Sandoomer Hoops Mac OS
I’m often digging into old bitmap font and UX design out of curiosity - and someday hope to revive a lot of these fonts in more modern formats using a pipeline similar to that for ZX Origins so we can get all the usable fonts, screenshots etc. out of them.
Of course, like Windows, you'll have to jump through some hoops to actually install this stuff, and any educated Mac user will recognize most of this software as fishy. What's Mac to me? I grew up as a Mac kid. My earliest memories were of playing games on my dad's Mac Classic, stuff like Crystal Quest, The Ancient Art of War, Dark Castle. I used Macs pretty much all the way through high school. The Spiderweb software games like the Exile series, Escape Velocity, the Marathon trilogy, and Blizzard games. But some Mac users still need to burn their own Blu-rays or read data off BD discs, so there are plenty of third-party Blu-ray drives available for the Mac.And once those drives became available, a few enterprising companies who did (presumably) pay up for the keys to decrypt Blu-ray discs released Mac apps to play regular Blu-ray movies with those drives. Steam Link has been available on Apple's iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS platforms since 2019. And now, the software has officially launched on the Mac App Store. You will need a Mac system running the macOS 10.13 software or higher to use Steam Link, in addition to another PC running Windows, Mac, or Linux and the Steam client.
One limitation I’ve run into is digging into old Macintosh fonts. While James Friend’s PCE.js puts System 6 and System 7 at your fingertips when it comes to later 7.5, 8 or 9 the site doesn’t have you covered as PCE doesn’t support PowerPC emulation (it handles Motorola 68000 and Intel 8086 processors).
This is a shame for me as that’s where the interface started diverging by adding color and some more interesting fonts. Additionally some third-party fonts are distributed in .sit (StuffIt Expander) or only work with later Mac OS versions.
Enter QEMU
Thankfully QEMU has us covered. It’s an open-source emulator that unlike regular virtualization tools is quite capable of emulating completely different CPU architectures from ARM through to MIPS, PowerPC, RISC-V, Sparc and even IBM’s big s390x z/Architecture.
With such a wide variety of options and settings available you can imagine it will require some digging through the user interface and you’d be wrong. There is no GUI however and the third party ones that exist mostly seem to be from 10 to 2 years out of date and many don’t support Windows at all. The only “up to date” one I found - QtEmu - only supports configuring x86 virtual machines.
This is a shame as although I love the command-line for its scriptability when it comes to exploring valid combinations of options the command-line is mostly awful (the IBM AS/400 command-line and prompting system excluded).
You could try and build this yourself but Stefan Weil has you covered for pre-built QEMU Windows binaries
Please note that Mac sound support is missing here. There are “screamer” forks but the only binaries available are for Mac OS X so you’d have to build it yourself and there will probably be a whole lot of hoops to jump through.
Obtaining an OS install image
To install Mac OS 9 we’re going to need a disk image/ISO to install from.
The nice people over at Mac OS 9 Lives have a Mac OS 9.2.2 Universal Installer ISO which is pre-configured and easy to use - it also conveniently includes a few extra tools and apps you’ll need.
While Mac OS is copyrighted this image has been up for over 6 years so I like to think Apple are turning a blind eye in that people who want to use their legacy stuff can do so without expecting support from Apple - win-win. They also don’t charge for their Operating Systems instead it’s “free” with the hardware and I still have a MacBook Pro 15” so I won’t feel bad about using it. Your mental mileage may vary.
Creating a machine & installing Mac OS 9
First off create a new folder to put your machine config into. (Windows won’t let you stuff it into Program Files). I’ve chosen c:retromac.
Now let’s create an empty hard-drive image file:
This creates a virtual hard-drive that can grow up to 5 GB in size and will allocate disk as it needs (copy-on-write). After installation this file will grow to about 660 MB.
Now before we go further remember the keyboard-shortcuts:
- CtrlAltG as you’ll need it to get the mouse back
- CtrlAltF to get you in and out of full-screen mode
Now lets start the installer:
This specifies that we want to use:
- a PowerPC G4 900MHz CPU
-cpu g4 - a PowerMAC based Mac with USB support
-M mac99,via=pmu - 512 MB of RAM
-m 512 - Our hard-drive image
-hda xxx - Our Installation CD mounted
-cdrom xxx - Boot from CD
-boot d - 1024x768 32-bit display
-g 1024x768x32 - a USB keyboard
-device usb-kbd - a USB mouse
-device usb-mouse - SDL display buffer
-sdl
There are many other useful config switches available for the PowerPC emulation if you need to troubleshoot or tweak. The final item, SDL, is required because the default GTK emulation, while faster, has major problems on Windows trying to keep the mouse captured.
You should now be presented after a few seconds with a ReadMe. Just close that with the top-left window control then click into the Drive Setup window, select <not initialized>, press the Initialize button then confirm it with the default on the subsequent Initialize window.
You might now want to click the “untitled” hard drive icon that’s appeared on the desktop, wait a few seconds and you should be able to rename it. Typically Macintosh HD is a popular choice.
Head up to the MacOS9Live CD icon, double click it then double-click on Apple Software Restore. The following Window will appear. You can accept all the defaults or just change Volume Format to Extended - I did this just in case I want to try and mount the image on my MacBook at a later date.
Clicking Restore, then confirming the dialog will give you a progress bar that is comically fast for installing an operating system (via software emulation no less).
Now you’ll need to head to the Special menu and choose Shut Down.
Using our virtual Mac OS 9
Finally, we want to start our freshly created machine without booting from the ISO. The command line is mostly the same just omitting the ISO and boot-from-CD options:
You’ll probably want to put that in a shortcut icon.
