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.
JKCalhoun 11 hours ago [-]
(Hey, no problem. You're welcome.)
MacSourcePorts 11 hours ago [-]
Thanks for releasing the source. Had you seen this source port before?
JKCalhoun 7 hours ago [-]
I am not sure. I definitely did not see it running in a browser, ha ha.
p0w3n3d 14 hours 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 13 hours 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).
MacSourcePorts 11 hours 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)
rgovostes 3 hours 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?
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/.
dbalatero 13 hours 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.
MacSourcePorts 10 hours 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
"[...] 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."
bsimpson 12 hours 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.
MacSourcePorts 11 hours 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
Extractor is just a GUI-based version of innoextract, so if you prefer the command line you can use that.
p0w3n3d 12 hours ago [-]
The executables are built from source if you use the OpenSource ports
bsimpson 11 hours ago [-]
That's a good point. I was thinking more generally about downloading binaries from unofficial sources.
reactordev 12 hours 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.
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.
MacSourcePorts 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah there's a glitch on scrolling up, I've never completely nailed it for some reason. I need to get on a real CMS just haven't had time.
I originally omitted filtering on mobile for space reasons but then re-added it on the Home Screen.
galad87 12 hours ago [-]
Yup, just right in the upper half of the page there is a big search box and an "sort by" popup button.
I don’t see that on mobile. Just a list of games and a pager at the bottom that goes on for miles…
MacSourcePorts 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I don't know why I've never added that, but you can filter games on the main page not the /games page.
asveikau 13 hours 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 12 hours 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.
alsetmusic 14 hours 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.
JKCalhoun 13 hours 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.
bombcar 12 hours 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.
sam256 6 hours 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]
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...
PaulHoule 14 hours 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.
ascagnel_ 14 hours 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.
PaulHoule 12 hours 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.
Console success hasn't really been about performance for some time now.
PaulHoule 11 hours 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.
hedora 9 hours ago [-]
Beelink's AMD mini-PCs are great console replacements. AMD $/perf and perf/watt is keeping up with Apple in the midrange (laptops, mini-pc's), and is winning at high-end (workstations + up).
guestbest 14 hours ago [-]
Every general purpose computer eventually becomes a game console.
stared 14 hours ago [-]
Games are the crabs of software
MacSourcePorts 11 hours ago [-]
DOOM is the crabs of games.
tjpnz 13 hours 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 11 hours 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.
philistine 15 hours ago [-]
THIS IS AN INSANE LIST! Well, there goes my productive day.
p0w3n3d 13 hours ago [-]
Week*
WesleyJohnson 14 hours 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.
bombcar 12 hours ago [-]
Heroes of Might and Magic III has some serious activity out there, still.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of this one. I'll see if I can add it to the collection.
NoSalt 14 hours ago [-]
Woah, sweet ... THANK YOU!
HanClinto 12 hours ago [-]
I loved O.G. Escape Velocity and would love to replay that.
squeedles 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Endless Sky seemed like a nice refresh when I tried it a few years ago, did a few initial quest lines.
It was interesting how the different faction technologies had different power/mass/volume/hardpoint production and consumption ratios, so there was a real nudge towards having tech all from one faction, and gently discouraging min-maxing the build using a Frankenstein of gear sourced from the far-flung-corners of the galaxy. At least that was my recollection.
squeedles 6 hours ago [-]
Well, if it was that way, it certainly isn't any longer. They keep adding new alien races, storylines, and sectors of the galaxy, and some of my best ships were franken monsters with tech from a half dozen races. There is a core storyline that is primarily human, but if you play to the end of that will suddenly discover that there is significantly more around you that becomes reachable with some interesting new technology (trying not to spoil anything)
They have done a good job balancing the numbers so that everything requires some tradeoffs. More species/tech gives more choices and interesting variability. Some species make very efficient drives, others inefficient, more powerful but produce tons of excess heat, those folks also produce good passive cooling, others great active cooling but power hungry, etc. The ship hulls tend to match the sizes of the drives and weapon hardpoints of that race, but often work much better when outfitted with different kit (perhaps with some wasted space)
Plus the fleet management is pretty good. You fly your flagship, but you can park ships and switch your flag to different ships. So I might fly a fast little scoutship, then switch to an armor-clad behemoth surrounded my 20 of my heavy-hitting henchmen for some different missions.
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.
MacSourcePorts 11 hours ago [-]
I've also added a build of DarkPlaces. I need to get a few more going like FTEQW and QuakeSpasm.
herpdyderp 14 hours ago [-]
Wish I could get Deimos Rising and Gridz working again, neither are on this list.
zeristor 9 hours 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.
wingworks 10 hours ago [-]
Ahh bummer, couldn't find Blobbo on the list. It was the best old mac game!
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
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).
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)
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/.
https://www.macsourceports.com/games/list
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.
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.
https://www.macsourceports.com/games/list
I originally omitted filtering on mobile for space reasons but then re-added it on the Home Screen.
The Games page does not: https://www.macsourceports.com/games
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.
[1] https://continuumjs.com [2] https://github.com/sam-mfb/continuum
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.
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
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.
Still manages to stay cool with games like CP2077 though.
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
https://endless-sky.github.io/
It was interesting how the different faction technologies had different power/mass/volume/hardpoint production and consumption ratios, so there was a real nudge towards having tech all from one faction, and gently discouraging min-maxing the build using a Frankenstein of gear sourced from the far-flung-corners of the galaxy. At least that was my recollection.
They have done a good job balancing the numbers so that everything requires some tradeoffs. More species/tech gives more choices and interesting variability. Some species make very efficient drives, others inefficient, more powerful but produce tons of excess heat, those folks also produce good passive cooling, others great active cooling but power hungry, etc. The ship hulls tend to match the sizes of the drives and weapon hardpoints of that race, but often work much better when outfitted with different kit (perhaps with some wasted space)
Plus the fleet management is pretty good. You fly your flagship, but you can park ships and switch your flag to different ships. So I might fly a fast little scoutship, then switch to an armor-clad behemoth surrounded my 20 of my heavy-hitting henchmen for some different missions.
I was quite impressed with it back in the nineties, I don’t think I got very far into it.