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Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

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Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#151

Post by CamperBob2 »

ChoGGi wrote: post #131
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…

Proud to be a Luddite. Less so in the hobby area, more so in the "they're taking our jobs" area.

Do you make your own shirts and pants, too?

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#152

Post by ayaros »

srp-shay wrote: post #112
ayaros wrote: post #40

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!

Hey, glad to hear it's running on your iBook and I really appreciate the feedback! Hopefully you're not having any mouse look problems, or invisible NPCs... I've got a fix for those issues coming soon, as well as a separate build of Blue Shift and Opposing Force. The current Blue Shift and Opposing Force builds are for Tiger and Leopard only. Cheers!

I should note:

I ran the OS 9 installer, then was doing a few other things around the apartment and when I got back, it had crashed. So I reopened it, reran it, and it seems all the files had successfully been copied, so all it effectively did the second time was prompt me to create shortcuts.

I haven't extensively tested it beyond the initial parts of the training room because I didn't have time. I didn't notice anything odd; it seemed to run just fine.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#153

Post by gcp123 »

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.

[dead]

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#154

Post by amatecha »

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…

Just adding a post to correlate with what VonGuard wrote (but for some reason got downvoted into oblivion) , apparently there was a Mac port of Half-life nearly completed but canceled in late 1999: https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2024/06/25/half-life-for-the... This is especially surprising since I was saying "if someone had spent the time to port it" -- apparently someone DID, but the project was simply canceled! Brutal!

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#155

Post by amatecha »

EPWN3D wrote: post #147
taneq wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having spent a large chunk of my teens playing X-Wing on a 486-DX33 you are clearly my enemy. :P I didn’t have to data mine a compatible .exe from the game files but I did have to use a special boot disk with a modified himem.sys on it so the game would launch. Good times, haha.

You jerks always got the best games lol. But I always lorded over my PC friends that they didn't know what they were missing with Marathon.

Well, yeah as much as we missed out on so many games, the ones we did get were often better quality .. I still have this distinct memory of visiting my friend who ran DOS, and his version of Command & Conquer was hilariously pixelated. Turns out the DOS version ran in 320x240? I was so used to my 640x480 Mac version and I was blown away that he had to suffer with this inferior version lol ... There was also the games with high-fidelity CD audio (Descent anyone?) compared to the weaksauce MIDI stuff the other guys got.

The other crazy "Mac vs. DOS/Win gamer" moment was when my buddy got a sound card for his birthday in 1994, maybe 1995. I remember being shocked about this -- "what the hell were you using before, then?", I wondered. This was when I learned about PC speaker audio. Wow. I had been getting nice 22khz (maybe even 44khz) stereo audio for years before my friend had anything better than a PC speaker. This particular moment made me especially wonder why anyone ever made fun of me for being a Mac owner, because they had literally nothing to be smug about except a broader selection of games.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#156

Post by CursedSilicon »

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…

Actually, one of the larger youtubers is currently facing massive backlash from his own community because all his projects are done by the slop machine :)

The great thing about retro computing is we want to see what people come up with. Not slop bots!

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#157

Post by walrus01 »

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.

500MHz was not a thing in 1998, an expensive desktop PC was a slot based Pentium 2 350MHz in 1998. The 500MHz P3 came at least a year later and was quite high end for its time.

In early 1998 a more normal baseline home gaming desktop PC was like a Pentium 266 MMX.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#158

Post by lenerdenator »

anthk wrote: post #52
lenerdenator wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Q: how will the future removal of Rosetta 2 impact things like this?

I do have some things that will play now, but I worry about that.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#159

Post by anthk »

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 forgot about Oni, I might play it again.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#160

Post by userbinator »

CursedSilicon wrote: post #156
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…

Actually, one of the larger youtubers is currently facing massive backlash from his own community because all his projects are done by the slop machine :) The great thing about retro computing is we want to see what people come up with. Not slop bots!

To be precise, it's people using AI.
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