8 ms·

The Impossible Port: MacOS

276 points by wow00 4y ago

lefstathiou 4y ago
Where do people go to get roms of games they own these days?
- sli 4y ago
  You aren't going to get any links to copyrighted content, but a Switch running CFW can dump game backups easily.
  - chungy 4y ago
    Unfortunately the window of Switch consoles sold that are softmoddable (afaik) was very narrow and early on, about the first ~18 months of the console's life (and mind, it is 5 years old now). Most units of the standard console are not softmoddable, nor are any of the Lite or OLED units. Hardware mods exist for all of them.
    - berbec 4y ago
      So I should keep/sell for alot my purchased-in-the-first-three-months switch?
      - mechanical_bear 4y ago
        Did you ever update it?
        comex 4y ago
        That shouldn’t matter… homebrew supports the latest firmware as long as you’re on the original hardware.
        piperswe 4y ago
        The ability to softmod those early Switches can't be patched out in software AFAIK, so it shouldn't matter what software version it's running
        mechanical_bear 4y ago
        Oh cool. Thanks for that…off to go check mine..
      - bakugo 4y ago
        Don't know the exact prices they're going for nowadays but if it's in good condition and you're willing to prove to the buyer that it's hackable, you can probably sell it for at least a bit more than what you originally paid for it. I've been considering getting a second one for myself just in case my own first year console decides to kick the bucket (I already had to open it up to replace the joycon rails once)
- bakugo 4y ago
  There's no officially supported way of obtaining them. The closest thing is owning a console manufactured before mid-2018 and hacking it. But nobody really cares how you get the games anyway especially if you already own them, so just download them from somewhere.
  - chungy 4y ago
    I've done it, and won't pass negative judgment on anyone doing so, but being able to dump your own games actually feels like a bit of an accomplishment, it's just nice to not have to pirate your own games to use them in emulation, and it can open up preservation wider: It's possible that you own a revision of a game that was previously unknown, or maybe you just have a really obscure game card.
    - bakugo 4y ago
      > It's possible that you own a revision of a game that was previously unknown, or maybe you just have a really obscure game card. This isn't as common as it was in older consoles, thankfully. And we have groups of cool people working in the background to preserve perfect dumps of basically any game they can get their hands on.
      - chungy 4y ago
        For me, it's still fun regardless, and removes a lot of friction for knowing where to get games: from my own legit copies of said games! (for as frequently as sites/archives go down that host pirated copies... it's honestly worthwhile doing it myself) I've dumped all my NES cartridges and even though they match with existing No-Intro entries, it's still fun and gives peace of mind enough that I'm not unknowingly holding onto a rare revision.
        bakugo 4y ago
        Yeah, I'm not arguing against that. I don't dump my games often but it's still good to have that freedom, makes me feel like I actually own the product I bought for once.
bakugo 4y ago
Are people who own M1 Macs actually interested in playing games though? You'd think they would buy something more suitable for the job if they were.
- Klonoar 4y ago
  Quite a sizeable crowd, actually. The M1 series is quite fine for gaming, it just requires vendors/authors producing for it.
  - bakugo 4y ago
    A platform that nobody develops for isn't really a good platform for gaming. And I don't see why developers would bother when Apple is just going to break compatibility for their games in a few years unless they keep updating it.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - astrange 4y ago
      The last compatibility break (i386) had 15 years of warning, although I still saw game developers complaining about being surprised afterward.
      - sdflhasjd 4y ago
        Apple doesn't just remove architecture support, they remove APIs too. My last, and brief, foray into games development on MacOS was quickly soured by things breaking between point version updates. Even things as crucial and simple as pushing pixels onto the screen broke as Quartz APIs changed
      - sbuk 4y ago
        That's generally true of any change that Apple makes. They telegraph the change directly, yet it's largely ignored, usually wilfully, and the caterwauling starts as soon as they take the action that they say they are going to take. Take the M-series transition. When M1 was announced (mid 2020), Cook said that they expected to complete the transition in 2 years. If you have a pre-2020 mac, expect the next macOS to be the last.
neilv 4y ago
For emulating vintage gaming hardware that's no longer available, one argument would be preservation of the media. But what's the rationale (not rationalization) on running an emulation of the Nintendo Switch, when it's still commercially available? In practice, is it usually because people want to play the games without paying for the hardware and software?
- asveikau 4y ago
  Preservation starts in the present, does it not? I think one thing that's easy to forget, some of the old school emulation, like early SNES emulators, came about when the hardware was still kinda current or recent.
  - eru 4y ago
