Mac Source Ports – Run old games on new Macs
There's some irony in that the one thing they haven't figured out (the living room) is the one thing their competitors in the space (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) _have_ figured out.
My take on the living room is that streaming boxes and most Blu-Ray players really suck these days (crappy little Sonys take 45 seconds to boot!) and if you want something to sit next to your TV to be a Plex client it should be a PS or XBOX.
X86 is going the way of the VAX and 68k but ARM ex. Apple is always underpowered at any price. If the rest of the industry was keeping up with Apple Silicon we would not be locked into what Apple thinks is fashionable we’d be seeing a lot of innovation.
Still manages to stay cool with games like CP2077 though.
The Games page does not: https://www.macsourceports.com/games
It was interesting how the different faction technologies had different power/mass/volume/hardpoint production and consumption ratios, so there was a real nudge towards having tech all from one faction, and gently discouraging min-maxing the build using a Frankenstein of gear sourced from the far-flung-corners of the galaxy. At least that was my recollection.
They have done a good job balancing the numbers so that everything requires some tradeoffs. More species/tech gives more choices and interesting variability. Some species make very efficient drives, others inefficient, more powerful but produce tons of excess heat, those folks also produce good passive cooling, others great active cooling but power hungry, etc. The ship hulls tend to match the sizes of the drives and weapon hardpoints of that race, but often work much better when outfitted with different kit (perhaps with some wasted space)
Plus the fleet management is pretty good. You fly your flagship, but you can park ships and switch your flag to different ships. So I might fly a fast little scoutship, then switch to an armor-clad behemoth surrounded my 20 of my heavy-hitting henchmen for some different missions.
"[...] a source port is just the executable code for the game, you still have to provide your own copy of the game's data.
So for example, using Quake III: Arena again, the game consists of both an executable and a set of data files (pk3 files, in this case). The download for ioquake3 is an executable that is up to date and has been maintained to work on modern Macs, but you still need to acquire the pk3 files from a legal source, such as an existing installation of the game from disc or Steam or GOG."A lot of abandonware games have ISOs posted on the Internet Archive. There's a glimmer of worry in the back of my head about the safety of downloading random executables, but it seems like they're usually the real deal.
https://www.macsourceports.com/utility/extractor
Extractor is just a GUI-based version of innoextract, so if you prefer the command line you can use that.
I suppose I can point people to this when they ask me if there is a "Glider" on a modern platform. A lot easier than setting up emulators.
In my opinion gaining accuracy for a single engine is way harder than for general emulation since one does not have a giant corpus that can be used for validation, just the game as is. I‘ve seen a few approaches that try to go the extra mile like the bit identical Super Mario 64 decompilation, or Dungeon Master where the developer recorded inputs on actual hardware and checked that the play through reaches the end of the game provided the same inputs.
Not to take away from the tremendous task those reverse engineering efforts go through, I am very grateful to have classic games running on modern hardware with enhancements and modding support!
On the wiki on my build system I have a categorization thing happening, perhaps I should incorporate that into the site. https://github.com/MacSourcePorts/MSPBuildSystem/wiki
One thing I try to avoid though there are some examples on the site is recompilation efforts. Those can get into dodgy territory.
Nonetheless, I got it on SourceForge and it seems a later maintainer ported it to Windows. https://sourceforge.net/projects/robowar/files/Original%20Ro...
I also received the sources to Despair from Lloyd Burchill, which I was similarly unequipped to port. But unfortunately I didn't upload it anywhere.
There's also the game engine World Builder by Bill Appleton (of SuperCard fame), which Alexei Svitkine re-implemented in Java at https://github.com/asvitkine/wage-engine. This was used by several puzzle-adventure games. One I remember fondly is A Mess of Trouble by Ray Dunakin, which has been separately ported to modern macOS at http://www.amessotrouble.com/.
I think it's almost necessary that gaming's home needs to be on an open-source OS, where people make things work because they love to, not (necessarily) because they're paid to.
I have already encountered games that no longer run on Windows but run fine (great even) on Proton.
I wish Apple wasn't locking down their PC platform so much. I mean, Asahi exists, but they are given ZERO assistance except for what is essentially "Apple holding the door open for that and similar projects". Which can close at any time. Which is a serious problem (reminiscent of the ZFS situation with Oracle).
Then there is the whole culture clash between FOSS and the way games industry sees IP, NDAs and the proprietary tooling that gives a game that edge over the competition.
But yeah if it can run on the Mac it can run on Linux and probably does. There's a few cases where it doesn't go the other way (Skin Deep uses OpenGL 4.3 and the Mac stopped at OpenGL 4.1, that sort of thing)
IIRC that game was pretty impressive when you consider that similar games on consoles were using custom sprite hardware, and doing it on a CPU would have been trickier, even despite having much better CPUs than the consoles.
[1] https://continuumjs.com [2] https://github.com/sam-mfb/continuum
https://rakhim.exotext.com/how-to-play-half-life-2-on-mchip-...
Unfortunately, the best source port (VCMI) doesn't support Horn of the Abyss directly, but you can do things with Rosetta and friends: https://github.com/ponich/heroes3hota-mac-installer