Nice, I'm surprised it took this long! My first experience of playing Quake 1 in my home was an unauthorized source port which ran in System 7, I believe was called "HackQuake", ported from stolen source code from CrackDotCom apparently[0][1] .. For me as a kid getting insanely impatient to play Quake, this was a godsend! Even if the performance was brutal and firing a rocket caused the framerate to halve. Played it at 320x200 pixel-doubled just to eke out that extra little bit of performance. Anyway, the point is that HL probably could have been running on Mac since day one, if someone had spent the time to port it!
I remember when TIE Fighter finally came out for the Mac, I just begged my parents to order it from Mac Warehouse or whichever catalogue it was in. I didn't read the system requirements, which said it needed a PowerPC. I was still rocking a Quadra 610 that I'd upgraded to a 50MHz 68040 and 24 MB of RAM.
When I got the game and looked at the box, I was heartbroken. But I decided, why not put in the disk anyway. I did the Get Info on the app, and lo and behold, Lucas Arts had left what was probably a totally untested 68k slice in the binary. Double-clicked it, and I could play without a problem. Sure I had to play it in a tiny 320x240 window, but that extra 16 MB of RAM and extra 25 MHz made it playable.
That is an amazing story. I grew up with a weak performa 560 and was constantly browsing the aisles at Fry’s Electronics looking for games. None of them supported Mac, especially 25MHz 68k!
The most interesting thing about this link, for me, is seeing that there's an open-source recreation of GoldSrc [0]? That's apparently been around since 2011 [1]? I'm stunned I haven't heard about this before. Very cool.
More and more, I wonder if projects like this (I assume they're made possible 'all of a sudden' because of AI coding tools) are going to eventually breathe new life into dozens of "obsolete" platforms long ago deemed too costly to keep supporting. Maybe we'll be able to daily drive OS9 with modern browsers and bugfixes. Or for those of us less masochistic, say, Windows 2000 or NextStep!
I think you're underselling where we'll get to in the next 5-10 years. I'm thinking:
Best Beatles song recorded between Rubber Soul and Revolver, composed mainly by McCartney but Lennon wrote the bridge and Ringo was feeling adventurous and Harrison was angry that day, and it was deemed not commercial enough to include on Revolver.
Best season 3 episode of The Simpsons, really showing the transition to Homer as the lead, written by Robert Cohen with significant musical input from Danny Elfman and featuring seven characters loosely representing the deadly sins, with Homer as Gluttony of course.
I think people seem to be downvoting this because it's not something they like whether true or not, however I think it's a thought-provoking perspective which warrants some consideration.
I think there is real insight but it kinda relies on a rhetorical trick. AI could arguably create a simpsons episode. It absolutely could not make a Beatles song. The Beatles can only make a Beatles song, and they do not exist.
For reference this is roughly period correct for the early iMac models (G3 and DV) that came out in 1998 and 1999, though MacOS 9 didn't ship until later. Impressive porting work.
Always weirds me out to see an iMac running an OS older than OS X. The physical design language really ended up dictating the OS X look, didn't it? Still does, in a way, with Liquid Glass bringing back clear.
I think the technology also dictated it. It’s easy to forget that in those days the idea of window chrome being full color, full transparency, with live window dragging and visuals not locked to tiling 8x8 or at best 32x32 elements was incredibly novel. And that was as much about preemptive multitasking and expecting and allowing every application to keep its windows up to date as it was about Quartz.
Aqua was garish and in your face, but it needed to be in order to be a symbol of what the system had achieved, which I think was especially important because that came at the cost of being a buggy, immature OS that had to run crucial apps in a hideous compatibility mode while it was getting established.
Edit: and if I can be a cranky old codger for a moment, I think that Liquid Glass unintentionally serves just as well as a symbol for what Apple has become: a company grasping to relive the memory of innovation without remembering how to innovate.
At the time there was also a major push to bring desktop computing and the web to the general population, remember this was a time when cutting costs enough to market a $1000 PC ($2000 adjusted for inflation) was considered a major achievement, the very bottom of the market. I get the sense that Apple was trying to distance its design as much as possible from square-cornered beige boxes as possible to signal that the products were for normal people.