    Yes, the timelines match up pretty well: The SNES was released in Japan in 1990. The first SNES emulator in 1994 could run a few homebrews; I'd say SNES emulation proper started in perhaps 1996 with Snes96, but that's a judgement call. The Switch was released in 2017. We are in 2022 now.
    - asveikau 4y ago
      Nice observation. I hadn't realized how parallel that timeline is. I just remember playing games on a pentium 2 in '98 that were published in '94.
  - roywiggins 4y ago
    And Nintendo 64 was released 1996-7, UltraHLE was 1999. And apparently early GBA emulation predated the GBA? https://emulation.fandom.com/wiki/History_of_emulation#Game_Boy_Advance https://emulation.fandom.com/wiki/History_of_emulation#Game_...
    - Vanit 4y ago
      iirc GBA emulation got an early head start due to leaked documentation (citation needed).
porphyra 4y ago
I'm happy to see that most games just work fine and do not rely on any weird proprietary Nvidia stuff to run.
notpushkin 4y ago
Very nice! I wonder how hard it'd be to get the Asahi Linux supported too :-) EDIT: I see other ARM platforms are being discussed, too, like Nvidia Jetson here: https://github.com/Ryujinx/Ryujinx/issues/1884 https://github.com/Ryujinx/Ryujinx/issues/1884
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thewebcount 4y ago
Just a suggestion to the authors - if you want to get people on the platform excited about your work, maybe don’t shit all over the platform. You did something great. Emphasize that. Leave the editorializing out. Yes, Apple does things differently than other manufacturers and sometimes that makes things more difficult for what your trying to do. Every platform has these issues, just in different places. Other than that, it looks like a really neat project. Best of luck!
- coconut08 4y ago
  yeah, no. sometimes apple just decides to reinvent the wheel instead of using the cross-platform universal standard that everyone else is using. being frustrated by this is both understandable and obvious. apple's obstinance and complete refusal to implement vulkan is a large reason why game developers don't release games for the mac. thank god some third party decided to make a vulkan translation layer because that is one of the primary reasons macos has any games at all.
  - sbuk 4y ago
    Metal predates Vulkan by 2 years.
  - galad87 4y ago
    That doesn't make sense, most game are made with Unity and Unreal, which can quite easily package a Mac version, but those aren't coming to Mac either. Which AAA studio uses Vulkan anyway?
    - girvo 4y ago
      id, and that’s about it as far as I’m aware?
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > instead of using the cross-platform universal standard that everyone else is using. 1. Metal predates Vulkan 2. The vast majority of gaming platforms either don't support Vulkan, or have it as a distant third-party option https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33742823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33742823
jawadch93 4y ago
[dead]
eschaton 4y ago
The article says: > Implementing ARM compatibility is a big-deal for normal software, and emulators are far from normal. This is bullshit. ARM compatibility is trivial for normal software, and unless an emulator wants to leverage some sort of virtualization technology, emulators are perfectly normal software. Stop pretending there’s some mystique to them. Everyone who’s gone through a reasonable undergraduate CS curriculum should have implemented an emulator as part of their computer architecture courses, just like everyone should have implemented an OS as part of their operating systems coursework.
- manchmalscott 4y ago
  As someone who is about to graduate from an undergrad CS program in the fall, apparently my curriculum isn’t reasonable? None of the classes I’ve taken, required or otherwise, have had us implement an emulator or an entire operating system. We’ve mostly focused on integrating with existing things e.g. writing Linux kernel modules, writing MIPS assembly, rather than creating new things. Probably the only notable exception I can think of was writing a tokenizer/parser/compiler over the course of CSE340, but none of the classes my college offers involve writing an OS from scratch (at least at the undergraduate level).
- jnwatson 4y ago
  Emulators are not remotely normal software. If there's any static or dynamic binary translation at all, there's a lot of architecture-specific stuff you gotta know.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    That's going into the realm of virtualisation, which the parent comment does note is different from "plain old emulation".
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > Everyone who’s gone through a reasonable undergraduate CS curriculum should have Tell me the equivalent of "I went to Harvard you peasant" without telling it.
BuckyBeaver 4y ago
This title indicates that it's a port of Mac OS. Please put a properly descriptive title on your post.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  Same title as the article.
  - BuckyBeaver 4y ago
    So what? This is not a domain-specific Web site, so there's no context. The problem is compounded because the title presents "Mac OS" as the sole item, with no other mentioned. If you're reading a publication about dentistry and there's an article called "What's next in our field?" it would not be appropriate to barf that same title out on a more general-interest Web site. For example, you'd post "What's next in dentistry?" on this site. Clear?
rosnd 4y ago
You can just right click to open anyway without going through the settings.

