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Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

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Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#161

Post by EPWN3D »

amatecha wrote: post #155
EPWN3D wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It really was a bit weird, games that got ported to Mac almost always had higher-quality graphics. The X-Wing port looked incredible compared to the PC version, and so did TIE Fighter. For whatever reason, the default viewport on Mac OS was 640x480."

But that all went out the window with Quake. Once PCs got 3D graphics cards, Macs just couldn't keep up because those companies wouldn't write Mac drivers for their top-end stuff. I do remember getting a Voodoo 2 once 3Dfx started selling it for the Mac, and Unreal looker absolutely gorgeous.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#163

Post by xp84 »

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…

I hope most people are like Obama's energy strategy, famously described as "All of the above."[1] -- the AI-powered efforts don't take away anyone's ability to do amazing "by hand" accomplishments. There's so much in the problem space that there's no chance of all the interesting projects being "solved with AI." I want everyone interested to be building things, with or without AI as they prefer.

[1] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/doc...

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#164

Post by xp84 »

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!

I massively disagree. If someone uses AI to port a whole game engine to $RETRO_OS and that means I can port a great game to that OS by hand that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise, everybody has won there.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#165

Post by user3939382 »

userbinator wrote: post #101
user3939382 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TLS is not really that much of a blocker, nor was AI necessary to clear that hurdle (albeit crypto is fundamentally "just maths" and thus very, very portable): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36486512

It’s a blocker bc it’s complex and not available. By blocker I mean huge hurdle, not so much saying it’s impossible. Your link shows work has been done there.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#166

Post by user3939382 »

Palomides wrote: post #128
user3939382 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A library and working OS utilities including a browser are not the same thing. A year or so ago I was able to get 1 very old browser working but nothing else had TLS. The browser also didn’t have modern JS which is another similar non-trivial issue.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#167

Post by rufo »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #138
rufo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, interesting - I saved the video but haven’t gotten around to watching it yet. I don’t know if this is touched on, but it certainly does seem like Gabe’s statement could be a nicer-sounding front for what Becky says; if there are fewer users than the math for supporting HL on Macs on an ongoing basis doesn’t make as much sense.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#168

Post by johng »

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 played the original Doom on my 386SX/25 this way.... actual action shrunk down to the lowest stamp sized box on low detail.

But damn, did I have fun playing that game... especially multiplayer over a modem.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#169

Post by amatecha »

EPWN3D wrote: post #161
amatecha wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It really was a bit weird, games that got ported to Mac almost always had higher-quality graphics. The X-Wing port looked incredible compared to the PC version, and so did TIE Fighter. For whatever reason, the default viewport on Mac OS was 640x480." But that all went out the window with Quake. Once PCs got 3D graphics cards, Macs just couldn't keep up because those companies wouldn't write Mac drivers for their top-…

Yeah, I used also used a Voodoo2 in my Mac (PowerComputing PowerTower Pro), but it was from a PC. The driver for it was very crash-prone, BUT, Unreal Tournament and Quake looked freakin' amazing! Good times :D
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