You can buy lots of video games on Steam. Many of them support old versions of OS X! In fact, many of them only support old versions of OS X, because Apple removed 32-bit support in macOS 10.15 Catalina.
Too bad Steam only supports macOS 10.15 and above! And most Steam games need Steam to run. Oops.
Let's fix that. I managed to build a version of the "Goldberg Emulator" for Mac. This is a replacement library you can drop into a game's app bundle to make it work without Steam. Whenever the game asks Steam for a status update, the replacement library will pinky-promise that Steam is totally running right now, and everything is going just fine thank you very much. Source code (mostly recovered from a deleted gitlab branch) and build instructions are included in the package.
Download from: https://jonathanalland.com/downloads/steam-api-emulator.dmg. I compiled the libraries on Snow Leopard, which means they should work on OS X 10.6 and above.
(To be fair to Steam, at the moment it can still be used at least as far back as macOS 10.13 High Sierra; the client no longer receives updates but the old version still connects. But we don't know how long that will last, and older operating systems like OS X 10.9 Mavericks don't work at all.)
I must admit that I've only tested one game so far, Bit.Trip Flux. (This all started because I accidentally bought a Steam key for Bit.Trip Flux earlier this week; I'd thought the game would be DRM-Free like other entries in the series.) That said, it was also the first game I tried, and it worked perfectly. I don't particularly like Steam and don't own many Steam games, so I'd be delighted if others could help test more titles. I do expect the emulator to work with any single player game, unless it contains additional DRM beyond what Steam provides by default (which does exclude a lot of large titles). Please share your results!
Note: I do not like piracy. I am sharing this project so that people can play games they purchased on otherwise incompatible computers and operating systems. If anyone in this thread even hints at using this project to play games they did not pay for, I will personally report their post to the mods and reconsider whether I should share stuff like this in the future. Thanks.
Too bad Steam only supports macOS 10.15 and above! And most Steam games need Steam to run. Oops.
Let's fix that. I managed to build a version of the "Goldberg Emulator" for Mac. This is a replacement library you can drop into a game's app bundle to make it work without Steam. Whenever the game asks Steam for a status update, the replacement library will pinky-promise that Steam is totally running right now, and everything is going just fine thank you very much. Source code (mostly recovered from a deleted gitlab branch) and build instructions are included in the package.
Download from: https://jonathanalland.com/downloads/steam-api-emulator.dmg. I compiled the libraries on Snow Leopard, which means they should work on OS X 10.6 and above.
(To be fair to Steam, at the moment it can still be used at least as far back as macOS 10.13 High Sierra; the client no longer receives updates but the old version still connects. But we don't know how long that will last, and older operating systems like OS X 10.9 Mavericks don't work at all.)
I must admit that I've only tested one game so far, Bit.Trip Flux. (This all started because I accidentally bought a Steam key for Bit.Trip Flux earlier this week; I'd thought the game would be DRM-Free like other entries in the series.) That said, it was also the first game I tried, and it worked perfectly. I don't particularly like Steam and don't own many Steam games, so I'd be delighted if others could help test more titles. I do expect the emulator to work with any single player game, unless it contains additional DRM beyond what Steam provides by default (which does exclude a lot of large titles). Please share your results!
Note: I do not like piracy. I am sharing this project so that people can play games they purchased on otherwise incompatible computers and operating systems. If anyone in this thread even hints at using this project to play games they did not pay for, I will personally report their post to the mods and reconsider whether I should share stuff like this in the future. Thanks.
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