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Mac PPC port?


Travolta
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I'm afraid we don't have the manpower to support old versions of OSX (we barely have the one to support recent versions), so the only thing we can do is looking for Mac developers. :(

@Travolta you didn't answer stanislas69's question, did you test the dmg we provide? We sort of guarantee support for 10.7+ Intel, but that doesn't mean it won't work anywhere else.

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TL;DR: Don't bother trying, it's not going to work. Given the specs mentioned on wikipedia for G4s with lots of upgrades (which is I guess not what you are actually operating) you might have a better or equivalent experience by eg getting a Raspberry Pi.

For those that asked if some x86 dmg will work on PowerPC do ask yourself what a cpu architecture is. That said PowerPC is dead, and has been that way for about a decade.

Now since strange architectures do have a certain fascination I'll try explaining why getting the game to work on that box is unfeasible without lots of work.

Now since the vendor of both the box, and the OS stopped providing any support for this about 5 years ago (at which point most support was already gone). So getting a toolchain installed that both supports the system and API and what the game needs is unlikely to be easy. The game does require mostly complete C++11 (soon complete C++11) support, OSX on PowerPC does not have that. I suppose one could try getting some recent GCC to build there and hope everything works, but I suspect that doing so while running OSX is not going to be easy or well supported.

Now that rules out using OSX as the OS, but since there are other systems one could use we'll check another one. For the sake of example we'll pick OpenBSD since they tend to care about strange architectures and the game is in the ports tree. Now that we'd have access to a recent compiler to actually attempt to build the game we'll check if out one big dependency called SpiderMonkey (the JS engine from Firefox) would build and run there. Since that architecture is not one of a select few we'd not have a nicely working JIT, but that would only make the game very slow on a not that powerful (by today's standards) machine. A quick check of the supported architectures for Firefox reveals that it isn't built for macppc, a quick search reveals that Mozilla dropped support for PowerPC when releasing Firefox 4.0. So that rules out recent versions of the game at least. The SpiderMonkey version that corresponds to Firefox 4.0 is SpiderMonkey 1.8.5. For those not well versed in our SpiderMonkey to releases mapping (I'm just kidding, I also had to look that up) we did upgrade to 1.8.5 after Alpha 6.

I guess at that point one could also stay on OSX, but if you want to run a by now over 6 years old version of the game that you have to most likely patch a lot to even build (there is some somewhat low level code that would need to be extended, though you could most likely reuse the arm version that uses compiler intrinsics for those) I'm not sure that is going to be a lot of fun.

So to conclude this I suppose you will both have better support and better performance if you used eg a pi.

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I don't think you'll find a lot of software still supporting a dead port of an OS.

That said quite a few games released back when that was a live OS did have ports to it. Some of those were since released as freeware, so you might have some success with that. I'm however not sure if those releases include binaries that run on those platforms. Among those you could check would be Starcraft (which had a Mac OS, not OSX release, though the notes for the free release talk about OSX 10.11, maybe Stargus does work on PowerPC if the old files aren't included), a few of the classic C&C games (but a quick check of the ISOs for that that I have locally seem to only show .EXE files; and a further check of OpenRA and its dependencies list 10.7 as the minimum OSX version), I also seem to remember that WC3 had an OSX port (wasn't released for free though), C&C Generals had an OSX release and that was before OSX was publically available on Intel (but I don't think Generals was released for free), same for quite a few other RTS games released around that time (be that with MacOS or OSX support) but not a lot of those are available for free.

I guess you could do some reading of some OSX or MacOS gaming wiki pages and see if anything was released for free, but I wouldn't expect to find a lot.

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