Mac Source Ports Progress Report: April 28, 2022

I’ve added a build of j2mv to the site, it’s a multiplayer client for Jedi Knight II. The OpenJK project had a single player client for JK2 but not one for multiplayer. Daggolin was able to figure out the trick to getting OpenJK working on arm64, he was able to apply similar logic to j2mv, which I incorporated.

I’ve updated DevilutionX, the source port of Diablo, to the latest code. They had a formal release of 1.4.0 and this includes that, plus some stuff off the main branch. I’m not sure what my long term strategy should be yet, I think at some point I’ll want to make builds based off labeled or tagged commits but I’m not sure the best way to do that. As in, for DevilutionX they have a commit they tagged as 1.4.0 and then there’s like 60+ commits after that. My build includes the 60+ commits after that which, so long as they didn’t break anything, is probably fine. Maybe at some point I’ll have a “stable release” and “latest code” thing happening.

My focus at the moment is to try and get as many games/ports as possible going, with an eye on automation down the line. At some point I need to get releases packaged into .dmg files instead of just zip files of the app bundles. Not sure if this would be less likely to trigger the “this file is not commonly downloaded” thing Chrome does when (I assume) the zip file contains executable code for the first X number of downloads.

Someone pointed out that the dhewm3 bundle for DOOM 3 did not feature the code to run the Resurrection of Evil expansion pack. I rectified that and did a new upload.

Iliyas Jorio let me know that the fourth and final Pangea Software game he maintains, Mighty Mike, is now signed and notarized so I added it to the site as well. I wasn’t sure if I should have listed it as Mighty Mike (Power Pete) or not – it was released in 1995 as a commercial CD-ROM title from Interplay/MacPlay under the Power Pete name, in 2001 Pangea regained the rights to the game but not the name so they re-released it as Mighty Mike via shareware. Maybe I have my timeframes mixed up but I’m kinda surprised to hear there was still shareware happening in 2001.

And then on something of a lark, despite still trying to get ES3 happening, I decided to do The Ur-Quan Masters, aka Star Control 2. I’ve never been into this game but it’s one of those titles where it’s frequently on the lists of best games ever made, and subsequent attempts at sequels or remakes haven’t really been a hit, sort of a RoboCop effect.

I’m always fascinated by backstories like this – the developer is Toys for Bob which, unlike a lot of developers from the 90’s is still technically around, though for a while there they were stuck in licensed game hell. In any event, Star Control II was ported to the 3DO where they used the then-novel CD-ROM technology to add speech and different music to the game.

Apparently the source to the original DOS version is completely lost, but the 3DO port’s code was still available so they made it open source. Then at some point they made the content for the game be freeware under a creative commons license. The one thing they didn’t own and couldn’t release was the Star Control name, which is in some legal limbo clusterfuck that continues to this day, so the project is The Ur-Quan Masters, which was the subtitle of the original game.

Since the game uses very little if any 3D graphics (there’s some level of OpenGL in there but it’s primarily a 2D game) I figured it would come over to Apple Silicon fairly easily. And for the most part it did, with a couple of hitches.

Most of the source ports I work with use either Make or CMake to handle builds, with probably 2/3 or more of those being CMake. I’m still figuring out the best practices there but I’m coming around to liking CMake projects the most because they’re much closer to uniformity with what works.

There’s some outliers – a few projects use nonstandard stuff, like Ninja. The DXX-Rebirth ports used SConstruct which I’ve never even accidentally run into anywhere. The Ur-Quan Masters, however, uses its own homegrown build system. It’s not that bad, it is to some extent a scripted wrapper around Make, and they have another script that builds an App bundle, not entirely successfully but nothing I can’t work around

The problem is it has a menu system. You have to select a few things by specifying numbers, and even that’s no big deal except it requires intervention and I can’t automate it. Star Control 2 came out in 1992 and The Ur-Quan Masters started in 2002, so it’s a 20-year-old source project for a 30-year-old game. Maybe they’d do it differently today but a number of today’s practices either didn’t exist or weren’t mature in 2002.

Anyway without a ton of hassle I had it doing a Universal 2 build and even included the data files so it can be the full game (according to the FAQ on the website, this is permissible). But the problem was – the sound was fucked up on Apple Silicon. The graphics were fine, the sound had an issue.

There’s two or three libraries included in source code form that appear to be sound-related. My first thought was perhaps one of these has an updated version that works with Apple Silicon so I could just copy over newer code, but the UQM devs actually left a note to future developers that these were custom versions of these libraries, so that was out – no telling if a new version of the code would work at all.

Then on a Hail Mary hunch I figured – ok, so if it’s working on Intel Macs and screwed up on Apple Silicon Macs, could there be some sort of code in these audio libraries that’s being configured for Intel. So I did a search for “x86_64” and found two places doing an #ifdef thing. I added arm64 to the list of defined variables and it worked. Essentially it was two places that had to define a typedef for 64-bit machines and this code predates arm64 (or at least Apple Silicon). The website for the port says the 0.8 version released late 2021 was the first release in almost a decade.

In that vein, I added a new “Full Game” badge to source ports on the site to indicate releases that include the game data or at least don’t require you to download or configure anything out. Looks like right now with the Pangea titles, the Marathon titles, Star Control II and a few others, there’s a dozen full game releases on the site.