BTW IIRC there was some method to convert the 32-bit game binaries to make them run on recent macs. I remember doing it.
Are there any other architecture changes that are preventing 32 bits binaries from running? Does that also mean that old software no longer runs unless there is a 64 bit version?
In windows you can run x32 and x64 executables in a 64 bits machine
On Windows, this was is implemented as SysWOW64. WOW64 means Windows on Windows 64. It makes the userland emulation and pretends towards the process that everything around him (incl. drivers) are the 32-bit ones.
Source: Microsoft.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20081222-00/?p=19...
It's literally a 2004 game! That's ridiculous. A handful of opterons existed in the market, but Intel wouldn't get there for years still and it was well over a decade until x86_64 crossed 50% market share in consumer stuff.
Good grief, as it were.
What? First, those chips were plenty powerful to run HL2 (the game predates them). And second, all x86_64 chips can run older x86 32-bit code unmodified.
The reason macOS stopped supporting 32-bit code has nothing to do with the processors but more about them wanting to remove support for 32-bit binaries from the kernel and from all user-space libraries. To run a 32-bit binary, you need itself and all libraries it depends on to be 32-bit too, including the syscall boundary, which is "fine" (both Windows and Linux do this just fine, so it's really on Apple to have removed this). And I suppose Apple removed those because it was building towards a 64-bit-only world to simplify the Apple Silicon transition.
Valve wanted steam to co-exist on the mac in the early days and John Sculley of Apple didn't want Apple to be seen as a gaming device or a "personal home computer". So they ceased contact with Valve and the rest is history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPTLPXNtb2I
Apple refused to license joysticks so they could prevent customers from considering early mac's as game machines and deliberately refused to support games on the machine. Myst was only few that were exclusive to the Mac; that they then ported to PC.
Is it, though?
How Hard Can It Possibly Be to just do a software GL renderer that emulates a mid-2000s Radeon, these days?
