Are there any good emulation options for playing old Mac OS X games?

[bribri]

With current systems and emulation options that I know of, I can play old Macintosh games from the entire classic era, and any Mac OS X / macOS games that were compiled for x86_64 (or of course arm64).

However there's a gap, which is all of the PPC and x86 Mac OS X games, which require an older version of Mac OS X to play.

Are there any good emulation options for older releases of Mac OS X? Qemu doesn't emulate sound in Mac OS X (as far as I can tell), and commercial options like VMware Fusion don't emulate hardware accelerated graphics. Are there any other options I may not be aware of?

[adespoton]

With current systems and emulation options that I know of, I can play old Macintosh games from the entire classic era, and any Mac OS X / macOS games that were compiled for x86_64 (or of course arm64).

However there's a gap, which is all of the PPC and x86 Mac OS X games, which require an older version of Mac OS X to play.

Are there any good emulation options for older releases of Mac OS X? Qemu doesn't emulate sound in Mac OS X (as far as I can tell), and commercial options like VMware Fusion don't emulate hardware accelerated graphics. Are there any other options I may not be aware of?

You've got multiple questions going at once here; one is: are there good emulation options for older releases of Mac OS X?

For PPC, the answer here essentially boils down to the Screamer build of QEMU-PPC (available on here from the QEMU downloads page). However, both DingusPPC and MAME are *almost* at the place where they can run up to 10.2 with audio -- it's not quite there yet, but will be soon. There's also PearPC, but it doesn't have audio support.

For X86, it again boils down to either VM if you're on X86, or QEMU if you're not.

But it sounds like the real question you're asking is: Is there something that emulates hardware accelerated graphics? The answer to that is still no. There's a few virtual graphics cards out there, but none of them are yet functional with the current crop of emulators and VMs; S3 Virge is the latest thing we've got, although QEMU does have a stub for the ATi Rage -- it's just that most of the acceleration routines don't actually do anything. And none of these solutions involve hardware pass-through. You CAN do hardware pass-through, but modern graphics cards are far enough advanced from the 2000-2008 graphics cards as to be non-functional.

[bribri]

Too bad the options are still limited. Hopefully at some point there'll be a way of revisiting games from the early days of Mac OS X without needing to have working original hardware on hand.

[adespoton]

Too bad the options are still limited. Hopefully at some point there'll be a way of revisiting games from the early days of Mac OS X without needing to have working original hardware on hand.

It'll get there. What's been fascinating (to me) to see over the past few years is the interplay between QEMU, DingusPPC and MAME. The three systems appear to be converging on the bits that are hard/missing in G1/G2/G3/G4 emulation now.

What we really need is people with a deeper understanding of Rage128 internals, and people with the time and patience to sort out the audio issues. Right now, most of the progress in these areas is being accomplished by just five people in their spare time, who have been working on these issues tirelessly for decades.

[Jorpho]

Too bad the options are still limited. Hopefully at some point there'll be a way of revisiting games from the early days of Mac OS X without needing to have working original hardware on hand.

Are there really a lot of games from that period that don't have equivalent ports to other platforms..?

[adespoton]

Too bad the options are still limited. Hopefully at some point there'll be a way of revisiting games from the early days of Mac OS X without needing to have working original hardware on hand.

Are there really a lot of games from that period that don't have equivalent ports to other platforms..?

That require hardware acceleration? No. Most games either have a CPU mode or a DirectX/console equivalent (exact equivalent, not a less-finished one). There's a few games where the "deluxe" version from a different platform is the same as the only version for the Mac, but I believe there's only a handful of games that require ATi Rage acceleration (or Voodo) AND aren't available on another platform.

[bribri]

For me the question came up because I was trying to play Return to Dark Castle but I can't manage to get it to run on any early emulated version of Mac OS X. There are some other little games from that era I wouldn't mind revisiting too.

[adespoton]

For me the question came up because I was trying to play Return to Dark Castle but I can't manage to get it to run on any early emulated version of Mac OS X. There are some other little games from that era I wouldn't mind revisiting too.

RDC isn't "early" -- it was first released in 2008 and version 1.4 was released in 2014. The Windows version came out in 2021 and is still for sale via Steam. I've played it with no issues on 10.6 under emulation, and on 10.13 on an Intel Mac. Its only restriction is that it's 32-bit Intel, so won't run on Catalina or later, and won't run on Rosetta 2 on an M-series Mac. Works fine on 10.6 (likely also 10.7) on QEMU on an M-series Mac though; I play it on my M1 MacBook Pro.

[bribri]

RDC isn't "early" -- it was first released in 2008 and version 1.4 was released in 2014. The Windows version came out in 2021 and is still for sale via Steam. I've played it with no issues on 10.6 under emulation, and on 10.13 on an Intel Mac. Its only restriction is that it's 32-bit Intel, so won't run on Catalina or later, and won't run on Rosetta 2 on an M-series Mac. Works fine on 10.6 (likely also 10.7) on QEMU on an M-series Mac though; I play it on my M1 MacBook Pro.

I guess I need a better term than early, but it's a mac app that can no longer be run on a modern mac, so it's not modern either. I guess it's kind of middle era now?

However, I did not realize there was a Windows version! I'll check that out.

And I was trying to play it on an Intel mac running macOS 13, so no 32-bit apps. I tried emulating PPC Mac OS X 10.3 in QEMU and 10.6 / 10.13 in VMware Fusion and it wouldn't run properly with either. Is there a reason QEMU would have better compatibility with Apple Silicon?

edit: It doesn't appear to be out for Windows. There's no steam page for it, and all I could find was a reddit thread claiming a problem with the rights holder that forced them to shelve the Steam version indefinitely. From what I'm reading, I don't think it was ever released for Windows.

[adespoton]

RDC isn't "early" -- it was first released in 2008 and version 1.4 was released in 2014. The Windows version came out in 2021 and is still for sale via Steam. I've played it with no issues on 10.6 under emulation, and on 10.13 on an Intel Mac. Its only restriction is that it's 32-bit Intel, so won't run on Catalina or later, and won't run on Rosetta 2 on an M-series Mac. Works fine on 10.6 (likely also 10.7) on QEMU on an M-series Mac though; I play it on my M1 MacBook Pro.

I guess I need a better term than early, but it's a mac app that can no longer be run on a modern mac, so it's not modern either. I guess it's kind of middle era now?

However, I did not realize there was a Windows version! I'll check that out.

And I was trying to play it on an Intel mac running macOS 13, so no 32-bit apps. I tried emulating PPC Mac OS X 10.3 in QEMU and 10.6 / 10.13 in VMware Fusion and it wouldn't run properly with either. Is there a reason QEMU would have better compatibility with Apple Silicon?

edit: It doesn't appear to be out for Windows. There's no steam page for it, and all I could find was a reddit thread claiming a problem with the rights holder that forced them to shelve the Steam version indefinitely. From what I'm reading, I don't think it was ever released for Windows.

What didn't run properly? I can't see a reason it would run in QEMU but not VMWare Fusion. Did it throw any particular errors?

[bribri]

What didn't run properly? I can't see a reason it would run in QEMU but not VMWare Fusion. Did it throw any particular errors?

Yes, on both it tossed up an OpenGL error on launch and then quit.

[adespoton]

What didn't run properly? I can't see a reason it would run in QEMU but not VMWare Fusion. Did it throw any particular errors?

Yes, on both it tossed up an OpenGL error on launch and then quit.

Hmm... when I get some spare time, I'll investigate that further, as QEMU shouldn't be able to run something that depends on OpenGL. Maybe I tweaked something to get it working.