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  • Hacker News
  • I can finally relive my childhood on a non-inferior OS.
    by remiminnebo
  • 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.

    by ChrisMarshallNY
  • you do it.
    by parl_match
  • Counter-Strike!
    by cs02rm0
  • Jokes are downvoted not because of a lack humor but because if we reward making jokes we will have to scroll through dozens of jokes and all of their responses to get the actual discussion. Voting is about keeping the on topic and worthwhile discussion at the top with everything else buried beneath it.
    by ofalkaed
  • Missing a bounty to go with that directness!
    by Barbing
  • I think those guys are about classic Macs
    by altern8
  • But, to make it clear, it was a joke. 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.
    by ChrisMarshallNY
  • Done. http://www.macsourceports.com/game/halflife
    by nomel
  • Wow. This is the golden age for classic Macs.
    by system7rocks
  • 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!

    by ayaros
  • Hey, glad to hear it's running on your iBook and I really appreciate the feedback! Hopefully you're not having any mouse look problems, or invisible NPCs... I've got a fix for those issues coming soon, as well as a separate build of Blue Shift and Opposing Force.

    The current Blue Shift and Opposing Force builds are for Tiger and Leopard only. Cheers!

    by srp-shay
  • 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.
    by sharkjacobs
  • Hah. When I saw the headline, I said, "Finally! I've been asking for this for almost 30 years!"
    by snapetom
  • > I knew I'd be getting Halo soon

    That’s a deep cut. (And salt on the wound.)

    by jonhohle
  • > The game was originally planned to be released for Mac OS 9 by Valve in 1999, but was cancelled shortly before launch.

    The wildest cancel of all was certainly the impressive Dreamcast port, which was fully playable and basically ready to release but got canned a month before release.

    https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Half-Life_(Dreamcast_port)

    by lloeki
  • 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.
    by hedgehog
  • The G3 iMac that came out in this time period had much weaker 3D rendering capability than a contemporary PC gaming video card like a TNT2. Their video ability was closer to the 2D/office oriented video cards sold for non gaming use...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_TNT2

    Or a voodoo2...

    by walrus01
  • Always weirds me out to see an iMac running an OS older than OS X. The physical design language really ended up dictating the OS X look, didn't it? Still does, in a way, with Liquid Glass bringing back clear.
    by mikestorrent
  • Maybe it’s because I’m old, but the classic Mac OS user interface looks so good. I’d trade the current Mac OS UI for it in a heartbeat. I’m already sticking with Sequoia because I don’t want Liquid Glass making my eyes sore.
    by felixding
  • You know they do this on purpose to have a novelty effect on the next release -.- customer loyalty really doesn't pay
    by xkcd1963
  • I literally thought the same the other day when I was messing around with macos 9. The modern macos is so damn bright that I don't think it would need a dark mode if it just softened the colour choices.

    That and just generally it feels so soulless nowadays. Mac OS pre-brushed metal felt like a breath of fresh air compared to os9, but it's taken it to its extreme now and it just looks bad

    by ChrisRR
  • 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!
    by xp84
  • This isn't an all-of-a-sudden, the engine has been worked on for over 7 years now https://github.com/fwgs/xash3d-fwgs
    by russelg
  • There's already Netsurf with beter JS support than the Duktape one under Unix, Windows and even RiscOS.
    by anthk
  • Or even create new platforms where we're not bound by platform owners' imposed artificial limitations.
    by Coeur
  • One impressive one to me is the current effort to port Doom to the Neo Geo. Because of its unique hardware setup in that it is entirely sprite based and doesn't have a frame buffer, it is a very difficult challenge to take on. And yet most of the code on these projects is being done via AI and it works pretty dang well.

    Considering these coding system probably have almost no idea of the Neo Geo's specifics and with very little reference code directly linked to the system to bounce off, that is dang impressive.

    by ColdStream
  • Projects like TenFourFox and PowerFox have ported modern FireFox to late PowerPC Macs running Mac OS X. And some of those Macs are at the bleeding edge (back then) of modern device support (PCIe, WiFi, etc.) so they can also run surprisingly modern hardware and software via Linux. Getting harder with 32 bit support vanishing though.
    by geerlingguy
  • At least in retro spaces there's a lot of rejection of using AI to do things.

    Half-Life (and the later Source engine games such as Half-Life 2 and Portal) were ported without LLM assistance however

    (Source: I am in the Discord where the developer has been working and diligently posting updates on the project)

    by CursedSilicon
  • I'm hopeful it will. Just the other day I got an old webcam I own working on Windows 11 despite there being zero compatible drivers for it on any modern version of Windows.

    I might be a developer, but I'm not one who knows how to develop drivers, so I gave Claude the spec sheets for several of the chips inside the camera, stated what my goal was, and after doing some debugging guided by the AI it just worked. So tada, an obsolete piece of hardware is now usable again.

    Things like that are what have changed my mind on AI assisted development.

    by SkyeCA