchen sink modpack in which you have a large amount of the mods. So you can have various different machines and setups to play with in your Minecraft world. I believe it has 253 mods available to it.
Does having all these mods make me a better player... of course it doesn't
On the Snow Leopard side of the Mac Pro I have installed Guitar Pro 5 which is a program that allows you to write music using TAB notation and other methods and even play it back.
Now I admit I am not exactly Mozart when it comes to being musical, but I do own a guitar and I have a few minor compositions. Nothing to write home about before anyone asks.
However people have asked if I have ever transcribed them. I did using Tux Guitar but that program has proved to be a little temperamental. So now using Guitar Pro 5 which is probably a million years out of date. I may be able to keep it running without the program keeling over.
As I have not really tested the program in anger I can only speculate, but hey a man can dream.
Also I have been playing Active Lancer which is a shoot-em-up with various levels. Your main ship has two firing modes. and your primary one can switch between three main weapons of Pulse, Laser and Spread which is handy depending on the number of enemies on screen. The secondary firing is used to fire missiles at ground targets such as tanks, turrets etc.
The game is rather fun, however each level is rather long so it can get very repetitive very quickly. However that's most shoot-em-ups in a nutshell.
Each level has 4 stages and a boss at the end and the game itself has 6 levels. The game is quite fun. There is an updated version of Active Lancer version 1.0.1 that adds extra music, levels and other stuff but no matter what I tried I could not get that to work so I had to stick with version 1.0
It was missing some Carbon file which it didn't tell you which one it was so I could not just go and download CarbonLib as I have no idea which version it actually wants.
So that is what has been keeping me busy in the world of Macintosh. So until next time... Take care.