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Comment by amatecha | Hacker News Reader

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/...

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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.

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!

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.

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.

Yeah it was seriously like mining for gold back then. I remember being at a Best Buy and just happening to stumble upon Duke Nukem 3D for Mac OS a week or so before its official release. Snatched that bad boy right up. I think I'd moved on to a PowerMac 8500 by that point.

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.

You jerks always got the best games lol. But I always lorded over my PC friends that they didn't know what they were missing with Marathon.

Well, yeah as much as we missed out on so many games, the ones we did get were often better quality .. I still have this distinct memory of visiting my friend who ran DOS, and his version of Command & Conquer was hilariously pixelated. Turns out the DOS version ran in 320x240? I was so used to my 640x480 Mac version and I was blown away that he had to suffer with this inferior version lol ... There was also the games with high-fidelity CD audio (Descent anyone?) compared to the weaksauce MIDI stuff the other guys got.

The other crazy "Mac vs. DOS/Win gamer" moment was when my buddy got a sound card for his birthday in 1994, maybe 1995. I remember being shocked about this -- "what the hell were you using before, then?", I wondered. This was when I learned about PC speaker audio. Wow. I had been getting nice 22khz (maybe even 44khz) stereo audio for years before my friend had anything better than a PC speaker. This particular moment made me especially wonder why anyone ever made fun of me for being a Mac owner, because they had literally nothing to be smug about except a broader selection of games.

It really was a bit weird, games that got ported to Mac almost always had higher-quality graphics. The X-Wing port looked incredible compared to the PC version, and so did TIE Fighter. For whatever reason, the default viewport on Mac OS was 640x480."

But that all went out the window with Quake. Once PCs got 3D graphics cards, Macs just couldn't keep up because those companies wouldn't write Mac drivers for their top-end stuff. I do remember getting a Voodoo 2 once 3Dfx started selling it for the Mac, and Unreal looker absolutely gorgeous.

Yeah, I used also used a Voodoo2 in my Mac (PowerComputing PowerTower Pro), but it was from a PC. The driver for it was very crash-prone, BUT, Unreal Tournament and Quake looked freakin' amazing! Good times :D

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"

It was either that or someone made a last-minute decision to pull support, and they just forgot to stop building that slice. In fact, I'd be willing to believe they did some initial bring up work on 68k since X-Wing ran on 68k. Either way, I'm thankful to the person who mastered the CDROM.

I played the DOS version on a 386SX16MHz. Had to use flat shading but it was still fun. Friends 386DX/40 ran it with texturing etc. Both were VGA 320x200

If my 32-year old memory serves me correctly, TIE Fighter only supported VGA 320x200 256-color mode 13h.

The system requirements on the box[1] claim MCGA support, which I'd expect to be technically correct since MCGA is just CGA plus VGA modes 11h and 13h, but I'm not aware of any MCGA systems other than the 8086-based variants of the entry-level IBM PS/2 Models 25 and 30.

Which a careful reading of the box label suggests might technically run the game, or at least walk it.

Because while it claims to require a 386, it also requires one megabyte of EMS memory, which would be an odd choice for an application running in (286 or 386) protected mode.

And since all the MCGA PS/2s were non-Micro Channel systems with 8-bit ISA slots, EMS cards were readily available.

It's still possible that the game uses instructions not supported by the 8086, of course.

God I feel old.

[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/240/star-wars-tie-fighter/cov...

I remember VGA and MCGA being loosely synonymous back then

I only had the demo of TIE Fighter (TIEDEMO.EXE), but I remember there being a SVGA version (maybe on CD) later one

I played the original Doom on my 386SX/25 this way.... actual action shrunk down to the lowest stamp sized box on low detail.

But damn, did I have fun playing that game... especially multiplayer over a modem.

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

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)...

Just adding a post to correlate with what VonGuard wrote (but for some reason got downvoted into oblivion) , apparently there was a Mac port of Half-life nearly completed but canceled in late 1999: https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2024/06/25/half-life-for-the... This is especially surprising since I was saying "if someone had spent the time to port it" -- apparently someone DID, but the project was simply canceled! Brutal!

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