This; and that WIndows 2k was as stable as OSX (compared to w9x and the ME disaster) but... it looked functional but boring , as a brutalist building in any European neighbourhood. Mac OS X blended both the incredible FX you would get from an SGI machine... with all the A/V and printing/design Mac tools, most common PC software (Office, Photoshop)... AND being able to run damn LaTeX, X11, Unix tools and the like. Of course even Windows XP wasn't a match against a G4 with OSX Tiger. They tried with VIsta (after Compiz and KDE3 tried to get tons of OSX' inspiration under GNU and BSD) and it was a disaster.
The G3 iMac that came out in this time period had much weaker 3D rendering capability than a contemporary PC gaming video card like a TNT2. Their video ability was closer to the 2D/office oriented video cards sold for non gaming use...
I would have been really excited about this circa 1999. I mean don't get me wrong, I was grateful for Unreal Tournament and Q3A, and I knew I'd be getting Halo soon, but this is the one game I was really jealous of my friends for.
I sometimes wonder what the timeline where Bungie didn't write the Myth II uninstaller-can-wipe-your-hard-drive bug would look like.
IIUC, the fact that they reprinted all the discs and manually replaced all the boxed, ready-to-ship discs to avoid any chance of destroying someone's data wound up eating most of the profits from Myth II.
That, in turn, led to the situation where they were too cash-strapped to finish Halo on their own, resulting in the infamous moment where Apple decided to buy them after all just a couple days too late: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/jobs-turned-down-bung...
I still fantasize about an Oni-meets-Mirror's-Edge freerunning / martial arts game.
I was not aware of the Myth 2 bug, but from people I know that have worked with Bungie's code in the 90's early 2000's... yeah that tracks.
Not sure what it was like towards the end of the Blam/Midnight/Slipspace engine era but at the beginning it was the dictionary definition of 'Technical debt'.
the real achievement here is getting a 1998 game engine to run on an OS that Apple actively tried to erase from existence. Half-Life outlived both Mac OS 9 and the Performa line.
Is the OS 9 build supposed to include Blue Shift and Opposing Force, or is that only a reference to the Tiger and Leopard ports? Just tried out the Tiger port on my iMac G4; it also runs fine!
[UPDATE] To make it clear, it was a joke (always a faceplant, on HN, where senses of humor go to die). It's actually very cool. I just get cranky that 3/4 of my Steam games don't work on new Macs, and I did like HL.
If Apple Silicon ran my games collection I simply wouldn't have another computer other than my M2 MBP. I've run Fallout 3 on it, and while the emulation isn't perfect, it is playable and runs. The fan doesn't turn into a jet aircraft at takeoff, the temps stay cool.
The fact that most games won't play on Apple Silicon natively is a crime.
Jokes are downvoted not because of a lack humor but because if we reward making jokes we will have to scroll through dozens of jokes and all of their responses to get the actual discussion. Voting is about keeping the on topic and worthwhile discussion at the top with everything else buried beneath it.
Nice, I'm surprised it took this long! My first experience of playing Quake 1 in my home was an unauthorized source port which ran in System 7, I believe was called "HackQuake", ported from stolen source code from CrackDotCom apparently[0][1] .. For me as a kid getting insanely impatient to play Quake, this was a godsend! Even if the performance was brutal and firing a rocket caused the framerate to halve. Played it at 320x200 pixel-doubled just to eke out that extra little bit of performance. Anyway, the point is that HL probably could have been running on Mac since day one, if someone had spent the time to port it!
[0] https://www.wired.com/1997/01/hackers-hack-crack-steal-quake...
[1] https://github.com/Jason2Brownlee/QuakeOfficialArchive/blob/...
I remember when TIE Fighter finally came out for the Mac, I just begged my parents to order it from Mac Warehouse or whichever catalogue it was in. I didn't read the system requirements, which said it needed a PowerPC. I was still rocking a Quadra 610 that I'd upgraded to a 50MHz 68040 and 24 MB of RAM.
When I got the game and looked at the box, I was heartbroken. But I decided, why not put in the disk anyway. I did the Get Info on the app, and lo and behold, Lucas Arts had left what was probably a totally untested 68k slice in the binary. Double-clicked it, and I could play without a problem. Sure I had to play it in a tiny 320x240 window, but that extra 16 MB of RAM and extra 25 MHz made it playable.
That is an amazing story. I grew up with a weak performa 560 and was constantly browsing the aisles at Fry’s Electronics looking for games. None of them supported Mac, especially 25MHz 68k!
