Mac Source Ports

Developer: id Software
Release Date: June 22, 1996
Source Code Release Date: December 21, 1999

Quake is a first-person shooter, the first in the Quake series, which added polygonal enemies, advanced geometry, and a soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails. A fascinating example of grappling with technology changes in parallel to gameplay, it spawned entire industries of modders and mutiplayer gaming.

The vkQuake port was derived from the QuakeSpasm Spiked port and uses Vulkan on macOS by way of MoltenVK. In addition, vkQuake recently added support for the remastered version of Quake from Night Dive Studios.

And because I've had a few requests for it, we are now hosting a build of DarkPlaces as an alternative port.

If you want to experience what it was like to play Quake at laumch before the advent of GLQuake or hardware acceleration, we have added Chocolate Quake as an additional option.

  Buy Quake on GOG.com

  Buy Quake on the Humble Store

Developer: New World Computing
Release Date: June 8, 1999

There's lots of game series whose entries reflect the evolution of gaming technology, but not many of them can lay claim to staring the series on the Apple II and Commodore 64.

Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor is the seventh entry in the mainlne Might and Magic series, which runs parallel to the Hereos of Might and Magic series. Released in 1999 (the Best Year for Gaming, Ever) it is the second game in the series to use a 3D engine. The OpenEnroth project aims to implement Might and Magic VI, VII and VIII, but at the moment only VII is playable.

  Buy Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor on GOG.com

Developer: Simtex Software
Release Date: September 1993

Described by some as "Civilization in space", Master of Orion is a 4X strategy game where you lead one of ten alien races to conquer the galaxy via dominaton or diplomacy. You start small, with a single homeworld and few resources and build out from there. There are different types of planets, the various races have different specialities, and there is a variety of technologies available to persue. The ultimate world to conquer is the titular Orion, which is also the hardest to conquer.

Although simplistic by today's standards, the game has developed a cult following, multiple sequels, spiritual successors, and even a reboot.

NOTE: the 1oom source port is compatible with the original, DOS-based version of the game from 1993, not the reboot from 2016 named Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars, which is sometimes just called Master of Orion. Most retailers sell the 1993 game in a 2-pack along with its first sequel under the titme Master of Orion 1+2.

  Buy Master of Orion on GOG.com

  Buy Master of Orion on the Humble Store

Developer: Oddworld Inhabitants
Release Date: September 18, 1997

A cheery game with a grotesque protagonist and a dark premise, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee is one of the best selling PlayStation games of all time. This side scroller has you playing as Abe, an enslaved creature trying to rescue as many of his comrades as he can once they discover that management is about to go all "Soylent Green" on them for their next product line.

  Buy Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee on GOG.com

  Buy Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee on the Humble Store

Developer: Oddworld Inhabitants
Release Date: November 17, 1998

Following a year later, Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus continues the story of Abe as he once again tries to save himself and others from becoming consumer products, a bevarage in this case. This game is considered both a sequel as well as a spin-off of the original title.

  Buy Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus on GOG.com

  Buy Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus on the Humble Store

Developer: Cavedog Entertainment
Release Date: September 27, 1997

Total Annihilation is an RTS game with a cult following. Whereas other games in the genre focused on resource scarcity or micromanagement of units, it focused on resource streaming and large scale battles across bigger maps.

The game's designer, Chris Taylor, would go on to make spiritual sequels in the form of Supreme Commander amd Planetary Annihilation.

  Buy Total Annihilation on GOG.com

  Buy Total Annihilation on the Humble Store

Developer: Ion Storm
Release Date: May 22, 2000

Yes, it's that game. Daikatana is the game known as much for its infamous advertising and the drama of its backstory as the content of the game itself.

Released in 2000 after a protracted (for the time anyway) three-year development cycle, John Romero's Daikatana was an ambitious game from an enthusiastic new developer that was unable to live up to the hype due to numerous issues at launch. Although some problems were addressed in patches, the Dallas branch of developer Ion Storm was unable to survive despite its pedigree (though their Austin branch would soldier on for a few more years).

Theorizing that the game's issues were not unsalvageable, a group of individuals online contacted the right people and were able to obtain the source under a non-open source license. Years later the Daikatana 1.3 Project released the first version of their attempt at fixing the game's issues with the years of what we've learned about game design as a guide (also the game used id Tech 2, same as Quake II).