When it boots for the first time you’ll get a Register With Apple “wizard”. Just press WindowsQ to quit this and get to that Platinum desktop!
Head to the Control Panel’s Monitors applet to set the screen size/resolution you want. You might also want to head into Appearance applet’s Fonts tab to turn off anti-aliasing so you can enjoy the fonts in their pixel-glory. (You can also switch from the revised Charcoal front back to the classic Chicago font here). You may also have to switch screen-resolution again if you see some odd artifacts/missing/doubled pixels when turning it off. (There’s a quick resolution changer on the control-strip in the lower left, it’s the one with the checkerboard effect)
Remember to always shut-down correctly! Use the switcher at the top-right to “switch” to Finder then go through that Special, Shutdown process each time. QEMU will close several seconds after it’s complete.
On your hard-drive you’ll find an Applications folder, dig into Internet Utilities, Classilla folder and you can launch Classilla which is a port of the Netscape browser made in 2014 (based on Netscape Navigator 1.3.1 Nokia N90 port). It was a valiant effort given how diferent Mac OS development was prior to Mac OS X - there were no Unix libraries/support so ports were difficult and most applications were written in MetroWerks CodeWarrior - the “classic” Mac OS version was discontinued in 2002.
Still Classilla is much better than IE 5.5 which fails to do anything at all. Google works, for example, but many sites don’t render at all because of the push to later versions of SSL the browser does not support.
You can find a ton of old Mac software at The Macintosh Repository but there are no more capable browsers.
Still, it’s a fun environment to play with and it’s nice to have 100% accurate references to Geneva, Chicago, Monaco, Espy Sans etc. as most “conversions” tend to be hand-converted and mistakes are a-plenty. I’ve done a few conversions myself this way on FontStruct and know how easy it is to make mistakes when working from screenshots especially when it comes to spacing between letters.
It’s also nice to see an old friend again. Despite regularly finding myself on retro machines and emulators spanning 8 and 16 bit machines I don’t have (or have the space for) a classic Mac and emulation has been difficult. I think I last used Mac OS 9 in 2000 on an iMac at work before we put the Mac OS X Public Beta on it (I was a bit NeXT/OpenStep fan and wanted to see what they had done to it!)
My thanks to James Badger for his general article on Mac OS 9 on QEMU.
[)amien
Hello, everyone.
It is with a heavy heart that I've decided to pull Steam Marines 2 support for MacOS moving forward. I'd like to take the time to explain my thoughts.
What's Mac to me?
I grew up as a Mac kid. My earliest memories were of playing games on my dad's Mac Classic, stuff like Crystal Quest, The Ancient Art of War, Dark Castle.
I used Macs pretty much all the way through high school. The Spiderweb software games like the Exile series, Escape Velocity, the Marathon trilogy, and Blizzard games. Blizzard holds a special place in my heart since they always released Mac versions of their games.
This is why I've supported Mac through all of my games: Ignition Impulse, Steam Marines 1, and up until now Steam Marines 2. I also had plans to support Mac for Steam Marines 3 which is still in pre-production:
Mac support has never been a good financial bet (for me and most indies) and neither has Linux: I've talked about this openly on Twitter, which then got picked up by GamingOnLinux (link to my first comment in a series on that article).
What's Changed?
Starting in 10.15 Apple will require notarization for all software by default.
Let's get the elephant in the room out of the way right now: Is this a particularly onerous condition to continuing to support Mac, from any of a time, effort, or money aspect? No. Is it extra money and work? Yes. I've gone through (most) of the process to see what it entails.
The problem is that Apple has been moving toward a vision of controlling all software on MacOS for years now. I don't need to call Microsoft for permission to release Windows software. I don't have to email Linus for his blessing to release software for any Linux distribution. I now have to pay an annual fee to Apple to be able to properly deploy software on their platform, jump through several hoops every single time I issue a build, I have absolutely no control or voice about what they decide to notarize or not, and their behavior does not instill any confidence in me that this is not going to get even worse in the future.
At the core this is not about me having to jump through hoops. I've jumped through a lot of hoops over the last decade making and selling games, and if i can understand and commiserate with the reasons why someone is making me do A Thing, and it's not going to sink me, I feel that I can be reasonable about most things.
I am now in the position of being near my Steam Marines 2 launch window on Steam Early Access and I literally do not know if something might roadblock me in the future. What happens if I go ahead and release with Mac support and Apple does something that is actually onerous?
Absolutely no offense to Itch, I love this platform and wish it nothing but the best of luck, but the number of times people have downloaded the Mac build of Steam Marines 2 on here is SIX (6). Not owners - this is six downloads of any of the Mac builds I've pushed so far.
Sandoomer Hoops Mac Os X
What Happens Now?
I'm changing the information on the Steam and Itch pages of Steam Marines 2 to indicate that I am only supporting Windows and Linux.
If you have purchased Steam Marines 2 on or prior to the date of this post because you wished to play on Mac, or really any other reason - you don't like me, you don't like this post, you don't like my reasoning, you don't like my face, please feel free to contact me at yjseow@worthlessbums.com for a refund. As far as I know you can also contact Itch support to initiate some sort of refund process but I would be happy to personally refund your money, including any extra tip if you graciously had tipped me at the point of purchase, and you can maintain your purchase through Itch in the event you wish to continue playing on Windows or Linux.
I won't completely rule out Mac builds for Steam Marines 2 or 3 or my other games in the future, but this would be contingent on Apple changing course. Should I reverse my stance on Mac support, I will not require anyone to repurchase Steam Marines 2 if you received a refund.
Sandoomer Hoops Mac Os Download
Thanks for reading,
Sandoomer Hoops Mac Os 11
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