Hi there

I heard of Half-Life 1 for Mac a long time ago, but unfortunately (like you probably know) it has been canceled for unknown reasons.
But today I found something quite interesting on MacRumors: A video from a woman who has been working on Half-Life 1 for Mac. ( http://www.macrumors.com/2010/12/20/how ... st-minute/ )

It's quite interesting to watch this video. I think it's amazing: Half-Life 1 for Mac was almost done (and you could even play with Windows versions of HL1) but it was canceled during to low sales/requests for the game.

I would really like to see Half-Life 1 on one of my PowerPC Macs, but I guess it will never happen!

So what do you think about this story?



I hope that this topic will fit in here - I did some research in this forum but I haven't found anything on HL1 for Mac. If there is anything or if this thread is in the wrong board, please move or delete it!

Very interesting. It's a shame it was scrapped and I find it horrible to know that they could end it just like that, must feel pretty horrible

Well same deal with Dreamcast.
But Valve has been porting all their source games to Mac, Perhaps they will do the same with Half-Life?

I hope Valve will release Half-Life 1 in Steam for Mac - but anyway this wouldn't be the same, because Steam for Mac only runs on Intel Macs, so I will never see Half-Life 1 running on my PPC Macintoshs

Perhaps an emulator can help with that?

you can run HL1 on HL2,the HL2 engine has AI code for all enemies.
The HL2 code does contain nether PPC nor complete OpenGL source.
Find someone that ports it for you,I have no dev tools installed on my G4 box.

Today even Smartphones could run
it with some changes eg. fixed point numbers ,OpenGL ES, slimmer UI.

Indeed, I remember sending an email to Gabe a while ago asking if they would ever make any future improvements to the GoldSource engine and ended up getting an email from Alfred Reynolds instead saying that while they have no plans right now it's still possible.

Pardon? I don't really understand what you meant. So is it possible to compile Half-Life 1 to run on PPC?

But I think it's strange that nobody of them has "accidentally" released anything of the code of the Mac version

Someone needs to leak this, I myself haven't used a Mac in a long time but it could be fun. The original programmers are probably in possession of the source code and an anonymous release wouldn't be impossible.

It'd be great running Half Life on my PowerBook natively. It's just about impossible to even run the original Unreal (note: uses directx 5) never mind Half Life in a VM! :<

I have heard some rumors about a leaked Beta version of Mac HL being available on Hotline back in the days.

http://forums.macnn.com/77/gaming/74982/ask-macplay-for-half-life

I have done some research and have visited most of the Mac related KDX and Carracho/Hotline servers that are still active to this date but a Beta of HL was nowhere to be found on any of them so I suspect it's a myth that was created to troll the dissappointed Mac users lol

Sure Half-Life original release for PPC Macs is a legendary abandoned project. They supposedly even demod it to people at trade shows so it must have been playable. If it was out there "in the wild", we would all know about it.

All we can hope is that some developer or tester out there re-discovers it on their old box and leaks it. Valve won't do it.

FYI originally the Half-Life engine (GoldSRC) was a fork off of the Quake engine, but around when QuakeII was being released Valve had extended the Quake1 engine with their own improvements and decided that they did not want to support both OpenGL and DirectX, this is why the Mac version was scrapped. Keep in mind that Apple was on the verge of going bankrupt then anyway, so businesswise it was not a big deal. If you check out Valve's development tools is some of their leaked HL2 stuff you can see that they still include depricated options for compiling and running OpenGL, but what it takes to get it working is anybody's guess.

Why would Valve wanting to use DirectX for the Source engine cause them to scrap an OpenGL-based HL1 Mac port? They're two totally different engines, and what happens in one shouldn't affect the other.

I think that the Apple tanking at the time is what caused it to be scrapped, not something like them using DirectX for HL2. Of course, now that things are dfferent with Apple, I think a modern, OpenGL-based port for HL1 would sell.

But it's not going to happen - Valve has no plans for making the GoldSrc engine games available natively for OSX. I wonder if this attitude has anything to do with the drawback 10 years ago.

I remember reading before they announced Portal 2 that they were considering it. When did that change?

Can you link me to the article? If Valve says they're considering something that usually means "We told you what you wanted to hear, now go away."
I can't imagine that they're really investing time and resources into porting an outdated game engine for a platform with as little marketshare as the Macintosh. As you can hear in the above interview, the only reason work on the original OS9 port started was because of miscalculated sales-figures. Once the true numbers were revealed it got insta-canned - basically the project was dead before it even startet so to speak.

But if Valve would adapt the GoldSrc port to the iOS as well - that'd attract a far greater potential userbase.
I can imagine Goldsrc would perform well on the iPhone - if it wasn't for Steam being OSX-only that would have been a real opportunity.

It's been a while and I don't have the link on me. Sorry.

Because it was not a straight cross-compile, they were each written a bit differently. So to maintain it, they'd need to pay to continue two separate projects. It was easier and cheaper for them to support a single platform.

ID took a different approach, they developed Quake on NeXT systems with elaborate cross-compilation tools, so it took them less work to crank out a Windoze, Mac, and Linux version from the same code. And a major reason why this worked was because they went the OpenGL route instead of DirectX, more systems were supported.

Why GoldSRC games are asspain to bring to Steam for Macs is the same reason. The original port which got axed was for PPC processors, now Macs use intel processors. Finishing the games for PPC would be easy, but pointless. Or rewrite them for new Macs and change the math and rendering, which is work. Better off porting Black Mesa to Mac!

I'm sure it would be easier for Valve to do it today than it was back then, Valve is much larger and organised than it was back then. I personally think that in the future Valve will most likely release Half-Life for the Mac if there is a demand for it to be on that platform and seeing as they only really recently began porting their games for the Mac we should probably give it another year or so. It's most likely that they are already considering to try and port Half-Life to the Mac again.





I hate the idea of it being on the iPhone...

Hi all,

I think that the iOS platform IS where we can hope to see in the future the old classics. Many are being released back from the memory drawer to that platform (did you try Bruce Lee on the C64 emu?? fantastic!).
The real question is: are the games for iOS going to be ever ported to OSX?
Angry Bird, Pinball and some others have been, with the birth of the Mac App Store...

Andrea

Well andreadandrea interesting question as well, but this thread is about HL1 on the Mac

but by the way: Half-Life 1 is now older than 10 years (release date of the PC version has been in late 1998) - so would it actually be legal for this development team to leak the old PPC port of HL1? Or would it be illegal because it has never been a final product and Valve cancelled it's production?

I want to play HL1 on my dual 1 gig PowerMac G4 MDD (or on my older Quicksilver )

It wouldn't be legal for them to leak it for many reasons.

I wonder how bad the consequences of such an action would be.