[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/...

[EPWN3D]

I remember when TIE Fighter finally came out for the Mac, I just begged my parents to order it from Mac Warehouse or whichever catalogue it was in. I didn't read the system requirements, which said it needed a PowerPC. I was still rocking a Quadra 610 that I'd upgraded to a 50MHz 68040 and 24 MB of RAM.

When I got the game and looked at the box, I was heartbroken. But I decided, why not put in the disk anyway. I did the Get Info on the app, and lo and behold, Lucas Arts had left what was probably a totally untested 68k slice in the binary. Double-clicked it, and I could play without a problem. Sure I had to play it in a tiny 320x240 window, but that extra 16 MB of RAM and extra 25 MHz made it playable.

[amatecha]

Ah yeah, the same kind of thing happened to me. I saved up enough money to buy WarCraft 1 from the store, only to find out it required a 640x480 monitor -- I had a Macintosh LC with the standard 12" 512x384 display. Luckily my parents let me play the game on their IIci (or whatever it was they had at the time) with a nice large display. Phew!

That's pretty lucky about the 68k code still being available in the binary! I can just imagine someone on the dev team going "ehh we aren't officially supposed to support it, but someone will be really glad we did even if it doesn't play as well as the PPC version"

[metadat]

That is an amazing story. I grew up with a weak performa 560 and was constantly browsing the aisles at Fry’s Electronics looking for games. None of them supported Mac, especially 25MHz 68k!

[amatecha]

Oh yeah, I remember being blown away any time I found a Mac game in a store. Usually they just had some edutainment/shovelware stuff at best, though.

[User23]

I had a dream as a kid that my parents had finally bought a Color Macintosh. Imagine how heartbroken I was when I woke up. That MacUser issue for the Mac II was basically torture.

[taneq]

Having spent a large chunk of my teens playing X-Wing on a 486-DX33 you are clearly my enemy. :P

I didn’t have to data mine a compatible .exe from the game files but I did have to use a special boot disk with a modified himem.sys on it so the game would launch. Good times, haha.

[tekchip]

You're spot on. Software is infinitely flexible provided time and/or resources.

[amatecha]

Yeah, I pretty often think of how much we're using today that totally could have been done in the 90's (or earlier), just in a slightly more primitive form (which in many cases would have been a lot better, considering how bloated and ad/surveillance-laden modern tech is)...