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Comment by hamdingers | Hacker News Reader

That's missing the point. There were official native MacOS builds and now there aren't.

Can't be too mad about it though, it was free back then too.

What benefit does a native build have over proton? I used to care more about it on Linux, until I realized that "native build" probably means "doesn't work." I can only imagine this being much worse on a niche gaming target which there are extremely few users making (and voting for) bug reports.

Tack on having to pay Apple to play in their shitty ecosystem and it makes complete sense.

Wine/proton as a gaming ABI/runtime is perfectly fine, Microsoft used to do a lot to maintain backcompat and that spirit has clearly distilled into proton: it even runs games Windows is unable to (most recent example of mine is Black and White).

Native build usually also means it’s a supported platform and developers will try to fix any big issues coming up.

On macOS, it often means the opposite. Natively compiled games like Portal 2 stopped working when Apple depreciated 32-bit libraries and transitioned to Metal.

This is why Proton is so important, since the games are theoretically supported forever as long as you port the DXVK/Wine backend to the latest APIs.

macOS has changed a lot more than Windows or Linux did in the last decade. It's hardly Tarn's fault, here.

macOS is also just a proper PITA through and through. I'm annoyed that I can't play it on my m4 but I also understand that supporting macOS has always been a nuisance.

If I were making games I wouldn't support it either. Apple does just about everything to not support backwards compat.

FWIW DF and DFHack work flawlessly through Crossover on macOS on my M2 and my M5

It’s kind of insane that we can play windows x86_64 games on macos arm almost perfectly. I got a bit annoyed with it being slightly jank and built a (linux) gaming pc for my kids in the end but it worked fine for most things for a while.

People stopped releasing Linux builds, too, since proton+win32 works better on average

> There were official native MacOS builds and now there aren't

They probably stopped supporting macOS when Apple introduced the notarization bullshit. Can't blame the DF team tbh, macOS is a royal PITA to support (even without notarization), Apple doesn't mind breaking stuff from one OS release to another.

I still remember getting support mail every time Apple released an OS update. For a week or two there'd be reports of things crashing randomly with stacktraces that didn't seem to make much sense.

One of reasons why I stopped trying to make mac/ios apps.

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