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You can’t recompile executables you don’t have the source for.
by kabwj 7y ago
You can’t recompile executables you don’t have the source for.
- lozenge 7y agoThis is Steam itself, not a game. If they don't have the source, they'll have to drop Mac support too.
- the_mitsuhiko 7y agoThe mac market is bigger and some companies are porting 32bit games to 64bit.
- Zardoz84 7y agonobody would port old games that don't give revenues. For example, if Paradox/Cerberos don't move a finger to fix a stupid annoying bug of a game that have like 6 years old (Sword of the stars), why hell they would port to 64 bits ?
- tomxor 7y agoSurely this is steam by proxy, how can they claim to support a platform if none of the 32 bit games work? I mean they could also probably port steam to NetBSD, but i doubt any games would work, so they wouldn't claim to support NetBSD.
- lostgame 7y agoIt's obviously more about the games themselves than the client, which are much more difficult to update in many cases and offering only 64-bit games would, AFAICT, vastly reduce the number of available titles in the library.
- dragonwriter 7y agoThey already distinguish platforms, if they just recognize 32-bit and 64-bit as platform features and recognize that games might require support for either or both features, this would be almost a non-issue and they would be more future proof.
- Illniyar 7y agoSteam has a lot of 32bit only games. And it relies on WINE to run them. I doubt they have 64bit version of all their popular games. That is why windows is king for so long - the thought of dropping backward compatibility is unthinkable. Instead you do horrendous hacks to get things to work (such as having two different system folders - 1 for 32 bit executables and one for 64bit executables)
- bpfrh 7y agoMicrosoft made a hardcut with drivers on windows 7/8. The same will be done eventually for 32bit, just not now.
- jplayer01 7y agoYeah, they're not going to drop 32-bit for the foreseeable future. They see the value in backwards compatibility, despite HN readers continuously criticizing them for the lengths they go to accomplish it, or straight up ignoring how much effort they've put into it. There's too much software that is only 32-bit, particularly in businesses, for it to be anything other than an ideological argument for "purity".
- thebitrot 7y agodoesn't microsoft also need to keep 32 bit windows so companies can run 16-bit software if they need to?
- badsectoracula 7y agoConsidering new software is released as 32bit only as recently as today, this "eventually" will only come if PCs stop using CPUs from the Intel 8086 lineage.
- kabwj 7y agoI was replying to the comment outside of the context of this article.
- Cyph0n 7y agoBut the point of Steam is to play games, and Valve does not have the source for those games.
- Avamander 7y agoYou can repackage them though.