[mrtksn]

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.

[dgb23]

Disheartening. 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.

[Klonoar]

I admit that Valve’s approach to Steam on macOS has never made sense to me.

[shakna]

I think Apple may have burned a lot of developer bridges with Metal, deprecating OpenGL, and ignoring Vulkan.

[charcircuit]

To be fair Microsoft ignored Vulkan with Windows leaving it up to 3P to implement.

[doublerabbit]

This 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

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]

Your timeline doesn't make sense. Steam launched in 2003. Scully was forced out of Apple in 1993.

[doublerabbit]

So, 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.

[jillesvangurp]

On 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]

> 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]

At 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.