276 points by wow00 4y ago

lefstathiou 4y ago

Where do people go to get roms of games they own these days?

sli 4y ago
You aren't going to get any links to copyrighted content, but a Switch running CFW can dump game backups easily.
- chungy 4y ago
  Unfortunately the window of Switch consoles sold that are softmoddable (afaik) was very narrow and early on, about the first ~18 months of the console's life (and mind, it is 5 years old now). Most units of the standard console are not softmoddable, nor are any of the Lite or OLED units. Hardware mods exist for all of them.
  - berbec 4y ago
    So I should keep/sell for alot my purchased-in-the-first-three-months switch?
    - mechanical_bear 4y ago
      Did you ever update it?
      - comex 4y ago
        That shouldn’t matter… homebrew supports the latest firmware as long as you’re on the original hardware.
      - piperswe 4y ago
        The ability to softmod those early Switches can't be patched out in software AFAIK, so it shouldn't matter what software version it's running
        mechanical_bear 4y ago
        Oh cool. Thanks for that…off to go check mine..
    - bakugo 4y ago
      Don't know the exact prices they're going for nowadays but if it's in good condition and you're willing to prove to the buyer that it's hackable, you can probably sell it for at least a bit more than what you originally paid for it. I've been considering getting a second one for myself just in case my own first year console decides to kick the bucket (I already had to open it up to replace the joycon rails once)
bakugo 4y ago
There's no officially supported way of obtaining them. The closest thing is owning a console manufactured before mid-2018 and hacking it. But nobody really cares how you get the games anyway especially if you already own them, so just download them from somewhere.
- chungy 4y ago
  I've done it, and won't pass negative judgment on anyone doing so, but being able to dump your own games actually feels like a bit of an accomplishment, it's just nice to not have to pirate your own games to use them in emulation, and it can open up preservation wider: It's possible that you own a revision of a game that was previously unknown, or maybe you just have a really obscure game card.
  - bakugo 4y ago
    > It's possible that you own a revision of a game that was previously unknown, or maybe you just have a really obscure game card. This isn't as common as it was in older consoles, thankfully. And we have groups of cool people working in the background to preserve perfect dumps of basically any game they can get their hands on.
    - chungy 4y ago
      For me, it's still fun regardless, and removes a lot of friction for knowing where to get games: from my own legit copies of said games! (for as frequently as sites/archives go down that host pirated copies... it's honestly worthwhile doing it myself) I've dumped all my NES cartridges and even though they match with existing No-Intro entries, it's still fun and gives peace of mind enough that I'm not unknowingly holding onto a rare revision.
      - bakugo 4y ago
        Yeah, I'm not arguing against that. I don't dump my games often but it's still good to have that freedom, makes me feel like I actually own the product I bought for once.

bakugo 4y ago

Are people who own M1 Macs actually interested in playing games though? You'd think they would buy something more suitable for the job if they were.

Klonoar 4y ago
Quite a sizeable crowd, actually. The M1 series is quite fine for gaming, it just requires vendors/authors producing for it.
- bakugo 4y ago
  A platform that nobody develops for isn't really a good platform for gaming. And I don't see why developers would bother when Apple is just going to break compatibility for their games in a few years unless they keep updating it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - astrange 4y ago
    The last compatibility break (i386) had 15 years of warning, although I still saw game developers complaining about being surprised afterward.
    - sdflhasjd 4y ago
      Apple doesn't just remove architecture support, they remove APIs too. My last, and brief, foray into games development on MacOS was quickly soured by things breaking between point version updates. Even things as crucial and simple as pushing pixels onto the screen broke as Quartz APIs changed
    - sbuk 4y ago
      That's generally true of any change that Apple makes. They telegraph the change directly, yet it's largely ignored, usually wilfully, and the caterwauling starts as soon as they take the action that they say they are going to take. Take the M-series transition. When M1 was announced (mid 2020), Cook said that they expected to complete the transition in 2 years. If you have a pre-2020 mac, expect the next macOS to be the last.

neilv 4y ago

For emulating vintage gaming hardware that's no longer available, one argument would be preservation of the media. But what's the rationale (not rationalization) on running an emulation of the Nintendo Switch, when it's still commercially available? In practice, is it usually because people want to play the games without paying for the hardware and software?

