Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

ChrisMarshallNY

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.

pimlottc

Cleverly done.

hedgehog

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.

frollogaston

Porting AssaultCube should be doable too

mcfdoesdev

This makes me so happy lol.

wk_end

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

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.

amatecha

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/...

system7rocks

Wow. This is the golden age for classic Macs.

purpleflame1257

So will this run through Classic no problem, yes? I almost want to break my powebook G4 out of mothballs on principle to try this.

ayaros

Runs nicely on my iBook G3! Is the OS 9 build supposed to include Blue Shift and Opposing Force, or is that only a reference to the Tiger and Leopard ports? Just tried out the Tiger port on my iMac G4; it also runs fine!

xp84

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!

gcanyon

Great, now all I need is (checks the closet) any of the dozen or so powermacs I owned over the years to not have left my possession...

luciana1u

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.

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.

gilgoomesh

In one of the most infamous stories of the era, Half-Life was officially ported to Mac OS back in the year 2000 by Logicware/MacPlay but got shut down by Valve at the last minute. I've watched interviews with Rebecca Heineman (one of the devs involved) on the topic. It did not make her happy. Here's an article from the era: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/mac-half-life-canceled/110... Interview with Rebecca Heineman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPTLPXNtb2I (skip to timecode 1:36:41 for the Half-Life details)

zombot

Everybody knows what a celebrity Gordon Freeman is, but Mac OS 9 has not been graced with his presence yet. So glad to see things change for the better!