Maybe it’s because I’m old, but the classic Mac OS user interface looks so good. I’d trade the current Mac OS UI for it in a heartbeat. I’m already sticking with Sequoia because I don’t want Liquid Glass making my eyes sore.
Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9
121–130 of 169 posts
Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9
#122Maybe it’s because I’m old, but the classic Mac OS user interface looks so good. I’d trade the current Mac OS UI for it in a heartbeat. I’m already sticking with Sequoia because I don’t want Liquid Glass making my eyes sore.
You know they do this on purpose to have a novelty effect on the next release -.- customer loyalty really doesn't pay
Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9
#123In 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…
It sounds like Valve was misled to believe that the Mac sales would be X which would have justified long term Mac support/updates, but in reality the sales were going to be 10% of X...
Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9
#124Maybe it’s because I’m old, but the classic Mac OS user interface looks so good. I’d trade the current Mac OS UI for it in a heartbeat. I’m already sticking with Sequoia because I don’t want Liquid Glass making my eyes sore.
I literally thought the same the other day when I was messing around with macos 9. The modern macos is so damn bright that I don't think it would need a dark mode if it just softened the colour choices.
That and just generally it feels so soulless nowadays. Mac OS pre-brushed metal felt like a breath of fresh air compared to os9, but it's taken it to its extreme now and it just looks bad
Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9
#125More 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)
It's the same as every community now. There's a bunch of people endlessly complaining about AI, and there's people using it to create projects that didn't exist before
The fact of the matter is people are going to keep using AI to create projects no matter how much the others complain about it, so I fall on the side of enjoying these new-old retro projects
Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9
#126the 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.
How do you define erase from existence?
Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9
#127Maybe it’s because I’m old, but the classic Mac OS user interface looks so good. I’d trade the current Mac OS UI for it in a heartbeat. I’m already sticking with Sequoia because I don’t want Liquid Glass making my eyes sore.
I literally thought the same the other day when I was messing around with macos 9. The modern macos is so damn bright that I don't think it would need a dark mode if it just softened the colour choices. That and just generally it feels so soulless nowadays. Mac OS pre-brushed metal felt like a breath of fresh air compared to os9, but it's taken it to its extreme now and it just looks bad
What exactly is bright? I don't disagree with you on pre-brushed metal and so on. I am running Tahoe in bright mode (not a fan of dark mode unless it's an IDE or a terminal emulator), and I can't really say it's screams bright. Even the new transparent menu bar matches my dark grey desktop background now.
Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9
#128More 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.
modern tls libraries on classic macs has been available for at least 6 years, and was pretty easily possible sooner if anyone bothered, no AI needed
Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9
#129Earlier 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…
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 day. For a long time, some of his emulators - most notably NO$GBA - were at the forefront of popularity among homebrew developers due to their unmatched debugging tools; even though one could make them much faster with an HLL, nobody really stepped up to the task. Even now, his work remains relevant thanks to the extensive documentation he maintained alongside the emulators he developed.
Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9
#130More 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!
Projects like TenFourFox and PowerFox have ported modern FireFox to late PowerPC Macs running Mac OS X. And some of those Macs are at the bleeding edge (back then) of modern device support (PCIe, WiFi, etc.) so they can also run surprisingly modern hardware and software via Linux. Getting harder with 32 bit support vanishing though.