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Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

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Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#41

Post by EPWN3D »

amatecha wrote: post #26

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…

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.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#42

Post by xp84 »

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!

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#43

Post by someperson »

xp84 wrote: post #42

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 feel like the best Beatles songs are yet to be written.

Or alternatively best classic Simpsons episodes are yet to be made.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#44

Post by soulofmischief »

someperson wrote: post #43
xp84 wrote: post #42

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 feel like the best Beatles songs are yet to be written. Or alternatively best classic Simpsons episodes are yet to be made.

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.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#45

Post by ColdStream »

NateEag wrote: post #32
jonhohle wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Ha…

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'.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#46

Post by anthk »

xp84 wrote: post #42

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!

There's already Netsurf with beter JS support than the Duktape one under Unix, Windows and even RiscOS.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#47

Post by russelg »

xp84 wrote: post #42

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!

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

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#48

Post by anthk »

hedgehog wrote: post #39
mistercow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#50

Post by metadat »

EPWN3D wrote: post #41
amatecha wrote: post #26

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…

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…

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!
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