Mac Source Ports

Developer: New World Computing
Release Date: June 1, 2001

Did you like Heroes of Might and Magic III and want more of it? Like a lot more? Good news - between 1999 and 2001 New World Computing put out eight expansion packs under the heading of Heroes Chronicles. Some were retail, others were free, but retailers like GOG have collected them all into one package.

Note that the way VCMI works you will also need the base Heroes of Might and Magic III game installed.

Although my aim is to host signed and notarized game bundles on Mac Source Ports, the VCMI project recently added Apple Silicon support and is sufficiently complex that at this time I'm going to link to their work. We may host a notarized version in the future.

Because the app bundle is not notarized, on first run you may run into issues. The shortest answer is to right-click on the app bundle (VCMI.app) and select Open. The long answer is here.

  Buy Heroes Chronicles on GOG.com

Developer: New World Computing
Release Date: March 3, 1999

Heroes of Might and Magic III is another 4X turn-based strategy game and is one of the best games in the series.

Although my aim is to host signed and notarized game bundles on Mac Source Ports, the VCMI project recently added Apple Silicon support and is sufficiently complex that at this time I'm going to link to their work. We may host a notarized version in the future.

Because the app bundle is not notarized, on first run you may run into issues. The shortest answer is to right-click on the app bundle (VCMI.app) and select Open. The long answer is here.

  Buy Heroes of Might and Magic III on GOG.com

Developer: Chris Sawyer
Release Date: 1995

OK, so this one is kinda weird. Here's the deal:

Transport Tycoon Deluxe was released in 1995, a simulation game by Chris Sawyer in his graphic/UI style about managing transportation in a city. Sort of the progenitor to things like Cities Skylines. Or maybe just the transportation parts of SimCity.

The source port OpenTTD, as its name might suggest, is a reimplementation of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. Like some other ports on this site, it is not based on existing code, it is a reimplimentation of the engine designed to consume the Transport Tycoon Deluxe data files.

Straightforward enough, but what makes it unusual is that Transport Tycoon Deluxe is not commercially available anymore, not even on the usual suspects like Steam or GOG. So unless you have the files from somewhere you can't play it.

To address that, OpenTTD allows you to download third party clean room data implementations of the game data files. These are not the exact same as the commercial game but they get the job done. When you run the game for the first time, it will prompt you to download the files for you. There's also tons others to choose from.

This is a complete enough solution that OpenTTD is even on Steam and GOG itself as a full (free) game. You can get it from there or you can get it from the links below, which are straight from the developer's site. I'm listing it here because I want to show all of the signed and notarized Universal 2 options I come across.

So download it from wherever and fire it up and strap in for one of the most ridiculously hardcore games on this site so far.

Developer: id Software
Release Date: May 5, 1992
Source Code Release Date: August 1995

Wolfenstein 3-D is the granddaddy to all the modern first person shooters that came after it. Released as shareware in 1992 it launched the independent career of id Software that would result in DOOM and Quake. Though simplistic by today's standards, it still holds up as a fun maze game with the occasional Nazi to shoot.

  Buy Wolfenstein 3-D on GOG.com

Developer: id Software
Release Date: September 18, 1992
Source Code Release Date: August 1995

Spear of Destiny is the retail sequel to the shareware Wolfenstein 3-D. Timeline-wise, it is a prequel that features B.J. Blazkowicz on a mission to recapture the titular Spear of Destiny from the Nazis. If you want more Wolfenstein 3-D, this has you covered.

  Buy Wolfenstein 3-D: Spear of Destiny on GOG.com

Developer: Wisdom Tree
Release Date: 1994

An example of a release whose backstory is more interesting than the game itself, Super 3D Noah's Ark is the byproduct of a truly strange course of events.

The original NES was the first home console to introduce the concept of locking out unofficial or unlicensed developers, and the market responded with various attempts to bypass the mechanism, being met with various forms of litigation in the process. One of these companies was called Color Dreams and they released a small handful of truly terrible games.

Faced with the concept of going under, one of the founders joked about getting into making religious games and the idea kind of took off from there - they'd be sold in Christian bookstores, they'd more or less have the market to themselves, and Nintendo would be less likely to sue a religious organization due to the bad press involved.

After years on the NES, they released what is believed to be the only unlicensed SNES game ever to hit the market, Super 3D Noah's Ark. It circumvented the lockout mechanism by being a "pass-through" cartridge, so you had to plug a licensed game into it to get it to work (think: Sonic & Knuckles).

