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Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

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Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#61

Post by itomato »

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!

One of the first things I did with ChatGPT was feed it source for the existing OHCI USB Host Adapter driver to make it work with more common UHCI hardware.

There are many people working to extend NeXT, Openstep and even Rhapsody. Not to mention emulation projects and deep dives into XNU source, early Darwin source and shoehorning kernels and libraries into various places.

The Epson NX was purpose-built to run NeXTStep, for example, and bringing support for machines like that and the Canon object.station into 86box is a pet project of mine.

Join us https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=5286.ms...

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#62

Post by philodeon »

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…

And just a few years later, Apple shipped an iTunes 2 installer that could wipe your external hard drives.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#63

Post by ColdStream »

Coeur wrote: post #55
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!

Or even create new platforms where we're not bound by platform owners' imposed artificial limitations.

So the entire free software movement? ;)

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#64

Post by hedgehog »

walrus01 wrote: post #38
hedgehog wrote: post #15

For reference this is roughly period correct for the early iMac models (G3 and DV) that came out in 1998 and 1999, though MacOS 9 didn't ship until later. Impressive porting work.

The G3 iMac that came out in this time period had much weaker 3D rendering capability than a contemporary PC gaming video card like a TNT2. Their video ability was closer to the 2D/office oriented video cards sold for non gaming use... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_TNT2 Or a voodoo2...

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 player play.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#65

Post by ColdStream »

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!

One impressive one to me is the current effort to port Doom to the Neo Geo. Because of its unique hardware setup in that it is entirely sprite based and doesn't have a frame buffer, it is a very difficult challenge to take on. And yet most of the code on these projects is being done via AI and it works pretty dang well.

Considering these coding system probably have almost no idea of the Neo Geo's specifics and with very little reference code directly linked to the system to bounce off, that is dang impressive.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#66

Post by 6stringmerc »

[R]age Board for the Elites represent!

I still send the di clan video around every few months to the Zoomers I connect with in games.

Halcyon days of HLDM and AG worldwide. RIP Neo. May you sneak around boot_camp in the great beyond with joy.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#67

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #60
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #2

That's nice. Now do MacOS 26, on M chips. [UPDATE] To make it clear, it was a joke (always a faceplant, on HN, where senses of humor go to die). It's actually very cool. I just get cranky that 3/4 of my Steam games don't work on new Macs, and I did like HL.

I get cranky coming to HN and seeing 3/4 of the posts about games.

Seems 90% AI, these days, with a lot of going into the weeds of AI management and development.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#68

Post by ColdStream »

hedgehog wrote: post #64
walrus01 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The G3 iMac that came out in this time period had much weaker 3D rendering capability than a contemporary PC gaming video card like a TNT2. Their video ability was closer to the 2D/office oriented video cards sold for non gaming use... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_TNT2 Or a voodoo2...

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…

To bring up an almost three decade old debate, it would be fascinating to see the performance difference between PPC and x86 in software rendering. Probably mostly bandwidth limited at this point still.

PPC ended up being a brilliant design done mediocre, while x86 is a mediocre design done very well.

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#69

Post by CursedSilicon »

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!

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)

Re: Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

#70

Post by ColdStream »

luciana1u wrote: post #59

the 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.

It's not like they held a funeral on stage in front of a huge crowd of developers, say at WWDC 02 or anything...

Yeah, I think Steve took equal part great joy with a little sprinkle of sadness at what was that event.

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