Half-Life Finally Lands on Mac OS 9 After 28 Years
Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9
I am thrilled to share that Half-Life has finally been ported to PowerPC-based Macintosh computers running Mac OS 9. GitHub user doctashay achieved this by forking the Xash3D FWGS engine, making the game playable from start to finish. This release includes the original game plus Blue Shift and Opposing Force, supporting G3 and G4 machines, though performance depends heavily on your GPU's VRAM.
This is a huge achievement for the Macintosh gaming community, and doctashay deserves considerable credit for the work involved in bringing Half-Life to the PowerPC platform.
- 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/...
- 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.
- 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!
- 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)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!