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Comment by cousin_it | Hacker News Reader

Funny thing about games: most revenue happens soon after release. It's like movies. A game from several years ago usually has low ongoing revenue, so there's little profit in updating it for a new OS. Many Mac games will just die. Especially indies, where the creator might have already moved on. Do you own any nice but not very successful Mac games? They'll die. This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform, compared to Windows which can run decades old games fine.

I'm so happy now that Steam purchases aren't tied to platform and that most gamedevs don't target Mac exclusively. I can just move to PC and keep the games I own. Probably lots of people will do the same.

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> This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform, compared to Windows which can run decades old games fine.

But this has happened before. Pretty much every pre-2007 Mac game stopped working in 2012 after they removed Rosetta, their PPC emulator.

And 64-bit Intel has been available since Leopard, released in 2007. So that leaves a tiny window of 32-bit only releases.

On the other hand, the removal of OpenGL, if/when that ever happens, might have worse consequences.

And it’s happened on the Windows side, too.

You can’t just run transport tycoon, rollercoaster tycoon, or xcom without any sort of modification on Windows 10. You’re either using an open source drop-in game engine or a packaged DOSBox setup from Steam. Or in the case of Rollercoaster Tycoon, a rewritten game (RTC Classic).

Windows 10 doesn’t run 16-bit applications, and Windows 10 doesn’t work nicely with a large amount of Windows XP era software.

The important difference is that Windows supported 16-bit for well over a decade after moving to 32-bit Windows. Well after how long the game developers intended for their games to stay relevant.

The fact that I can still run Age of Empires 2 on Windows 10, from 20 years ago, is amazing compared to the backwards compatibility track records of most software.

If only we all got more than ten years to port our stuff forward.

The first 64-bit Macs came out 16 years ago. The first 64-bit Intel Macs came out 13 years ago. The 32-bit to 64-bit transition on the Mac has not been an abrupt one.

I think we're looking at this the wrong way.

The reason Microsoft killed 16 bit support (In 64 bit editions of Windows) is that very few people were actually running 16 bit apps at that point. Where Microsoft made a decision based on what their users were actually doing, Apple has a made a decision based on what it wants their users to be doing.

The amount of time isn't really relevant. If lots of your users rely on 32 bit software, you should put in the effort to make them work. Apple products are expensive, and I think it's reasonable to expect this in return.

The true reason is that intel didn't support coexistence of Virtual 8086 mode with 64-bit mode. So adding 16 bit app support would require loads of work to get it working as part of a 64 bit OS.

Regular protected mode code has built in support that allows easily running 16 bit apps, so maintaining compatibility was a no-brainer. The moment the trade-off changed, Microsoft decided to drop support for 16 bit apps.

Personally, I don't mind that very much, because dosbox is a great product that bridges the gap perfectly.

Really, all they'd have to do is drop a v86 emulator into NTVDM. There actually exist a handful of projects attempting to bring emulated 16-bit support to 64-bit Windows, including one that's based on that leaked Windows source code (which apparently had a copy of the CPU emulator they used on other platforms back when there were actually non-Intel builds of Windows).

16 bit is an order of magnitude older than 32 bit though

16-bit applications?? Of course I don't expect Monkey Island 2 released 30 years ago to work on Windows 10, it would be nice but is easy to conclude it wouldn't work without even trying; what is being talked about here are game released few years ago and even just last year for mac.

Windows 10 still supports 16 bit applications if you run 32 bit windows.

Give OpenRCT2 a try.

But at least dropping PowerPC support was predicated on a legit hardware architecture change. And that new architecture actually made porting from PC much easier.

This change, by contrast, feels entirely unnecessary. The amd64 architecture natively supports i386 code. I realize it makes Apple's maintenance burden lower, but, they can deal with that.

