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SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

macintoshgarden.org

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Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#31

Post by KerrAvon »

ndiddy wrote: post #11

Looks neat! SDL seems open to supporting legacy platforms, so hopefully it'll get mainlined at some point (at this point, may be more likely if they port SDL3 though, SDL2 is in maintenance mode). Does anyone know if it's possible to use a new compiler for this rather than CodeWarrior 7? It would make it easier to port stuff to Mac OS 9 if you don't also have to deal with the compiler only supporting old C/C++ standa…

The classic 68k Mac binary model is pretty far from what LLVM and GCC support even if they still have backends capable of compiling to older 68k CPUs (I'm not sure if that's case). Executable code is stored in the resource fork; the Mac SDKs require a compiler with support for a special syntax for trap-table based calls; the classic Mac Toolbox expects Pascal-format strings for most things.

helfire mentions Retro68; if you look at its README, you can get an idea of the scope of modifications required.

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#32

Post by bluedino »

helfire wrote: post #6

It's really a great time to be a classic MacOS developer - tons of resources out there such as Retro68k, AmendHub, and a small but active community of people interested in sharing examples and help. Back in the day when this stuff was modern I didn't have many resources or people to talk to about it, so exploring what could have been is an interesting endeavor. https://github.com/autc04/Retro68 https://amendhub.com/

I tried a little bit 20+ years ago. Bought a 'road Apple' Performa for $50, download Pangea's game programming book, can't remember if I used MPW or CodeWarrior...

It wasn't anywhere near as simple as DOS game programming was so I think I just installed YellowDog and used that Mac as a webserver.

https://www.pangeasoft.net/book/buy.html

Edit: I just opened that PDF and I think that's a newer version or I remembered the book wrong.

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#34

Post by CursedSilicon »

gwbas1c wrote: post #28
slackfan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do not know what it is, nor cant be arsed to look it up perhaps hackernews is not the correct discussion forum for you. Lurk more.

I've been here longer than you, and have an order of magnitude more karma than you do.

This isn't Reddit. Imaginary internet points don't matter here.

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#35

Post by skrrtww »

Pretty cool!

I have heard stories of people in 2025 creating a fat macOS binary containing arm64, x86_64, x86, and ppc slices.

I hope that we can get virtualization of x86_64 macOS on arm64 hosts. It would be really cool to be able to do such a thing solely on a modern machine!

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#36

Post by 627467 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #25

Uhm, nothing says what SDL is ? The description is an interesting story about the struggles of getting vintage code to build; but it assumes that the reader knows what the thing is to begin with.

Isn't it easier to Google then?

Also, what's next? "Care to explain what is this `linux` thing?"

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#38

Post by geerlingguy »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #27

Wondering what I could do with it ... I rewrote Glypha (an old Mac shareware game I wrote) using modern SDL2. Might be fun to try to "back port" (?) it to OS 9 on top of SDL2 (rather than the clunkier CopyBits() calls I used in the original shareware game).

Thank you for providing me with many hours of entertainment on our old Performa 6360 many years ago! Bought the new version on Steam, too.

Re: SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

#40

Post by cmiller1 »

anthk wrote: post #10

New exotic stuff: - UXN for MacOS 9 - ScummVM, maybe modern games could run under a G4 with Altivec - Netsurf with the SDL front end

> - ScummVM, maybe modern games could run under a G4 with Altivec

Having done some testing for the PPC version of ScummVM on 10.4 I can say that it won't run many of the more modern games because none of those machines supported shaders on the GPU, which many of the more modern ScummVM supported games like Thimbleweed Park depend on. A software shader implementation could be added in theory if someone had the gumption to build it but it would most likely be unusably slow on those older machines.

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