The most interesting thing about this link, for me, is seeing that there's an open-source recreation of GoldSrc [0]? That's apparently been around since 2011 [1]? I'm stunned I haven't heard about this before. Very cool.
[0] https://github.com/fwgs/xash3d-fwgs
[1] https://www.moddb.com/engines/xash3d-engine
Xash3D is not really open-source. The original codebase comes from leaked/decompiled code, and nowadays still requires the proprietary HLSDK to build.
More and more, I wonder if projects like this (I assume they're made possible 'all of a sudden' because of AI coding tools) are going to eventually breathe new life into dozens of "obsolete" platforms long ago deemed too costly to keep supporting. Maybe we'll be able to daily drive OS9 with modern browsers and bugfixes. Or for those of us less masochistic, say, Windows 2000 or NextStep!
Or even create new platforms where we're not bound by platform owners' imposed artificial limitations.
This isn't an all-of-a-sudden, the engine has been worked on for over 7 years now https://github.com/fwgs/xash3d-fwgs
I feel like the best Beatles songs are yet to be written.
Or alternatively best classic Simpsons episodes are yet to be made.
I think you're underselling where we'll get to in the next 5-10 years. I'm thinking:
Best Beatles song recorded between Rubber Soul and Revolver, composed mainly by McCartney but Lennon wrote the bridge and Ringo was feeling adventurous and Harrison was angry that day, and it was deemed not commercial enough to include on Revolver.
Best season 3 episode of The Simpsons, really showing the transition to Homer as the lead, written by Robert Cohen with significant musical input from Danny Elfman and featuring seven characters loosely representing the deadly sins, with Homer as Gluttony of course.
I think people seem to be downvoting this because it's not something they like whether true or not, however I think it's a thought-provoking perspective which warrants some consideration.
I think there is real insight but it kinda relies on a rhetorical trick. AI could arguably create a simpsons episode. It absolutely could not make a Beatles song. The Beatles can only make a Beatles song, and they do not exist.
There's already Netsurf with beter JS support than the Duktape one under Unix, Windows and even RiscOS.
For reference this is roughly period correct for the early iMac models (G3 and DV) that came out in 1998 and 1999, though MacOS 9 didn't ship until later. Impressive porting work.
Always weirds me out to see an iMac running an OS older than OS X. The physical design language really ended up dictating the OS X look, didn't it? Still does, in a way, with Liquid Glass bringing back clear.
I think the technology also dictated it. It’s easy to forget that in those days the idea of window chrome being full color, full transparency, with live window dragging and visuals not locked to tiling 8x8 or at best 32x32 elements was incredibly novel. And that was as much about preemptive multitasking and expecting and allowing every application to keep its windows up to date as it was about Quartz.
Aqua was garish and in your face, but it needed to be in order to be a symbol of what the system had achieved, which I think was especially important because that came at the cost of being a buggy, immature OS that had to run crucial apps in a hideous compatibility mode while it was getting established.
Edit: and if I can be a cranky old codger for a moment, I think that Liquid Glass unintentionally serves just as well as a symbol for what Apple has become: a company grasping to relive the memory of innovation without remembering how to innovate.
At the time there was also a major push to bring desktop computing and the web to the general population, remember this was a time when cutting costs enough to market a $1000 PC ($2000 adjusted for inflation) was considered a major achievement, the very bottom of the market. I get the sense that Apple was trying to distance its design as much as possible from square-cornered beige boxes as possible to signal that the products were for normal people.
This; and that WIndows 2k was as stable as OSX (compared to w9x and the ME disaster) but... it looked functional but boring , as a brutalist building in any European neighbourhood. Mac OS X blended both the incredible FX you would get from an SGI machine... with all the A/V and printing/design Mac tools, most common PC software (Office, Photoshop)... AND being able to run damn LaTeX, X11, Unix tools and the like. Of course even Windows XP wasn't a match against a G4 with OSX Tiger. They tried with VIsta (after Compiz and KDE3 tried to get tons of OSX' inspiration under GNU and BSD) and it was a disaster.
Each original iMac color came with an associated default OS9 background that matched it.
The G3 iMac that came out in this time period had much weaker 3D rendering capability than a contemporary PC gaming video card like a TNT2. Their video ability was closer to the 2D/office oriented video cards sold for non gaming use...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_TNT2
Or a voodoo2...