We’ve heard rumours for a few years that Apple is considering shipping MacBooks which use the Ax ARM chips that power their phones and iPad pros. Those CPUs have excellent performance per watt, and decent performance overall. If they’re planning on repeating the Rosetta play that they pulled off during the PowerPC -> Intel transition, it might make a lot of sense to deprecate i386 applications first so there is less surface area they need to emulate. The x86 instruction set is way too complicated as it is without having architecture modes to worry about.

Apple has the ability to both support i386 software on x86 machines, and choose to not emulate that software on future ARM machines. If your supposition is correct, Apple is effectively crippling their current products in order to make their future products seem less bad by comparison. That's horrible.

And in the process, Apple is asking developers to rewrite i386 code for an amd64 architecture which they ultimately intend to abandon anyway.

Maybe. Maybe? I doubt they're motivated by malice or laziness, but nobody in this thread can say one way or the other. What I can say with high confidence is that unless we're in the meeting room at Apple we can only speculate based on little to no hard information. It's entirely possible that there are sound engineering reasons behind what they've done.

AMD64 is going to be around for a very long time; any developer that is having difficulty migrating code from i386 has more fundamental problems than Catalina.

This is also why all programs should be distributed with source code. If not, you are at the mercy of the platform not to break what you have bought.

Having app that heavily relies on 32-bit Carbon Api open sourced is useless. You can't replace those Api call with newer because they simply don't exist or have no alternative. It's not going to help much

Having access to the source makes it much easier for the community to do what they already do - create an open source re-implementation of the engine.

That ultimatum is idealistic at best.

Not only that, the recourse of inspecting and modifying the code isn’t realistic to most people. Many open source projects die just because literally nobody with the skills required to maintain them are interested.

Then you get to certain types of programs where open source provides no benefit: specifically, games.

Games are largely just artistic content. Making games open source essentially means that all the content is going to be taken without compensating the artists. Open source works for other programs because they depend on interoperability. But games are just content, like a movie or book. The source is the product. For other programs, support and continual development are the product.

id [0] seems to get by fine by open sourcing their game engines.

And doing so has lead to a number of ports that wouldn't exist otherwise.

The artists are still compensated fine. Because they separate the engine from the assets. If you want to play the original game, fine, but own it.

But now the community gets to port the game easier to a new platform. Which is one of the reasons that it's easy to port DOOM to every platform out there.

[0] https://github.com/id-Software

They open source the product long after it has any revenue potential.

For games, I think it's feasible to make at least the code that interfaces with the OS into a separate, re-linkable, open-source library.

Translations between the APIs (Carbon to Cocoa, OpenGL to DirectX) might be very hard, but at least upgrades would be possible.

Wine shows you don't need the source of the programs to do that API translation.

Not workable. But the source should be placed in escrow that releases it once the program is no longer supported.

Are there any actual escrows that do that?

>This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform

You can't destroy what never existed.

My first thought too. Nobody buys a Mac for gaming. I can't think of any Mac games other than "Myst"

These are pretty old examples, but Glider (1988) and Escape Velocity (1996) both come to mind.

Yeah the only lost games I really care about here are Crusader Kings, Homeworld remastered, and Escape Velocity/EV Nova.

The last ones sting most because the developer is defunct and those games are definitely never getting remade.

There is a game called Endless Sky, an open source remake of Escape Velocity, it looks similar, but the overall experience is rather far from the original.

If by “Mac games” you mean Mac-first games… Marathon! Frog blast the vent core, baby.

Also, wasn’t Quake III very briefly a Mac exclusive?

> Also, wasn’t Quake III very briefly a Mac exclusive?

Where the hell did you hear that? In any event, it isn’t true. Quake 3 was released shortly after Jobs was turning them around from circling the drain. They’re lucky somebody was porting it at all.

The first public beta of Q3Test was released on MacOS first: https://web.archive.org/web/20000229083216/http://macweek.zd...

Yep for 3 days before Linux! And then most of the later betas were Windows only.

