[HN Gopher] Steam to End Support for macOS Mojave and 32-Bit Games
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Steam to End Support for macOS Mojave and 32-Bit Games
Author : tosh
Score : 20 points
Date : 2023-12-04 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.macrumors.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.macrumors.com)
| gs17 wrote:
| Title makes it sound too much like Valve is making the decision
| and that it's not a Mac-only thing. Apple is who chose to end
| 32-bit support.
| olliej wrote:
| macOS was 64bit by default more than 16 years ago[1], and has
| _only_ operated on 64 bit hardware for almost 15 of those
| years, only dropped 32bit 4 years ago, and Apple literally no
| longer sells any 32bit hardware.
|
| It was game developers who chose to keep producing 32bit
| software for more than a decade despite it clearly being a
| deprecated architecture, and clearly having no future, that
| created this problem. Developers have had more than enough time
| and notice to switch to 64bit, and chose not to.
|
| I see HN talk about MS being stupid for supporting decades of
| weirdness, and I see HN talking about how bad Apple is for not
| doing the same thing. You can't have it both ways: either you
| support everything indefinitely no matter the cost, or you move
| forward and require developers to actually pay attention to
| deprecation information.
|
| [1] Minor edit, macOS had 64bit kernel and bsd layer before
| leopard for ppc64 but iirc a lot of the UI layer frameworks
| (Cocoa, etc) had issues that meant it was not really a 64bit OS
| from an normal user PoV
| eqvinox wrote:
| The real problem is that -- to my knowledge, please correct
| me if I'm wrong -- you can't install a 32-bit environment as
| a container/subsystem/... on OSX. For both Windows and Linux,
| you can throw 32-bit components into an appropriate place and
| it'll work, while the rest of your system is 64-bit native.
|
| That said, I agree game developers were/are being slowpokes
| on this. For games shipped as 32-bit 10 years ago you can use
| emulation techniques now because you have 10 years of
| performance gains to sink into the emulation. But more recent
| stuff shipped as 32-bit is in a special bad place since it
| may rely on "current" performance...
| freedomben wrote:
| > _I see HN talk about MS being stupid for supporting decades
| of weirdness, and I see HN talking about how bad Apple is for
| not doing the same thing. You can 't have it both ways_
|
| HN is not a monolith. There are people on here that hold each
| of those opinions, and there's no inconsistency because two
| people on HN are separate entities that can have different
| opinions. HN is in fact a great place for those people to
| have a discussion.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Re. [1]: ppc64 on macOS was always an afterthought. It was
| only available on G5 systems, so developers couldn't ever
| rely on it being available, since the Powerbook and Mac Mini
| were G4 to the bitter end. And, as you mention, there was a
| long period where the GUI libraries weren't available for
| ppc64 (probably because they depended on 32-bit Carbon on the
| back end), so using it required developers to run 64-bit code
| in a separate process.
|
| From what I recall, the performance benefits weren't even
| that dramatic (and were only available on the G5 which was
| already pretty fast for the time), so very few developers
| bothered building for ppc64 unless they really needed the
| larger address space.
| dangus wrote:
| The only thing I think that sucks about this is that there is
| no software emulation or translation alternative that can
| allow you to run 32-bit macOS apps besides literally running
| the entire Mojave operating system in the background.
|
| Something like DOSBOX or Wine but for 32-bit Mac apps would
| be great. (This exists but not in a capacity that can run
| games)
|
| I also think that games are uniquely well-suited to running
| them far in the future. Most productivity apps are either
| replaced by something else or have a new version that I can
| migrate over to. When it comes to games, they are typically
| one-time art pieces.
|
| A game like Morrowind is just as "useful" as it was 20 years
| ago. Sure, I can play it with a community game engine, but
| not all games are popular enough to get that treatment.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Believe it or not, some people like playing games that were
| made before the 64 bit transition happened. Not every good
| game is a constantly updated live service.
| nick_ wrote:
| Friendly reminder that support != able to run.
|
| This seems totally reasonable to me. Are there many games played
| today which are A) 32-bit only and B) still need
| fixes/patch/update support?
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Are there many games played today
|
| Most of Valve's own games are (still!) 32-bit only on macOS,
| including all of the Half-Life games, both Portals, Left 4
| Dead, and Team Fortress 2. The only major game of theirs which
| is available for 64-bit macOS is Dota 2. (Underlords and
| Artifact were both market failures, so I'm ignoring them.)
|
| Really, the way Valve has handled the 64-bit transition on
| macOS has been pretty terrible. Up until today, their
| recommended "solution" for running 32-bit games was for users
| to downgrade to Mojave or install Windows through Boot Camp.
| (Never mind that neither of these is an option for users with
| newer computers.)
| sosodev wrote:
| Right? I know Mac users are a fraction of the market but
| recompiling nothing almost seems petty.
| duskwuff wrote:
| They even did a bunch of work on Half-Life recently for its
| 25th anniversary [1], including adding Steam Deck support
| and fixing long-standing bugs -- but that didn't extend to
| making it run on any modern macOS system.
|
| [1]: https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife25/
| zlg_codes wrote:
| This sort of stuff is unsurprising.
|
| This is alongside losing Win7 support next month because Valve
| was stupid and built on Electron, so Google dropping support
| means Electron in general loses Win7 support.
|
| How long before Steam requires a TPM to run locking me out of my
| games?
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(page generated 2023-12-04 23:01 UTC)