Progress on our new Mac App Compatibility Environment

[Toni_]

Hey Toni_,

I was just about to shoehorn a few games into the existing packages, and then realized that summer has come and gone If you've got anything you want me to test, let me know.

Meanwhile, your contact link on the website is dead, as it points to the old 68kmla forum. Might be a good idea to update it

PM me if you're interested, otherwise I'll break out the hex editor in a week or so. The biggest pain will be fighting with Monterey to let the modified apps run. I'll probably have to build up the apps from scratch and paste in the binary code to evade Apple's protections at this point.

Also, a few questions:
I noticed that you're currently forcing Intel mode on the apps; I'm fully M1 on the host side now, and forcing the apps to run in Apple Silicon mode appears to work just fine. Is there a reason for explicitly setting Intel as your priority architecture?

I also noticed that you embed a few flags for things like fullscreen and hidpi. Is there a plan to migrate these to a plist for easier tweaking?

Thanks for keeping this project going!

Hi,

Sorry for the slow reply, it's been slow on the dev side since last summer. But hoping to catch up the speed again this year Thanks for pointing out the architecture and plist settings, those will def be on list of things to fix. They will most likely get improved when we get a more streamlined build system, and get closer to the "generic" release. Right now a lot of stuff is getting fixed at compile time to be application-specific, but plan is to (hopefully soon) move to more dynamic configuration, and for example allow selecting between the "classic" and "color" emulation modes (among other important settings) at runtime instead of build-time.

The main focus has still been on implementing missing features and improving compatibility, and we actually got some cool news - we just now finally added basic Sound Manager 2.x compatibility (although for now only in the b&w "classic" mode)

Link to the Sound Manager 2.x update blog post: https://mace.software/2022/04/13/sound-manager/

It's not yet fully complete (as detailed in the post), but at moment functional enough to cover a bunch of test cases for us We haven't updated any test apps (or added new ones), as we really need to improve both the build process, and also figure out a better way to share the demo packages (current WordPress approach is both really PITA to maintain - and also WP seems to randomly delete binary files...) But hopefully this summer we will make progress on that side too.

Thank you for your continued interest, let us know if you got any questions