Mac Source Ports – Run old games on new Macs

I played a ton of EV and EVO back in the day and still have them on a Basilisk II VM, but Endless Sky has really captured the spirit of EV (because everyone who made it also loved EV) and offered it up in a modern incarnation.

https://endless-sky.github.io/

stared2• 9 months ago

I came there because I wanted to play Quake on Apple Silicon and looked for the best option - which turned out to be a cross-platform Vulkan engine https://github.com/Novum/vkQuake.

MacSourcePorts11• 9 months ago

I've also added a build of DarkPlaces. I need to get a few more going like FTEQW and QuakeSpasm.

herpdyderp• 9 months ago

Wish I could get Deimos Rising and Gridz working again, neither are on this list.

PaulHoule3• 9 months ago

I'm absolutely impressed at how the M4 Mac Mini plays games -- if Apple were making a game console they could wipe the floor with XBOX and Sony.

guestbest• 9 months ago

Every general purpose computer eventually becomes a game console.

stared2• 9 months ago

Games are the crabs of software

ascagnel_• 9 months ago

I'm hoping the rumored revision of the Apple TV can slot in as a game console. Apple has been pushing AAA games on iOS/iPadOS over the past few years, but there's no good user story if I want to have that traditional experience beyond playing Apple Arcade games on the existing (and outdated) Apple TV pucks.

There's some irony in that the one thing they haven't figured out (the living room) is the one thing their competitors in the space (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) _have_ figured out.

PaulHoule3• 9 months ago

Apple's in the tough spot (re [1]) that mobile games have already surpassed conventional PC and console games in terms of revenue. I don't know what fraction of that is the block crusher games that I see on everybody's phones and what fraction is the otaku who is serious about Umamusume, FGO, Arknights or Genshin Impact. Either way why would they want to jump onto what seems to be a sinking ship?

My take on the living room is that streaming boxes and most Blu-Ray players really suck these days (crappy little Sonys take 45 seconds to boot!) and if you want something to sit next to your TV to be a Plex client it should be a PS or XBOX.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

pjmlp3• 9 months ago

Their last attempt didn't went down that well,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin

snovymgodym• 9 months ago

Console success hasn't really been about performance for some time now.

PaulHoule3• 9 months ago

But arguably that’s part of the problem. Not so much performance but for a long time you had improvement in the price/performance ratio and now you don’t… except for Apple Silicon! The PS5 costs more, not less, than it cost at launch years ago. Studios are in deep trouble because several years ago they assumed the average gamer was going to have a better machine (be it PC or console) than they do so now everyone is complaining new games suck.

X86 is going the way of the VAX and 68k but ARM ex. Apple is always underpowered at any price. If the rest of the industry was keeping up with Apple Silicon we would not be locked into what Apple thinks is fashionable we’d be seeing a lot of innovation.

tjpnz• 9 months ago

I've been having a terrible time with Kerbal Space Program on my M4 based MBP. At the very least you could call it immersive when you're re-entering Kerbin and your knees are on fire.

Still manages to stay cool with games like CP2077 though.

walkabout• 9 months ago

I used to play that on an Intel i5 MacBook Pro (~2014 model?) with only embedded Intel graphics. It gave it a workout and the frame rate wasn’t amazing, but it was playable. I’m surprised it strains an M4 at all.

pjmlp3• 9 months ago

Nah, they already tried that and it didn't went well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin

plmpsu• 9 months ago

FAQ says:

  "[...] a source port is just the executable code for the game, you still have to provide your own copy of the game's data.

  So for example, using Quake III: Arena again, the game consists of both an executable and a set of data files (pk3 files, in this case). The download for ioquake3 is an executable that is up to date and has been maintained to work on modern Macs, but you still need to acquire the pk3 files from a legal source, such as an existing installation of the game from disc or Steam or GOG."

bsimpson2• 9 months ago

I have original copies of a lot of these on CD, but even if it was easy to read CDs in 2025, that doesn't mean they're still in readable condition.

A lot of abandonware games have ISOs posted on the Internet Archive. There's a glimmer of worry in the back of my head about the safety of downloading random executables, but it seems like they're usually the real deal.

p0w3n3d3• 9 months ago

The executables are built from source if you use the OpenSource ports

MacSourcePorts11• 9 months ago

In a lot of cases the easiest way is going to be to get the game from GOG and use my Extractor utility to get the data from the Windows installer

https://www.macsourceports.com/utility/extractor

Extractor is just a GUI-based version of innoextract, so if you prefer the command line you can use that.

p0w3n3d3• 9 months ago

It's quite funny, because this page accidentally serves as a list of open source ports for gaming on Linux too. I used to look for ports of games I had played as a child (even for windows, because they sometimes no longer work there), and never got any global headquarters on games' ports (like the winehq db for example, which is another chapter of pain and sorrow to run them on linux)

pmarreck• 9 months ago

I would like Linux to be "the" home for gaming. With those other 2 OS'es as "also supported on"'s.

