Mac beta 4: Difference between revisions

Although no PC [[wiktionary:beta#Noun|betas]] are known to have been leaked, there are two alternate Mac versions that have been found "in the wild". One is definitely a beta, and has been called "beta 4" since its leak. It is unknown whether there were later beta versions or if this was the last one before Oni's release. Secondly, a version known as the "Big Blue Box beta", or "beta 5", which may not be a beta at all. Regardless of its actual version, both of these Mac "betas" have shed some light on the development of Oni.

The application's version number is 1.0, as opposed to retail Mac Oni's v1.1, and its creation date is 11/14/00, which corresponds to the period of time that Oni was in beta testing.

Also, this beta still had all the BSL functionality of the PC version; it had previously been thought that about 40 functions and about 160 variables were stripped from Oni for the Mac (listed [[BSL:PC_vs._Mac_Comparison_(list)|here]]), since the Mac version is generally thought to have been finalized a bit later than the PC version. Having seen that the code was once present in the Mac binary, the community set about searching for it in the retail Mac version, and found it. Through hex editing, pointers to active variables and functions that were not of much use were diverted to point to some of the hidden and more useful BSL abilities. Those efforts have brought the retail Mac release into effective near-parity with the retail PC version; the changes made are documented [[AE:OMNI|here]].

This version is v1.1, just like retail Mac Oni, and its creation date is 3/13/01, which, if accurate, means it is unlikely to be a beta, but rather a translated retail version, which would certainly agree with the version number. It was originally called "beta 5" by the community because it contains files that come from the development stage of Oni (although these files would likely have come from Oni's pre-beta era, to be exact).