Article URL: https://mac-classic.com/news/half-life-ported-to-mac-os-9/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49089814 Points: 94 # Comments: 29

Half-Life has finally landed for PowerPC based Macintosh computers 28 years after it's original release! Half-Life is a story driven first-person shooter, that follows scientist Gordon Freeman, who is a theoretical physicist trying to survive and escape the Black Mesa Research Facility after a failed experiment opens a portal to an alien dimension. The game was originally planned to be released for Mac OS 9 by Valve in 1999, but was cancelled shortly before launch. Valve didn't bring Half-Life to Mac OS X until 2013 which was well into the intel based CPU era, and now we finally have a release for PowerPC based machines. This port has been accomplished by GitHub user doctashay using a fork of Xash3D FWGS, (a re-implementation of the GoldSrc engine). It's playable from start to finish, includes multiplayer support, a demo of Uplink, along with downloads for Blue Shift and Opposing Force. This release supports G3 and G4 PowerPC based computers running Mac OS 9.0 or later. Performance heavily depends on the GPU present in your machine, iMacs, iBooks etc. may struggle with performance you have less than 8Mb VRAM. This is a huge achievement for the Macintosh gaming community, and doctashay deserves considerable credit for the work involved in bringing Half-Life to the PowerPC platform. Half-Life for Mac OS 9 is a story driven first-person shooter, following scientist Gordon Freeman as he tries to survive and escape the Black Mesa Research Facility.