Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

(mac-classic.com)

78 points | by freediver 2 hours ago ago

25 comments

  • amatecha 10 minutes ago

    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 at 320x200 pixel-doubled just to eke out that extra little bit of performance. Anyway, the point is that HL probably could have been running on Mac since day one, if someone had spent the time to port it!

    [0] https://www.wired.com/1997/01/hackers-hack-crack-steal-quake...

    [1] https://github.com/Jason2Brownlee/QuakeOfficialArchive/blob/...

  • wk_end 26 minutes ago

    The most interesting thing about this link, for me, is seeing that there's an open-source recreation of GoldSrc [0]? That's apparently been around since 2011 [1]? I'm stunned I haven't heard about this before. Very cool.

    [0] https://github.com/fwgs/xash3d-fwgs

    [1] https://www.moddb.com/engines/xash3d-engine

  • sharkjacobs 12 minutes ago

    I would have been really excited about this circa 1999. I mean don't get me wrong, I was grateful for Unreal Tournament and Q3A, and I knew I'd be getting Halo soon, but this is the one game I was really jealous of my friends for.

  • hedgehog an hour ago

    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.

  • ChrisMarshallNY 2 hours ago

    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.

    • nomel an hour ago
    • ChrisMarshallNY an hour ago

      But, to make it clear, it was a joke. 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.

      • bombcar an hour ago

        I love that simcity4 has an applesilicon and big name recent releases don't.

        Yay.

      • lenerdenator an hour ago

        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.

    • ofalkaed an hour ago

      Jokes are downvoted not because of a lack humor but because if we reward making jokes we will have to scroll through dozens of jokes and all of their responses to get the actual discussion. Voting is about keeping the on topic and worthwhile discussion at the top with everything else buried beneath it.

      • drnick1 6 minutes ago

        You must be fun at parties.

    • altern8 an hour ago

      I think those guys are about classic Macs

      • ChrisMarshallNY an hour ago

        I know. It was kind of a joke, which, due to this being HN, fell flat.

        • acheron an hour ago

          We at Hacker News do not have a sense of humor that we’re aware of.

        • altern8 an hour ago

          I see. Maybe it was a little random

    • Barbing an hour ago

      Missing a bounty to go with that directness!

    • rvz an hour ago

      This is the only site where it is illegal to make a joke.

    • parl_match an hour ago

      you do it.

  • frollogaston an hour ago

    Porting AssaultCube should be doable too

  • pimlottc an hour ago

    Cleverly done.

  • mcfdoesdev 27 minutes ago

    This makes me so happy lol.