For those of us who followed the 1990's Dallas FPS gaming scene, Daikatana has always been a fascinating case study in ambition versus expectations. Many critics agreed that there were genuinely good parts of the game bogged down by issues in the lesser sections. It's interesting to think what the gaming landscape might have been like had the game succeeded.

I first learned about this project via this excellent GManLives video and, upon learning that the game was also ported to Linux and Mac (the original release was Windows-only), I went to go download the Mac version to discover that it was years out of date and unplayable as a 32-bit executable. The reason was simple and a familar one: the (probably one) person who maintained it left the project years ago.

So, I wrote to the project and was able to get the source to work on it. I've been picking at it for months now and I finally got it working on Intel 64-bit as well as Apple Silicon. As mentioned above the source code is not available to the public but I intend to keep this one up to date.

  Buy Daikatana on GOG.com

  Buy Daikatana on the Humble Store

Developer: id Software
Release Date: December 2, 1999
Source Code Release Date: August 9, 2005

Quake III Arena is a first-person shooter, the first in the Quake series to focus on multiplayer. The ioquake3 source port has been maintained since the original source code release in 2005, featuring a Universal 2 app that supports Intel 64-bit and Apple Silicon as well as a Universal 1 app that can support Intel and PowerPC Macs going back to Mac OS X 10.3

  Buy Quake III: Arena on GOG.com

  Buy Quake III: Arena on the Humble Store

Developer: Raven Software
Release Date: October 18, 2005

Slowly but surely we're getting all the Quake games on the site.

Quake 4 is the fourth installment in the Quake series, and just to keep things weird it's the fourth entry in an anthology series of unrelated games except it's the also direct sequel to Quake II, bringing back its not-the-Borg enemies, the Strogg, and also switching the title to Arabic numerals for some reason.

A moderate success, it was also part of id Software's attempt to have modern id Tech 4 versions of various multiplayer options - DOOM 3 featured the small four-player maps DOOM was known for, Quake 4 was attempting to modernize Quake III: Arena gameplay, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was a modernzation of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory style team based play.

In some ways it's the outcast of the Quake series since it lacks the cultlike following of the three previous entries, but it's a solid fun shooter that's aged fairly well so it's worth another look.

There's been a few attempts over the years of doing the Xash treatment of merging an SDK with an adjacent engine but openQ4 is the first one I've been able to get working on the Mac so it wins.

  Buy Quake 4 on GOG.com

  Buy Quake 4 on the Humble Store

Developer: Rebecca Heineman
Release Date: October 1996
Source Code Release Date: November 30, 2014

Although DOOM is famous today for running on everything, this wasn't always the case, both because it wasn't until the source came out that it became a meme and also because, hard as it is to believe today, not everything in the early 90's was powerful enough to run DOOM, and often the results were very lackluster.

Rebecca Heineman was a legendary old school video game programmer, and one of the most famous and interesting ports she ever did was the 3DO version of DOOM. Except if you know anything about the ports of DOOM that came out in proximity to the original game, you know that the 3DO port is notorious for being of poor quality. So then why is it so well known? Because of the wild story behind it.

After having done the 3DO port of Wolfenstein 3-D (for which she also did the Macintosh port) she was contracted to polish up the DOOM port from a previous developer, but she soon learned that the publisher misled her, that no work had been done on the 3DO port, and she spent ten solid weeks getting the game to work, including having to address several shortcomings in th 3DO's SDK itself. When viewed through that lens, it's impressive the game runs at all.

In 2014 she released the source code to the 3DO version and the BurgerDoom source port (a nod to her nickname "Burger Becky") is the closest you can get to running the original 3DO version of the game. And I thought initially this was a deal where someone had just taken an existing DOOM source port and just emulated the experience but no, you actually need the game data from the original 3DO disc to run it. The result is a fascinating glimpse into the compromises necessary for console ports in the 90's. The levels are cut down (they're apparently mostly the same as the Atari Jaguar version) with a number of modifications to fit in RAM and decrease polygon count. The game has no multiplayer and no save progress other than remembering what level you were on. A series of video cutscenes did not make the final product. The one thing that's improved upon is the soundtrack since it was re-recorded by a live band in order to take advantage of CD audio tracks.

This is absolutely not the best way to play DOOM, we have source ports for the PC version elsewhere on this site. But as a retro gaming artifact it's an interesting experience. It's the E.T. of DOOM ports in that it's impressive not for its quality but for the fact that it worked at all.

NOTE: if you had the pre-2.0 version of BurgerDoom which used the 3DO disc image, you will need to instead install the data as linked above or specified in the instructions below.