It wasn’t the final full featured release of Quake III though. And as stated in Carmacks .plan it was because these gaming communities were so tiny so I’m not sure this is a strong argument for the macs viability as a gaming platform, which was the context of this thread.

I guess in a technical way that counts as a very brief Mac exclusive..

“MacOS still sucks” lol

http://fabiensanglard.net/fd_proxy/doom3/pdfs/johnc-plan_199...

Maybe he was thinking of Halo? Originally shown at a MacWorld Expo as a Mac exclusive then very shortly thereafter Bungie was bought out by Microsoft (obviously turning it into an XBox exclusive), leading to much outcry among the Mac faithful. But it was never actually released in playable form on the Mac.

...Until much later, ported back from the XBox.

This may interest you.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000229083216/http://macweek.zd...

I think you’re reaching a bit. I’m aware of this. Most of all because what this article doesn’t mention is that q3test was also initially released for Linux before Windows and you better believe that was a huge deal on slashdot at the time. The beta was basically a Mac OS exclusive for 3 days. (I admittedly was quite the Linux fanboy then but even I think calling this a Linux/Mac exclusive for the first “alpha” as they said in the readme silly as compared to something like Myst or Oregon Trail)

It was also like a week and change gap for Windows. And then the later beta releases were Windows only. The final Mac release ended up being delayed until after Christmas.

http://fabiensanglard.net/fd_proxy/doom3/pdfs/johnc-plan_199...

HaloMD. You can boot into Windows for the rest.

It's really just not the same with the Mac trackpad or magic mouse.

The magic mouse works surprisingly well. Use number 3 on the keyboard instead of the middle button, for say nades.

Dark castle!

It was getting decidedly better. In particular, if you mostly played indie titles, most of the big ones have supported Mac for a while now. Or, they did.

Right? I regularly play Hollow Knight, Civilization 6, Terraria and some other stuff via Steam. Haven't updated to Catalina yet...

On the hand, most people stop playing most games pretty quickly after purchase, too. And the good ones often get remade.

So, while this will disappoint some people, I think "destroys the reputation" is a bit much. Many game buyers don't care that much.

Top 2 games being played worldwide in steam right now were made 7 years ago. TF2 was made in 2007 and is still in the top 10. There’s also a huge number of gamers who played older games. In my friends list I’d say roughly half at any given time are imaging non-AA games that are at least 5 years old, and more than half at least regularly play older games.

Going back and playing favourites is an absolutely integral part of gaming as a hobby.

I game on both Mac and PC and I absolutely would abandon gaming on Mac if it stopped supporting older games. Why would I invest in games on Mac if I can’t be sure I can play it later, when I KNOW it’ll work “forever” on PC?

Does TF2 really count as a game made in 2007? Same for GTAV, WOW etc. These games have all gotten extensive updates, almost nobody is playing the gold master version of these games.

It says more about how some publishers have moved from releasing new games to incremental updates as part of a subscription model than it does about people playing "old" games.

> Does TF2 really count as a game made in 2007? Same for GTAV, WOW etc. These games have all gotten extensive updates, almost nobody is playing the gold master version of these games.

The original Halflife just got a number of security, AI, and other bugfixes.

Does that mean it no longer counts as a game made in 1998?

For the purposes of a discussion about older games not being playable on modern OSes? Yeah, maybe. In fact it could have no code changes whatsoever, but just be recompiled against newer tooling to accomplish that goal.

But I'm talking about games that are getting extensive updates through their lifecycle. It's quite possible that some of these "same" games will be playable in 50 years via slow process of incremental updates. There's no reason to suspect those are any less supporting of modern hardware & OSs than newly released games.

There's already been some unconfirmed talk of GTAV being the last ever GTA, with a hypothetical major update just being a new paid-for area that'll appear in-game one day, as opposed to being a new shrink-wrapped game under a different title like you'd get in the 90s.

