Posted June 11, 2020 by Daniel "MontyOnTheRun" Monteiro
#mac #osx #apple #powerpc #catalina #macOS #Xcode
Despite this being sort of a "retro" game, I coulnd't help but provide some builds for a newer plataform, just because I'm a big OSX fan (even with my recent disappointments with Apple). I also absolutely LOVE my PowerMac G4 and was feeling an itch to make one of my games run well on it. Given my efforts on porting Mistral Report to Amiga, this felt like the perfect match.
To be fair, I had builds of the game running on OSX from early on (around late 2018), but it was always a very rough version, without much care to stability.
Ever since getting the G4, I slowly studied what was needed for it to support the game and how Apple Universal binaries worked - there were, of course, some hurdles along the way - Xcode 2.5 is plain simply weird (mind you, I began using Xcode on 3.2, which now looks like another universe). Surprisingly, Xcode 11 still loads projects saved in 2.5 format reasonably well. After recreating some of the UI using NIBs (precursor to XIBs) and some care taken to support Cocoa most basic audio systems (my first stab at it was using AVFoundation), it was good to go. Gotta admit I was thrilled to see my Universal binary running on a 2012 Mac Mini running Mojave. Sadly, Catalina decided to break that compabilty.
Pleae, test it and let me know where I could improve things? This is my gift to the classic Mac community and I would love to tailor it to your needs.
68K Classic builds? I'm still trying to figure out Retro68 (https://github.com/autc04/Retro68). In the meantime, I plan to release an Android version (pretty much done. Went live a couple of months ago, but had a release-only crash and I had to pull it out. Now, I can't release it on Play for legal reasons) and a pure Win32 version (made some advancements on the Noudar95 (https://twitter.com/DanMonteiroNit/status/961362234642522113) demo that makes it playable on pretty much everything....but my original Windows 95 install, sadly).