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Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

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Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#131

Post by ChoGGi »

userbinator wrote: post #100
CursedSilicon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Proud to be a Luddite.

Less so in the hobby area, more so in the "they're taking our jobs" area.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#132

Post by ChoGGi »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #88
CursedSilicon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem either deliberately or functionally unable to grasp the premise of why anyone would do this (or reject LLM's) I suggest instead you go read up on why people dislike them and gain a more well-rounded and nuanced understanding of the topic

And you seem to be operating on a faulty premise (as was I.)

"Use it or lose it"?

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#133

Post by SkyeCA »

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'm hopeful it will. Just the other day I got an old webcam I own working on Windows 11 despite there being zero compatible drivers for it on any modern version of Windows.

I might be a developer, but I'm not one who knows how to develop drivers, so I gave Claude the spec sheets for several of the chips inside the camera, stated what my goal was, and after doing some debugging guided by the AI it just worked. So tada, an obsolete piece of hardware is now usable again.

Things like that are what have changed my mind on AI assisted development.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#134

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

asiekierka wrote: post #129
userbinator wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

I think it is more likely that the "amazing" things, as described, will become mundane, thus shifting the definition of what becomes interesting or noteworthy. Even then, I believe people who continue to write by hand will still be appreciated, given this is fundamentally a hobbyist space. One good example is nocash, who continues to write all of his Windows-targetting emulators in hand-rolled assembly to this very d…

NO$GBA is written in assembly language?! I can't believe it.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#136

Post by asiekierka »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #134
asiekierka wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is more likely that the "amazing" things, as described, will become mundane, thus shifting the definition of what becomes interesting or noteworthy. Even then, I believe people who continue to write by hand will still be appreciated, given this is fundamentally a hobbyist space. One good example is nocash, who continues to write all of his Windows-targetting emulators in hand-rolled assembly to this very d…

NO$GBA is written in assembly language?! I can't believe it.

> All no$gba program code, both emulation and user interface, is all hand-crafted and pure assembler code.

https://problemkaputt.de/gba-dev.htm

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#137

Post by bluedino »

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…

I played the DOS version on a 386SX16MHz. Had to use flat shading but it was still fun. Friends 386DX/40 ran it with texturing etc. Both were VGA 320x200

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#138

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

rufo wrote: post #83
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…

I was so steamed about this as a teenager back when it happened - pretty sure it was one of the foundational reasons I started to consider building my own gaming PC once I got the money together. As an adult, and with the hindsight of seeing how Valve has (generally) supported their games over the years, I can appreciate gaben's reasoning for cancelling it... though as someone gaming on the Mac, we were all kind of u…

Of course, if Rebecca is to be believed (per the above interview)...that's not at all why they cancelled it. They cancelled it because Valve was pissed off with Apple for lying to them about the size of their userbase, and then unilaterally decreed henceforth that no Valve game would ever see a release on an Apple platform.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#139

Post by bsaul »

SkyeCA wrote: post #133
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'm hopeful it will. Just the other day I got an old webcam I own working on Windows 11 despite there being zero compatible drivers for it on any modern version of Windows. I might be a developer, but I'm not one who knows how to develop drivers, so I gave Claude the spec sheets for several of the chips inside the camera, stated what my goal was, and after doing some debugging guided by the AI it just worked. So tada…

Never developped a driver, but doesn't that require running the OS in some special mode, or in a VM, requiring a ton of time waiting for the thing to reboot over and over again ?

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#140

Post by [deleted] »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #80
CursedSilicon wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bizarre take Many people refuse to use LLM's for various reasons that I don't need to rehash here

"Bizarre" is rejecting powerful tools on ... what, religious grounds? It would be one thing if we were talking woodworking or pottery or another skilled craft, where your personal growth of talent with experience is evident in the product, resulting in something you can look back on fondly and point to with pride. But moving some legacy code (which you didn't write) from one platform to another? What do you get out o…

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