> Top 2 games being played worldwide in steam right now were made 7 years ago.

Being "old" is not a problem. Being unmaintained is. I bet that every game in Steam's top-100 list is still being maintained.

And 64-bit support has been available in Macs since 2007. Only games older than 12 years missed the opportunity to use modern tech.

Those games with active revenue streams and playerbases will probably get OS updates.

Counter Strike Source looks like will not be updated by Valve. I play it every other day. Is there a petition I can sign?

In fact, the move towards internet-based multiplayer action has significantly extended game longevity. In the pre-Internet world, very few games ever achieved the sort of long-running activity you now get almost routinely with any moderately-successful production.

This is kind of pedantic, but I feel like you should specify video games here. Perhaps the consumer home platform personal computer video game market, even.

People have been playing cards, mahjong, chess, and catch greater than a century, so it's not some inherent ephemerality of games that's the problem here.

And even amongst the retro video game market, people are still playing console and arcade games that are decades old.

There's certainly a trend here, but I don't think it's something we should blame on the players.

I imagine quite a few games never get played once bought.

> This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform

Apple Arcade rescues that somewhat.

I'm not a fan of not owning games or not being able to play them offline whenever I want in the future, but Apple Arcade is actually kinda nice so far.

Only true for the game-as-a-product games. Games that are created as a service are usually soft-launched and increase in revenue after launch (if they're about to be profitable at all).

> I can just move to PC and keep the games I own.

A small nitpick, you don't _own_ the games in your Steam library.

Not a nitpick, but a well deserved criticism. When buying anything from Steam, the customer is at the mercy of a cloud service, since the offline mode deactivates itself after a certain time, or randomly.

Steam have banned customers and took away access to their paid games library for petty reasons and were sued into accepting refunds.

gog.com is an alternative where one doesn't depend on the goodwill of any company. If you have the setup files and they work once, they will continue to work, at least when the OS vendor pulls an Apple.

You don't own _any_ video games, you have a license and might happen to have physical media.

A pedantically correct, but ultimately pointless observation.

One can install and play a game bought from gog.com any time one wants, unlike with games bought from Steam, which have DRM, have to be activated online and must ping the Steam servers periodically.

Technically correct is the best kind of correct.

Your example is valid, but there are plenty of other examples pushing in the opposite direction—for example PS4 and XB1 games delivered on physical media. Yes they'll play out of the box "forever" ... but in order to download important (occasionally critical) software patches you need the explicit blessing of Sony or Microsoft servers. And you could lose these for reasons that are wholly unrelated to your legitimate ownership of physical game media.

The PS, Xbox and Steam are all different incarnations of cloud services. They are very convenient, but ultimately don't offer any guarantees that one can play the games even a week from now.

At least consoles work without issue in offline mode, although MS wanted to disable that a few years ago, were confronted massive backlash and had to cancel their plans.

A big and relatively recent problem with consoles is that even offline games now more or less require a patch, because they're launched with major bugs.

IME that's mostly true for traditional single player games, while even mildly successful multiplayer games may have an incredibly long tail (at east a decade or so?) where they are "paying the bills" very comfortably even though they're long past their heyday.

Time to run them in a VM with and old OS the same as older games?

Except this is explicitly against the TOS of macOS/OSX. This may be ok if you virtualize it on Apple hardware.

Not that I care, and note the DMCA/property law has a specific exemption for defeating copy protection if you bought the thing. But it is more work than you make it out to be.

It's not against ToS to run VMs with Windows in them.

It's also fine to virtualize a copy of macOS on an original hardware, but it hardly does anything for gaming as there is still no GPU acceleration available for macOS guests.

I was referring to macOS/OSX, but for Windows, it's actually against the licenses to virtualize anything but the Pro or Enterprise version. Considering the provisions in the DMCA about circumvention of copy protection being allowable, I'm not sure how enforceable this is.

