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Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

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Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#91

Post by hedgehog »

srp-shay wrote: post #89
hedgehog wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but Half-Life was designed to be somewhat playable with software rendering even on a 133MHz Pentium and that would have been the better rendering path on the earliest iMacs. In my opinion in that generation Half-Life's software renderer looked better than most of those cards due to the blurry textures and poor scaling (lack of VRAM basically unless you had cash for the 32MB versions) so no big loss for single pl…

The 1998 release required a 500MHz processor at a minimum... 133MHz might be pushing it.

Pentium 133MHz was coincidentally the fastest machine I had at the time but also the minimum spec labeled on the box. (my laptop had a Chips & Technologies 65550, so no 3D help there)

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#92

Post by User23 »

metadat wrote: post #50
EPWN3D wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I had a dream as a kid that my parents had finally bought a Color Macintosh. Imagine how heartbroken I was when I woke up. That MacUser issue for the Mac II was basically torture.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#93

Post by User23 »

itomato wrote: post #61
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!

One of the first things I did with ChatGPT was feed it source for the existing OHCI USB Host Adapter driver to make it work with more common UHCI hardware. There are many people working to extend NeXT, Openstep and even Rhapsody. Not to mention emulation projects and deep dives into XNU source, early Darwin source and shoehorning kernels and libraries into various places. The Epson NX was purpose-built to run NeXTSte…

That reminds me of how I had had to cross compile a Linux kernel with a special USB patch to install a system on my Bondi Blue iMac.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#94

Post by user3939382 »

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!

The big blocker is actually TLS. Without it lots of tools including browsers are blocked. Now with AI I bet it is manageable, before that the effort required resulted in what you see, almost nothing.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#95

Post by hedgehog »

ColdStream wrote: post #68
hedgehog wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but Half-Life was designed to be somewhat playable with software rendering even on a 133MHz Pentium and that would have been the better rendering path on the earliest iMacs. In my opinion in that generation Half-Life's software renderer looked better than most of those cards due to the blurry textures and poor scaling (lack of VRAM basically unless you had cash for the 32MB versions) so no big loss for single pl…

To bring up an almost three decade old debate, it would be fascinating to see the performance difference between PPC and x86 in software rendering. Probably mostly bandwidth limited at this point still. PPC ended up being a brilliant design done mediocre, while x86 is a mediocre design done very well.

I don't know the details but I would imagine that the comparison would shift quite a lot over those years due to the rollout of SIMD features on both sides along with the other microarchitectural improvements. I'm not sure I would characterize PPC as being mediocre, I think the designers hit more or less the target they wanted even if the top line performance numbers weren't hands down higher than the contemporary x86 parts and it didn't have the shine of IA64. There's a reason we still fly PPC 750 variants in some critical systems. If you think back to that period Apple was moving from 68k (where they were both one of the biggest customers for the chips but also not enough volume to field a part competitive on desktop) to PPC where they were no bigger (maybe declining unit volume) but at least part of a stronger coalition of users. The group's interest diverged (no laptop roadmap) and I'm guessing Apple wanted to switch to x86 as early as 2002 and it just took a few years to get the company stabilized enough to make the jump.

Edit: It would be interesting to look at the software rasterizer and game engine problems in a modern context of big compute and superoptimizers and see what is possible. I'm guessing not much above what the hand-tuned code of the era got, but maybe significant in the context of doing these kinds of retro-ports on a small budget.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#98

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

parl_match wrote: post #96
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Looks like someone already did (look up)

if youre not going to do it, then dont complain when others dont do it

If you had read -even the original post, with its update, you would realize that it was a badly-delivered joke.

Life’s too short to take seriously.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#99

Post by nxobject »

gilgoomesh wrote: post #79

In one of the most infamous stories of the era, Half-Life was officially ported to Mac OS back in the year 2000 by Logicware/MacPlay but got shut down by Valve at the last minute. I've watched interviews with Rebecca Heineman (one of the devs involved) on the topic. It did not make her happy. Here's an article from the era: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/mac-half-life-canceled/110... Interview with Rebecca Heinema…

Notoriously after Halo for Macintosh was canned, too...

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#100

Post by userbinator »

CursedSilicon wrote: post #69
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!

At least in retro spaces there's a lot of rejection of using AI to do things. Half-Life (and the later Source engine games such as Half-Life 2 and Portal) were ported without LLM assistance however (Source: I am in the Discord where the developer has been working and diligently posting updates on the project)

At least in retro spaces there's a lot of rejection of using AI to do things.

I suspect the community will fracture, and then once the pro-AI side shows off more and more of the amazing things they accomplished, they'll grow while the anti-AI side will eventually dry up into a few luddites.

I'm old enough to have been on the anti-HLL side when I was handwriting Asm for the PC, but of course HLLs took over because they're "good enough" and became a massive force multiplier.

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