this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
320 points (98.8% liked)
Gaming
20062 readers
18 users here now
Sub for any gaming related content!
Rules:
- 1: No spam or advertising. This basically means no linking to your own content on blogs, YouTube, Twitch, etc.
- 2: No bigotry or gatekeeping. This should be obvious, but neither of those things will be tolerated. This goes for linked content too; if the site has some heavy "anti-woke" energy, you probably shouldn't be posting it here.
- 3: No untagged game spoilers. If the game was recently released or not released at all yet, use the Spoiler tag (the little ⚠️ button) in the body text, and avoid typing spoilers in the title. It should also be avoided to openly talk about major story spoilers, even in old games.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In the earlier days of OS X this was true. A port from one to the other was somewhat trivial. However, Apple has done Apple things and tried to invent their own gaming library API after killing off OpenGL support on Macs and they've probably been up to some other buggery since then as well. Porting to Mac is probably equally as difficult from Windows now as Linux, and Linux has overtaken them on number of people who are playing on Steam.
They still have some pretty old version of OpenGL and Metal was a bit before Vulkan, so it’s sort of a lightning vs USB C situation.
I don’t believe that it was easy. Since it started macOS was based on BSD, not Linux, which is quite different. They also use different types of binaries and the similarities between kernels should end beyond the BSD compatibility layer. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths#FreeBSD_is_Just_macOS_Without_the_Good_Bits
Games have never been “trivial” to port to Mac, why do you think there are so few games that have been ported? Unless you write it for macOS, it’s just not easy or even worth it to port, has been since the Apple II days.
I meant the trivial portion would be porting back and forth between linux and early Mac OSX, making it a two-for-one proposition (though back then a lot of companies still chose not to do the linux port).
But even OSX was BSD, not Linux.
OSX was BSD based as well. Mac OS 9 and before were proprietary OSes. I don’t remember what the graphics underpinnings were, but I do know that porting directx to system 8.6 was a gargantuan task and the Mac ports were always 1-2 years behind pc.