Turns out other comments confirm for macOS, but I was under the impression Apple hadn't commented on it, though a plain reading of the license indicated it was ok.

> it's actually against the licenses to virtualize anything but the Pro or Enterprise version

At some point it was OK to virtualise Home OEM versions as long as it was not running twice at the same time. The wording made it so you couldn’t virtualise Win on Win with the same license but virtualising in a host OS like Linux on the hardware the OEM license was tied to was allowed. I don’t know how that flied with non-OEM Home licenses or if even that changed at some point though.

The clause forbidding running non-server versions of macOS in a VM went away when they discontinued the server version of macOS back in 10.7 (2011). It's now perfectly fine as long as it's running on Apple hardware.

> Except this is explicitly against the TOS of macOS/OSX. This may be ok if you virtualize it on Apple hardware.

It is ok to virtualize macOS on a Mac.

Can you imagine a world where someone who wants to play old Mac games has half a dozen VM containers with different versions of MacOS on them for each game that's compatible with each version?

I can't

This is probably more common than you might think.

I don't play games much, but I do need some software that only runs on Windows, and do this. One VM is Win7, the other is Win10. Neither get network access, so I don't worry about either surveillance or updates.

I also have a VM that runs a really old version of Debian, because I have a couple UPSes that don't support modern ssh.

I suspect we'll also see phone emulation for compatibility becoming more of a thing. Granted, the vast bulk of that software is garbage that nobody cares about, but there are things seeing increasing enterprise use. Someone will go out of business and orphan something people count on at some point.

Realistically, I'd be willing to bet the only old Mac games people are going to want to play are for classic Mac OS, in which case you already need to use a VM and have done for at least a decade.

I'm struggling to think of any games in OS X era where the Mac would be even close to the easiest or best place to play them.

I appreciate the notion that if you've bought the software you want to be able to keep using it for as long as possible, but we're talking about the niche-est of niches here.

Isn't this how node.js works now?

Games in a VM are often unplayable. Even something as old as the original Age of Empires is pretty bad when run under VirtualBox or VmWare Fusion.

That's curious, I've run games from that era (e.g. Starcraft) on a VM (Windows guest on Linux host) just fine. I don't think I even had hardware video acceleration working.

Really sad I cannot play Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded on Catalina. I bought this game. Same for my old scanner. Both 32bit only.

Seems I won't update to Catalina or I need to find a longterm solution with VMs.

Is your scanner supported by SANE on linux? Some people have put a surprising amount of work creating Linux drivers for scanners

The original Halo?

Yep. And Age of Empires II from Wine bottle (i.e. http://portingkit.com/en/http://portingkit.com/en/

I wonder if selling Mojave disk images with games pre-installed would be profitable.

This happens on PC too but it attracts so much more development we don’t notice.

Personally to avoid the problem on any platform, I took to making my own pipeline for rapidly iterating on games. Currently able to quickly cut and paste together a variety of experiments in my editor, play a bit to feed my urge for novelty, and happily save money not buying them.

I have one passion project which is a mix of isometric graphics, kotor group based single player, a “neverending” procedural world. Currently working on a system to have a chat bot feed NPCs dialog, as an experiment in “never ending” story building. I’m having more fun imagining and building it, I don’t even care if I finish it. Way more engaging than yet another “Skyrim clone with tits” or COD 19: Farting Dust

Like you said the major interest in a game is at launch, there’s not the same long lived community building the games used to have. Other than prettier graphics, there’s been little interesting going on, especially in the AAA space.

Even much of the indie scene is nostalgia dripping pixel graphics and same old design.

I am done spending on the business friendly view of what my hobby should look like. It’s generating too little new information of interest to me.

At the same time, it will also WEED OUT a lot of crapware. Only the best and best-cared-for software will remain :D.

Probably true for apps. But most games are in full screen and do not use OS UI elements anyway. So I'm not sure how OS upgrade can weed out crap games

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