As if that wasn't odd enough, they licensed the SNES version of the Wolfenstein 3-D engine from id Software. It was long rumored that id Software gave them the license for free as a reslt of being angry at the changes they had to make to Wolfenstein 3-D to appease Nintendo (turning German shepherds into giant rats, no blood, etc.) but it was later revealed that no, they legitimately licensed the engine.

The game itself doesn't make a lot of sense, like how on an ark designed to have two of every animal there's only a few different animals repeated over and over. Or why you need to put them to sleep with a slingshot. Or why the ark is a maze. Or why you have to take the occasional Bible quiz. But that was never the point. The point was to be a sprite-swapped Wolfenstein 3-D port for the religious video game market and it worked.

Interestingly enough, not only is it one of only three games that the ECWolf source port plays, the game is currently available on GOG and Steam because the autor of ECWolf worked out a deal with Wisdom Tree (which still technically exists, I guess) to put it on there with ECWolf packaged to play it. It's only on Windows though, so you can use the port we have built here to play it on your Mac.

  Buy Super 3D Noah's Ark on GOG.com

Developer: Sir-Tech Canada
Release Date: July 23, 1999

Jagged Alliance 2 is a cult classic tactical RPG from Canada with a devout following. In it, you play as the leader of a group of rebels seeking to defeat the tyrannical ruler of a Latin American country, hiring mercenaries in order to achieve objectives and recapture cities.

  Buy Jagged Alliance 2 on GOG.com

Developer: Epic Games
Release Date: March 30, 2004

For a brief window it seemed as if the twitch arena shooter was going to go the way of the annual sports franchise, for better or worse. In that vein, Epic released the sequel to Unreal Tournament in 2003 as... Unreal Tournament 2003. This was then followed up in 2004 by Unreal Tournament 2004.

While content-wise, Unreal Tournament 2004 is a superset of Unreal Tournament 2003, the initial plans to make it cross-play with the matching maps from the previous entry did not survive technical changes. Neverheless, it was a popular entry with tons of content, maps, modes, and the DVD-ROM version contained a disc full of map editing and modding tutorials that may have produced innumerable game developers, cementing Unreal as a game engine licensing force. It was truly a golden era of gaming.

Unfortunately things didn't last - Epic's planned break from the yearly cadence eventually meant that what would have been Unreal Tournament 2007 became Unreal Tournament III, eschewing the annual concept, and a planned 2014 reboot got consumed by an unclear business plan and their decision to shift everything to Fortnite.

Still, the OldUnreal guys have done it again - and by that I mean they convinced Epic to let them work their magic on yet another Unreal-the-franchise title. This is a preview release, so I'm labeling it Early Access, but fire it up and experience what at least one gamer called "I had to check to make sure there wasn't an Xbox under my desk."

Developer: Volition
Release Date: September 30, 1999
Source Code Release Date: April 25, 2002

FreeSpace 2 was the sequel to Descent: FreeSpace - The Great War. The first game was unrelated to the Descent series and only used the name to avoid conflict with a commercial software utility, so the sequel dropped it.

Although not a commercial success, it gained a cult following, especially in the wake of the 2002 release of the source code which gave rise to the FreeSpace 2 Source Code Project, one of the oldest continously maintained source ports in existence. In 2022 they added Mac support and in 2024 they added Apple Silicon support.

NOTE: The links below are to the Mac builds of the game, but there also exists a project called Knossos.NET which consists of a utility which will handle the installation and configuration for you, including installing the data files from GOG installers. For the quickest route to getting the game check out the Knossos.NET entry on our Utilities page.

  Buy FreeSpace 2 on GOG.com

Developer: Pumpkin Studios
Release Date: April 10, 1999
Source Code Release Date: December 6, 2004

Warzone 2100 is a post-apocalyptic real-time strategy game from 1999 whose source was released in 2004 and whose content was released as freeware in 2008.

Although my aim is to host signed and notarized game bundles on Mac Source Ports, the Warzone 2100 Project has done incredible work on this port and has logistical reasons for not being notarized yet. While they work through that process, I decided it was worth making an exception to the site's policy so that Apple Silicon gamers looking for a full, free and polished RTS would be able to find it.

Because the app bundle is not notarized, on first run you may run into issues. The shortest answer is to right-click on the app bundle (wz2100.app) and select Open. The long answer is here.