Day of Defeat: Source :: Steam for Mac

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Cpt. Boyd Feb 17, 2021 @ 10:36pm

Day of Defeat: Source

Not sure if this is the right place to post this or in the pinned section, but I'm a new Mac user and bought a M1 Macbook. The one game I play via Steam is Day of Defeat: Steam. I was hoping to be able to game with my father and looks like theres a 32-Bit/64-Bit problem. I take it the developers of DoD have to make this available for Mac correct? If thats the case, I guess the game has been nonplayable as Catalina has been out for idk 1-2 years? Not sure if someone can look into this or maybe I'm missing something.

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ReBoot Feb 18, 2021 @ 1:44am

Yes, the game is unplayable. It's a 32-bit-game and Cook decided that you shall not play 32-bit-games. In theory, you can lobby Valve to port the game but in practice, that won't happen. Decades-old games are essentially conserved in the state they were and if your platform vendor decides to drop old software, you've no choice but to
a) stop playing the old stuff
b) keep an old version of the platform around
c) change the platform vendor to one with better backwards compatibility

Cpt. Boyd Feb 18, 2021 @ 10:28pm

Originally posted by ReBoot:
Yes, the game is unplayable. It's a 32-bit-game and Cook decided that you shall not play 32-bit-games. In theory, you can lobby Valve to port the game but in practice, that won't happen. Decades-old games are essentially conserved in the state they were and if your platform vendor decides to drop old software, you've no choice but to
a) stop playing the old stuff
b) keep an old version of the platform around
c) change the platform vendor to one with better backwards compatibility

Thank you ReBoot. Glad I was able to get some quick clarification as I'm a new Mac user.

ReBoot Feb 18, 2021 @ 10:48pm

As a rule of thumb, old stuff will run on modern Windows no matter what (except DOS games but there's DOSBox for that).

On Linux, things are pretty easy when it comes to software you can compile yourself (as is the Linux way anyway). When you use software from repositories, you are likely to get non-up-to-date-versions (happened to me several times so I wonder what the ♥♥♥♥ apt get is good for if I frequently have to compile myself), but at least that's guaranteed to run. Otherwise, old stuff can be brought to work. In best case, you have to install a couple 32 bit libraries, worst case, it's a major PITA but still doable on your end.

As for MacOS, you're basically SOL. Apple doesn't give a damn about you (not you personally, but the whole of MacOS userbase) using older software, they drop backwards compatibility when they don't have to (like that recent drop of 32 bit compatibility) and when OpenGL gets dropped, every single older game will stop working. None of this matters if you use your Mac PC for productivity: no-one sane would use a 10 years old program for video editing. And if you do productivity, you have a subscription so you get the latest version which of course runs on the latest MacOS and the latest Mac hardware.

But games, the economy behind them means when they're done, they're done. They get patches, yes, but nothing in terms of full ports. Not usually anyway, there are remastered editions every now and then. Those remastered editions may or may not have loyalty discounts, they may be free upgrades but all in all, consider a game done in the state it got released. If it uses OpenGL and Apple drops support for OpenGL, the chances for a port to Apple's Metal (or Vulkan which AFAIK works on MacOS as well) are very slim to none.

That of course doesn't apply to currently released games. Current games use Vulkan anyway, MacOS ports of those games even may use Metal. I wouldn't be surprised for games on MacOS to be compiled for ARM natively. So things will be good for years to come.

... until Apple drops the next backward-compatibility bomb. They've been doing so in the past, they have dropped 2 bombs just recently (and the current Rosetta 2 x86 emulator is very likely to go to the way of Rosetta 1 namely being killed sooner than later).

I am very curious about how Microsoft's x86-on-ARM-emulator will fare though. Microsoft got an unparalleled history of binary backwards compatibility but so far, that's been on the same hardware (x86). With Windows on ARM, there's no historical precedence about how long-lived their emulator will be. That of course doesn't matter for you playing games on your Mac PC. At this point, I'm musing.

Last edited by ReBoot; Feb 18, 2021 @ 10:57pm