I think it's almost necessary that gaming's home needs to be on an open-source OS, where people make things work because they love to, not (necessarily) because they're paid to.

I have already encountered games that no longer run on Windows but run fine (great even) on Proton.

I wish Apple wasn't locking down their PC platform so much. I mean, Asahi exists, but they are given ZERO assistance except for what is essentially "Apple holding the door open for that and similar projects". Which can close at any time. Which is a serious problem (reminiscent of the ZFS situation with Oracle).

pjmlp3• 9 months ago

I doubt that it will ever happen, studios targeting Android/Linux with the NDK don't bother with GNU/Linux as customer base, due to additional QA costs for little benefit.

Then there is the whole culture clash between FOSS and the way games industry sees IP, NDAs and the proprietary tooling that gives a game that edge over the competition.

MacSourcePorts11• 9 months ago

Yeah I'm not sure how many ports have a Mac build but no Windows build but generally I find that most of these have a Windows port because everyone has Windows, a Linux port because anyone with a spare PC can run Linux, but no Mac build because either no one on the team has a Mac or "the person who did the Mac build left/disappeared" so I'm trying to be that person for everyone, to some extent.

But yeah if it can run on the Mac it can run on Linux and probably does. There's a few cases where it doesn't go the other way (Skin Deep uses OpenGL 4.3 and the Mac stopped at OpenGL 4.1, that sort of thing)

WesleyJohnson• 9 months ago

Carmageddon, in part, paved the way for my Software Development career. Manipulating the text files to change a vehicles weight, speed, etc, just opened up a whole world for me. Awesome to see it here.

alsetmusic• 9 months ago

Having Carmageddon at the top is a good eye-catcher. My brother and I used to love driving around their open world and smashing into other drivers. I chose not to click through to see any of the media. I'm sure it's better looking in my memory.

JKCalhoun4• 9 months ago

Definitely. I want to determine what the best implementation of Carmageddon was and try to get that set-up — which a steering wheel, pedals… Kind of my fantasy.

bombcar2• 9 months ago

There's a lot of money to be made here; just like how the current hotness in classic cars is always what the now late-middle aged dreamed of when they were teenagers - you could sell custom "best of" rigs for games when they were released.

JKCalhoun4• 9 months ago

Glider Pro [1] (called Airfoil?) is on the list. I guess posting the sources on Github made that an easy matter.

I suppose I can point people to this when they ask me if there is a "Glider" on a modern platform. A lot easier than setting up emulators.

[1] https://galeforcegames.itch.io/aerofoil

asveikau2• 9 months ago

This will be an off topic and kinda spammy comment, but thank you for that game. I played it a lot circa 1994. The level editor also kept it very fresh.

JKCalhoun4• 9 months ago

(Hey, no problem. You're welcome.)

MacSourcePorts11• 9 months ago

Thanks for releasing the source. Had you seen this source port before?

JKCalhoun4• 9 months ago

I am not sure. I definitely did not see it running in a browser, ha ha.

asveikau2• 9 months ago

Hadn't thought of Jazz Jackrabbit in a while.

IIRC that game was pretty impressive when you consider that similar games on consoles were using custom sprite hardware, and doing it on a CPU would have been trickier, even despite having much better CPUs than the consoles.

neckro23• 9 months ago

Also one of the first DOS games that had Amiga-module-style music (mixed samples) instead of Adlib or MIDI. This later evolved into the UMX system used in Unreal and Deus Ex.

dbalatero4• 9 months ago

I wish there was a simple single page with all the game titles on it, so I could quickly scan thru the list without paginating. The `/games` page also doesn't have the filters that the root `/` page has.

MacSourcePorts11• 9 months ago

Not the first time I've had this request, so try this thing I just hacked together and that's not listed anywhere yet

https://www.macsourceports.com/games/list

dbalatero4• 9 months ago

Looks great to me! Thanks!

mrits• 9 months ago

Homm2. finally I can delete my Windows XP vm

reactordev3• 9 months ago

This site is difficult to navigate with just a paging list of entries with no order. Is there a search feature? Anyway to find old games without having to scroll through each page or write a python scraper? I love the effort. We should absolutely preserve old software and try to keep it working through various means. I just have a really hard time finding what I’m looking for on this site.

galad87• 9 months ago

Yup, just right in the upper half of the page there is a big search box and an "sort by" popup button.

