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Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

79 pointsby freedivertoday at 8:58 PM25 commentsview on HN

Comments

amatechatoday at 10:57 PM

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_endtoday at 10:41 PM

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

sharkjacobstoday at 10:56 PM

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.

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hedgehogtoday at 9:58 PM

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.

frollogastontoday at 10:10 PM

Porting AssaultCube should be doable too

ChrisMarshallNYtoday at 9:36 PM

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.

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pimlottctoday at 9:41 PM

Cleverly done.

mcfdoesdevtoday at 10:41 PM

This makes me so happy lol.