OS X The State of Mac Gaming - Feral, Aspyr and Others

[iHailCarlo]

Steam is my friend, I love gaming on my Mac and have no desire to run windows on my machine. I also use a 360 controller to play a lot of my source games too. Its great fun. Add me if you want to play 8 Ball.

 

[throAU]

To me, the biggest middle finger Apple's flipped our way was the unceremonious removal of the Rosetta support from OS X Lion and onward. That move really shook this buyer's confidence in buying software. Now everytime I hear a rumor about Apple changing chipsets or even announcing a new OS, I don't get excited, I wonder how much of the stuff I bought is no longer going to work.

FWIW, my copy of Starcraft that I bought in 1998 still works great in Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7. Haven't tried 8 yet.

Dude, PowerPC was deprecated in 2005. That's 7, going on 8 years ago now.

Get over it.

If you take software for Windows from 7-8 years ago, a lot of it won't work on Windows Vista or 7 either. I know this because I've got a massive collection of PC games from the early-90s onwards.

Most will no longer run on current Windows. There were problems with the jump from DOS to 9x, 9x to XP and problems with the jump from XP to Vista. I have some titles that I bought in 1999 that would not run in Windows 2000 or XP a couple of years later. And this is a machine with the same CPU as before!

Yes, SOME old games work. Many, many more do not. Whether it is due to video problems, sound problems, DRM compatibility problems or removal of features (no more 16 bit subsystem on x64) due to the OS upgrade - or just plain brain damaged installers that refuse to install on a later windows version.

Apple provided PPC compatibility for 5+ years, on machines without a PPC cpu.


Did they HAVE to drop rosetta? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe the way gatekeeper works is not compatible with it? Who knows? Only apple.

It's time to move on.

 

[gregorsamsa]

There were two points when major changes left a lot of games behind - the OS 9 to OS X transition and removal of PowerPC (Rosetta) emulation. Other than that it was just the odd title here and there with each 10.x release.

To be fair these days I have a lot of my old OS 9 and early OS X games back again via things like DOSbox and WINE and companies like GOG see the demand for these to be re-released for modern systems. You also have the Feral Legends range bringing some of best titles from the last 5 or so years that got missed.

Lately we seem to be getting more and more recent triple A titles as well so all in all after a lull around the Intel transition OS X gaming seems more promising to me.

At the end of the day you can have a lot of fun gaming on most modern Macs in OS X - enough to keep all but the real hardcore gamer satisfied really.

True. Obviously Feral are a great Mac games company, who I've gladly supported with a number of game purchases. Long may they continue!

However, if you look at the average timespan it takes for most ports, it's obvious that Feral are a relatively small company who can only practically manage a tiny number of ports per year. Just look how long it took Empire: Total War to be ported.

I'm with iMacfarlane on this. Fact is, on buying a new Mac with OS X Lion last year, I (or we've) lost a fair number of Mac-native classics (eg. AoE 2, Rise of Nations, Civilization 3, etc.) that any recent Windows system still runs with minimal tweaking. Though I'll always buy Macs in future for serious work, frankly, I no longer trust Apple on this score.

BTW, anyone encountering problems with some of those older classics on W7, or even W8, can easily find viable solutions by Googling that doesn't take too much messing about just to play a few games.

 

[throAU]

OK, a list of just some of the games I've purchased for Windows that have stopped working on new versions (and have no workable solution) only a couple of years after purchase:

Ultima 9, F1 2000, Janes F/A-18, DI Superhornet, Hitman, Sacrifice

Just off the top of my head.

Sacrifice i can sort of run SLOWLY in a virtual machine of Windows XP. Which i can also do on my mac.

The rest of them do not run in virtual machines.