I would have been really excited about this circa 1999. I mean don't get me wrong, I was grateful for Unreal Tournament and Q3A, and I knew I'd be getting Halo soon, but this is the one game I was really jealous of my friends for.
> I knew I'd be getting Halo soon
That’s a deep cut. (And salt on the wound.)
I sometimes wonder what the timeline where Bungie didn't write the Myth II uninstaller-can-wipe-your-hard-drive bug would look like.
IIUC, the fact that they reprinted all the discs and manually replaced all the boxed, ready-to-ship discs to avoid any chance of destroying someone's data wound up eating most of the profits from Myth II.
That, in turn, led to the situation where they were too cash-strapped to finish Halo on their own, resulting in the infamous moment where Apple decided to buy them after all just a couple days too late: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/jobs-turned-down-bung...
I still fantasize about an Oni-meets-Mirror's-Edge freerunning / martial arts game.
Maybe there'd have been one if not for that bug.
I was not aware of the Myth 2 bug, but from people I know that have worked with Bungie's code in the 90's early 2000's... yeah that tracks.
Not sure what it was like towards the end of the Blam/Midnight/Slipspace engine era but at the beginning it was the dictionary definition of 'Technical debt'.
Hah. When I saw the headline, I said, "Finally! I've been asking for this for almost 30 years!"
Likewise. I still remember being upset when the news broke that the port had been dropped.
the real achievement here is getting a 1998 game engine to run on an OS that Apple actively tried to erase from existence. Half-Life outlived both Mac OS 9 and the Performa line.
Runs nicely on my iBook G3!
Is the OS 9 build supposed to include Blue Shift and Opposing Force, or is that only a reference to the Tiger and Leopard ports? Just tried out the Tiger port on my iMac G4; it also runs fine!
So will this run through Classic no problem, yes? I almost want to break my powebook G4 out of mothballs on principle to try this.
That's nice.
Now do MacOS 26, on M chips.
[UPDATE] To make it clear, it was a joke (always a faceplant, on HN, where senses of humor go to die). It's actually very cool. I just get cranky that 3/4 of my Steam games don't work on new Macs, and I did like HL.
I get cranky coming to HN and seeing 3/4 of the posts about games.
Done. http://www.macsourceports.com/game/halflife
Awesome!
But, to make it clear, it was a joke. It's actually very cool. I just get cranky that 3/4 of my Steam games don't work on new Macs, and I did like HL.
I love that simcity4 has an applesilicon and big name recent releases don't.
Yay.
https://github.com/Sikarugir-App/Sikarugir
Well, try installing this Wine build for Mac and then Steam for Windows under it.
Then run Steam and enable "Steam Play/Proton compatibility" or whatever it's called under its settings.
Nah, that's based.
If Apple Silicon ran my games collection I simply wouldn't have another computer other than my M2 MBP. I've run Fallout 3 on it, and while the emulation isn't perfect, it is playable and runs. The fan doesn't turn into a jet aircraft at takeoff, the temps stay cool.
The fact that most games won't play on Apple Silicon natively is a crime.
Tangentially related, there are now "officially allowed" Apple Silicon builds of Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2004 available [0]
[0]: https://github.com/OldUnreal/FullGameInstallers/releases/tag...
Install this Wine build for Apple Silicon and then install anything you want, from Steam to GOG games which often will perfectly run in your machine:
https://github.com/Sikarugir-App/Sikarugir
Next, open Steam and enable the "Steam Play/proton compatibility" in the settings.
I think those guys are about classic Macs
I know. It was kind of a joke, which, due to this being HN, fell flat.
We at Hacker News do not have a sense of humor that we’re aware of.
I see. Maybe it was a little random
Jokes are downvoted not because of a lack humor but because if we reward making jokes we will have to scroll through dozens of jokes and all of their responses to get the actual discussion. Voting is about keeping the on topic and worthwhile discussion at the top with everything else buried beneath it.
You must be fun at parties.
must?
Apparently so, he does not seem to be giving me any choice in the matter.
Missing a bounty to go with that directness!
you do it.
Nope. Looks like someone already did (look up)
This is the only site where it is illegal to make a joke.
Fair cop, Guv
Great, now all I need is (checks the closet) any of the dozen or so powermacs I owned over the years to not have left my possession...
Wow. This is the golden age for classic Macs.
Porting AssaultCube should be doable too
Cleverly done.
This makes me so happy lol.