reactordev3• 9 months ago

I don’t see that on mobile. Just a list of games and a pager at the bottom that goes on for miles…

dbalatero4• 9 months ago

The main page has the search box & sort by: https://www.macsourceports.com/

The Games page does not: https://www.macsourceports.com/games

MacSourcePorts11• 9 months ago

Try this, I just now added it.

https://www.macsourceports.com/games/list

reactordev3• 9 months ago

Better! However, just including the filter could have solved this and other problems. Only having it on the main page was lost on me when initially viewing. Page on but let me filter. Also when clicking on a page, trigger a scroll to top. There were a couple times where I clicked on a pagination page number and it looked like nothing happened but the above content changed. Snappy but send me up. Little polish, little elbow grease, and bam. You got yourself an archive of the best of the best in old Mac software. Keep it up, for real, I kept telling kids about Bungie and Marathon but they still swear Halo is original.

bombcar2• 9 months ago

Heroes of Might and Magic III has some serious activity out there, still.

Unfortunately, the best source port (VCMI) doesn't support Horn of the Abyss directly, but you can do things with Rosetta and friends: https://github.com/ponich/heroes3hota-mac-installer

chb• 9 months ago

Would love to see Spaceward Ho! (Delta Tao Software, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceward_Ho!) in this list.

mapmap• 9 months ago

It’s available on the App Store and it will run on both iOS and Mac.

wingworks• 9 months ago

Ahh bummer, couldn't find Blobbo on the list. It was the best old mac game!

zeristor• 9 months ago

Is Terranova a thing?

I was quite impressed with it back in the nineties, I don’t think I got very far into it.

catskull• 9 months ago

I love MacSourcePorts.com! If you're keen, I sat down with Tom a few months ago and we talked about the site and his passion for this stuff. Super interesting fella and a heck of a nice guy! https://catskull.net/podcast#episode-14-tom-macsourceports-m...

sam256• 9 months ago

You can play the old mac game Continuum in the browser now as well. [1] I ported it using the source code Brian and Randy released a while back. All my new code for the port is up on github as well. [2]

[1] https://continuumjs.com [2] https://github.com/sam-mfb/continuum

rgovostes2• 9 months ago

As a teenager I reached out to the authors of RoboWar and asked if I could have the source code to help port it to Mac OS X. A trifling detail I omitted was that I had no clue how to write C, whoops. How hard could it possibly be?

Nonetheless, I got it on SourceForge and it seems a later maintainer ported it to Windows. https://sourceforge.net/projects/robowar/files/Original%20Ro...

I also received the sources to Despair from Lloyd Burchill, which I was similarly unequipped to port. But unfortunately I didn't upload it anywhere.

There's also the game engine World Builder by Bill Appleton (of SuperCard fame), which Alexei Svitkine re-implemented in Java at https://github.com/asvitkine/wage-engine. This was used by several puzzle-adventure games. One I remember fondly is A Mess of Trouble by Ray Dunakin, which has been separately ported to modern macOS at http://www.amessotrouble.com/.

rgovostes2• 9 months ago

There's also an open source implementation of the Riven game engine for modern macOS, https://github.com/jfroy/rivenx. Though the Myst series has since been re-released.

freetonik• 9 months ago

Related: I recently found a way to make Half Life 2 (purchased via Steam) run on arm-based Macs. It’s probably my favourite game of all time, and totally worth a bit of hassle.

https://rakhim.exotext.com/how-to-play-half-life-2-on-mchip-...

Herdinger• 9 months ago

As a minor nit: Many of these are not actually source ports but reverse engineering efforts (e.g OpenMW). It would be nice to have a tag to highlight that is the case for accuracy purposes.

In my opinion gaining accuracy for a single engine is way harder than for general emulation since one does not have a giant corpus that can be used for validation, just the game as is. I‘ve seen a few approaches that try to go the extra mile like the bit identical Super Mario 64 decompilation, or Dungeon Master where the developer recorded inputs on actual hardware and checked that the play through reaches the end of the game provided the same inputs.

Not to take away from the tremendous task those reverse engineering efforts go through, I am very grateful to have classic games running on modern hardware with enhancements and modding support!

MacSourcePorts11• 9 months ago

Yeah for better or worse something I discovered was that the number of projects that fit the standard pattern of projects derived from the original's source code is actually pretty small, and the reverse engineering efforts are more common than I thought.

On the wiki on my build system I have a categorization thing happening, perhaps I should incorporate that into the site. https://github.com/MacSourcePorts/MSPBuildSystem/wiki

One thing I try to avoid though there are some examples on the site is recompilation efforts. Those can get into dodgy territory.

Mac Source Ports – Run old games on new Macs

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