asveikau 4y ago
Preservation starts in the present, does it not? I think one thing that's easy to forget, some of the old school emulation, like early SNES emulators, came about when the hardware was still kinda current or recent.
- eru 4y ago
  Yes, the timelines match up pretty well: The SNES was released in Japan in 1990. The first SNES emulator in 1994 could run a few homebrews; I'd say SNES emulation proper started in perhaps 1996 with Snes96, but that's a judgement call. The Switch was released in 2017. We are in 2022 now.
  - asveikau 4y ago
    Nice observation. I hadn't realized how parallel that timeline is. I just remember playing games on a pentium 2 in '98 that were published in '94.
- roywiggins 4y ago
  And Nintendo 64 was released 1996-7, UltraHLE was 1999. And apparently early GBA emulation predated the GBA? https://emulation.fandom.com/wiki/History_of_emulation#Game_Boy_Advance https://emulation.fandom.com/wiki/History_of_emulation#Game_...
  - Vanit 4y ago
    iirc GBA emulation got an early head start due to leaked documentation (citation needed).

porphyra 4y ago

I'm happy to see that most games just work fine and do not rely on any weird proprietary Nvidia stuff to run.

notpushkin 4y ago

Very nice! I wonder how hard it'd be to get the Asahi Linux supported too :-) EDIT: I see other ARM platforms are being discussed, too, like Nvidia Jetson here: https://github.com/Ryujinx/Ryujinx/issues/1884 https://github.com/Ryujinx/Ryujinx/issues/1884

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

thewebcount 4y ago

Just a suggestion to the authors - if you want to get people on the platform excited about your work, maybe don’t shit all over the platform. You did something great. Emphasize that. Leave the editorializing out. Yes, Apple does things differently than other manufacturers and sometimes that makes things more difficult for what your trying to do. Every platform has these issues, just in different places. Other than that, it looks like a really neat project. Best of luck!

coconut08 4y ago
yeah, no. sometimes apple just decides to reinvent the wheel instead of using the cross-platform universal standard that everyone else is using. being frustrated by this is both understandable and obvious. apple's obstinance and complete refusal to implement vulkan is a large reason why game developers don't release games for the mac. thank god some third party decided to make a vulkan translation layer because that is one of the primary reasons macos has any games at all.
- sbuk 4y ago
  Metal predates Vulkan by 2 years.
- galad87 4y ago
  That doesn't make sense, most game are made with Unity and Unreal, which can quite easily package a Mac version, but those aren't coming to Mac either. Which AAA studio uses Vulkan anyway?
  - girvo 4y ago
    id, and that’s about it as far as I’m aware?
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > instead of using the cross-platform universal standard that everyone else is using. 1. Metal predates Vulkan 2. The vast majority of gaming platforms either don't support Vulkan, or have it as a distant third-party option https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33742823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33742823

jawadch93 4y ago

[dead]

eschaton 4y ago

The article says: > Implementing ARM compatibility is a big-deal for normal software, and emulators are far from normal. This is bullshit. ARM compatibility is trivial for normal software, and unless an emulator wants to leverage some sort of virtualization technology, emulators are perfectly normal software. Stop pretending there’s some mystique to them. Everyone who’s gone through a reasonable undergraduate CS curriculum should have implemented an emulator as part of their computer architecture courses, just like everyone should have implemented an OS as part of their operating systems coursework.

manchmalscott 4y ago
As someone who is about to graduate from an undergrad CS program in the fall, apparently my curriculum isn’t reasonable? None of the classes I’ve taken, required or otherwise, have had us implement an emulator or an entire operating system. We’ve mostly focused on integrating with existing things e.g. writing Linux kernel modules, writing MIPS assembly, rather than creating new things. Probably the only notable exception I can think of was writing a tokenizer/parser/compiler over the course of CSE340, but none of the classes my college offers involve writing an OS from scratch (at least at the undergraduate level).
jnwatson 4y ago
Emulators are not remotely normal software. If there's any static or dynamic binary translation at all, there's a lot of architecture-specific stuff you gotta know.
- userbinator 4y ago
  That's going into the realm of virtualisation, which the parent comment does note is different from "plain old emulation".
dmitriid 4y ago
> Everyone who’s gone through a reasonable undergraduate CS curriculum should have Tell me the equivalent of "I went to Harvard you peasant" without telling it.

BuckyBeaver 4y ago

This title indicates that it's a port of Mac OS. Please put a properly descriptive title on your post.

ShamelessC 4y ago
Same title as the article.
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago
  So what? This is not a domain-specific Web site, so there's no context. The problem is compounded because the title presents "Mac OS" as the sole item, with no other mentioned. If you're reading a publication about dentistry and there's an article called "What's next in our field?" it would not be appropriate to barf that same title out on a more general-interest Web site. For example, you'd post "What's next in dentistry?" on this site. Clear?

rosnd 4y ago

You can just right click to open anyway without going through the settings.