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Interesting, I am not able to play HL2 on Steam because macOS no longer has 32-bit support and Valve never compiled if for 64-bit but here we are, it’s playable
by mrtksn 4mo ago
Interesting, I am not able to play HL2 on Steam because macOS no longer has 32-bit support and Valve never compiled if for 64-bit but here we are, it’s playable on the same OS in the browser.
BTW IIRC there was some method to convert the 32-bit game binaries to make them run on recent macs. I remember doing it.
- jillesvangurp 4mo agoOn paper qemu should be able to do this. The hard part is hardware acceleration for the GPU. Without Apple putting effort into supporting this with e.g. documentation, that's a bit hard. That's also holding back linux support on Apple hardware. But it's a fixable problem that will only get easier as hw gets better and faster over time.
- ErroneousBosh 4mo ago> The hard part is hardware acceleration for the GPU Is it, though? How Hard Can It Possibly Be to just do a software GL renderer that emulates a mid-2000s Radeon, these days?
- account42 4mo agoAt what resolution. You're not going to software render 4K120FPS even with 2000s graphics. But you also don't need a software implementation since translating to a host API isn't really any harder than that (and often much easier). And this already exists in Wine.
- Klonoar 4mo agoI admit that Valve’s approach to Steam on macOS has never made sense to me.
- doublerabbit 4mo agoThis was more Apple's doing rather than Valve's. Valve wanted steam to co-exist on the mac in the early days and John Sculley of Apple didn't want Apple to be seen as a gaming device or a "personal home computer". So they ceased contact with Valve and the rest is history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPTLPXNtb2I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPTLPXNtb2I Apple refused to license joysticks so they could prevent customers from considering early mac's as game machines and deliberately refused to support games on the machine. Myst was only few that were exclusive to the Mac; that they then ported to PC.
- Wowfunhappy 4mo agoYour timeline doesn't make sense. Steam launched in 2003. Scully was forced out of Apple in 1993.
- doublerabbit 4mo agoSo, your right. But the still holds true, that seed was what was sown not to encourage games for the Mac. If you watch the YT video they go in to depth that they attempted to port the game and was axed by apple.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Wowfunhappy 4mo agoApple runs a gaming subscription service which goes so far as to pay developers for timed exclusivity to Apple platforms. It may be true that in the early days of the Mac, Apple decided games were bad for their brand. This clearly is not true today.
- hypercube33 4mo agoMost valve games are 32bit macos binaries I assume for powerpc or Intel or something but they flat out refuse to run on modern ox
- russelg 4mo agoIf they were Intel 64bit binaries they'd still run due to Rosetta 2, however the majority of their games did not get a 64bit upgrade on macOS.
- doginasuit 4mo agoApple is so obsessed with how their product is marketed and perceived that they all but eliminated gaming on the platform. It's hard to argue that it hasn't been effective, but I'll never understand why people accept that the people who make the computer should decide how you use it.
- shakna 4mo agoI think Apple may have burned a lot of developer bridges with Metal, deprecating OpenGL, and ignoring Vulkan.
- charcircuit 4mo agoTo be fair Microsoft ignored Vulkan with Windows leaving it up to 3P to implement.
- xnickb 4mo agoHow is that "fair"?
- bjord 4mo agothey're not saying it's fair to consumers, they're saying "it's not just apple, microsoft does it too", i.e. that judgement on apple should be made in the context of how its competitors behaved
- zamadatix 4mo agoI think they are saying the fair comparison should be what another 1st party GPU maker supports in their 1st party drivers, not whether or not Windows provides 1st party Vulkan implementation for 3rd party hardware.
- 6SixTy 4mo agoMicrosoft has the OpenCL, OpenGL, Vulkan compatibility pack. Major issue is that it's just Mesa compiled to a D3D12 GPU backend, so if you have anything but Snapdragon it's basically useless.
- shakna 4mo agoI don't think Valve funded Proton and Linux development by accident.
- 4mo ago
- dgb23 4mo agoDisheartening. macOS seems to get less and less support in a way. For example some of the Blizzard remakes don't run on macOS but the originals do.
- hecifato 4mo agoI knew Blizzard was abandoning macOS when Overwatch didn't ship for it. I assume there must be a decent amount of Mac users playing WoW seeing as it still works on macOS and transitioned to ARM. Diablo 3 only ever got an ARM build because, apparently, Blizzard they replaced the 2010(?) Mac Pro that they were using to test Mac builds of the game with a Studio.
- gonzalohm 4mo agoHow is that possible? 32 bits should be compatible with a 64 bit machine. You can always use less bits for your memory addresses. Are there any other architecture changes that are preventing 32 bits binaries from running? Does that also mean that old software no longer runs unless there is a 64 bit version? In windows you can run x32 and x64 executables in a 64 bits machine
- functionmouse 4mo agoApple goes way out of their way every few years to ensure old games stop working
- whaleofatw2022 4mo agoLest we forget how they snubbed Bungie...
- naikrovek 4mo agoThe don’t let backwards compatibility stop them from doing anything, but I don’t think they go out of their way to target games. That doesn’t make any sense to me.
- wat10000 4mo agoAll 32-bit support got dropped, so you're totally right. It might appear to target games because games are disproportionately likely to not get updated to new archs and to be run long after they were introduced. Nobody is going back to run some 32-bit-only RSS reader or text editor from 2007 even though there surely were some.
- MrDOS 4mo agoOnly the very first few models of Intel Macs had strictly 32-bit processors (the 2006 iMac and Mac minis with Core Solo/Core Duo processors), and none of them were realistically capable of playing Half-Life 2. Apple is guilty of many sins, but this isn't one of them. Valve should never have shipped a 32-bit application in the first place. The binary was already obsolete before it even left Bellevue.
- iberator 4mo agowine?
- philipwhiuk 4mo agoMacOS removing 32bit support was a massive pain. A bunch of Ambrosia Software games no longer work too (e.g. Escape Velocity Nova, Apeiron).
- taylor-tg 4mo agoI know it's not a remake, but Endless Sky[0] seems to be a pretty faithful "reimagining" of the EV series. Even has an Android port on F-Droid. I haven't played through much of it, but the first few minutes gave me immediate nostalgia. [0] https://endless-sky.github.io/ https://endless-sky.github.io/
- anthk 4mo agoWine 11 for Mac will run 32 bit binaries without neeeding 32 bit libraries.
- freetonik 4mo agoThere's a way to compile HL2 on ARM Macs, I've written a guide here: https://rakhim.exotext.com/how-to-play-half-life-2-on-mchip-macs https://rakhim.exotext.com/how-to-play-half-life-2-on-mchip-...