Steam to End Support for macOS Mojave and 32-Bit Games

Correct, the macOS 32bit OS had an array of design decisions that impact large aspects of the system as a whole, and so it was deprecated - a large number of the APIs added after 2009 were 64bit only - and then removed so the OS could remove the various support infrastructure needed for that - recall that iOS shares a bunch of the core OS and dropped 32bit hardware entirely before "Apple Silicon" happened so you complicate everything for a deprecated platform. Then of course you run into the whole "there is no 32bit hardware at all" thing on the last few generations of mac hardware.

Supporting old hardware is not free (engineering time is the issue, presumably not money :D), supporting what is in essence an entire dead platform is even worse. It also means that those games and software that are 32bit (or in the case of steam, Intel only) have significantly increased overhead on the system - you suddenly have to map in essentially an entire copy of userspace, and there are likely indirect overheads as well due to page table nonsense, etc. This is before we get to things like rosetta.

That was my impression - it seemed very much a "I need more address space" than I need speed (after all, all PPC Macs were super computers IIRC :D)

I love this game.

Although after enough playtime, I found boots of blinding speed to be a necessity. (Blocking the blinding effect, of course)

I wonder why they took levitation out of the later games

The macOS 64-bit transition happened before steam for Mac was released. The was a single year between steam for Mac being released and 64bit hardware being a requirement for macOS.

There was never a reason for anything published in the steam store to be 32bit only.

Yup. Long live virtual machines

The OS volume on macOS is read-only these days, and due to how universal binaries are implemented, just putting a 32-bit version somewhere else would probably not work without a major redesign (in addition to making them more vulnerable to tampering compared to the read-only volume).

They even did a bunch of work on Half-Life recently for its 25th anniversary [1], including adding Steam Deck support and fixing long-standing bugs -- but that didn't extend to making it run on any modern macOS system.

[1]: https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife25/

It's really not as simple as recompiling with 64bit. There are likely numerous assumptions of a 32 bit system all over the codebase that would take weeks of engineer time to attempt to understand the scope of let alone fix. Casting pointers through int, tightly bit packed structs or a number of other little things.

The work has been done on newer versions of source sure, but that leaves you with two bad options. Spend lots of man hours back porting to a dead engine branch for every single game or port those old games on to new engine versions and spend even more man hours trying to update incompatible bits and hope you haven't introduced new bugs everywhere.

Not even close to worth the time for a tiny percentage of gamers for games that were released 10+ years ago.

> Isn't emulation a much better approach for that purpose? It's always been unrealistic keeping functional native systems around forever, whether that's game consoles or computer platforms including OSes and drivers etc.

This is an opinion I used to hold, so I definitely understand where this comes from. As I've learned more however, I now understand why this is not always a reasonable ask. Depending on the state of the emulator, the level of accuracy to the underlying hardware is pretty broad. Accuracy's not an outright killer of playability - most popular emulators for every console do some trade of accuracy for efficiency. A lack of accuracy however leads to a lack of compatibility. This might mean some titles might run with graphical or audio glitches, some might run with game breaking bugs that make a title unplayable. For the casual game enjoyer though, the bar for "good enough" is pretty low that people thoroughly enjoyed the "Classic" reproduction consoles that were all the rage back in the late 2010's despite them being far from perfect. However, this doesn't solve the key problem that will come with this change, which is availability.

In order to have a title to emulate or otherwise shim into running, you need to be able to download it. While plenty of titles have drifted into abandonware collections or various other sites for you to access, it's certainly gray area territory. Digital archivists will need to get access to the software to preserve it. In the days of classic cartridge based consoles, this meant buying every game you could get your hands on and getting it in the hands of someone with the ability to dump the ROM. With storefronts like Steam though, there is no secondary market to do that on the cheap, and no physical media many games that released exclusively through this Steam, or even the App Store, to be archived outside of this fashion.

You do make a good point though regarding keeping old hardware running. While sometimes you can still find boxes of old components to replace, the amount of supply will dwindle to inexistence. The Super Nintendo speedrunning community is desperate to find replacement components for the ceramic oscillator used for audio timing on the console, as the cheaper component in the BOM is degrading over use and time, causing inaccurate RNG generation and instability.

All this to say, it's reasonably hard to maintain compatibility and playability of old software, and the quality of that compatible experience isn't consistent. I'd love it if game platform developers put more effort into preservation efforts, whether that be first-part production of compatibility shims for newer consoles to play older titles, or an openness to publish technical documentation for platforms to make preservation more feasible by communities. And most importantly, a willingness to offer access to titles from libraries and collections digitally after their money making days are done.