Mac Source Ports

Developer: PopCap Games
Release Date: May 5, 2009

Plants vs. Zombies is an example of casual game perfection, from developer PopCap Games at their peak, pre-acquisition. Effectively a tower defense game without being a tower defense game, it has a difficulty curve so incredibly well done that at some point you're pulling off elaborate strategies without ever feeling like you're not ready for it. With an addicting amount of depth, additional mini-games once you finish the campaign, and no microtransactions or mismatched mechanics, it's a game that absolutely holds up.

It's also a game where I had no idea there was a modding community, let alone a nearly perfect reverse engineered source port nearly five years in the making. I honestly thought for a minute it was some sort of trick but no, PvZ Portable is a true reverse engineered port.

NOTE: While PvZ-Portable definitely works with Plants vs. Zombies: Game of the Year Edition, I'm not clar if it works with the regular (non-GOTY) edition. As of this writing the GOTY edition is the only version on Steam. As far as I can tell it does not work with the recent Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted edition.

Developer: Jonas Echterhoff
Release Date: 2000

In another example of the charm of early 2000's Macintosh shareware, Reckless Drivin' is a fun top down driving game where you attempt to balance damaging other cars, avoiding the police, and making it to the end of the level in one piece. It was released in 2000 by Jonas Echterhoff who put out the source code and released the game as freeware in 2019 it was recently ported to modern systems by Darren Cohen.

Developer: Wildfire Games
Release Date: April 1, 2010
Source Code Release Date: July 10, 2009

0 A.D. is a game like Age of Empires, which is appropriate given that it started out its life a quarter century ago as an Age of Empires II mod. After close to a decade of work the team decided the AOE2 engine was too limiting and decided to expand to their own engine which they've been plugging away at ever since. As of this writing they left Alpha status a little under a month ago, and they recently got Apple Silicon support nailed down.

Note that we are linking to their download page instead of direct files as there are multiple download options including BitTorrent to save the developers some bandwidth.

Developer: Valve Software
Release Date: November 19, 1998

For the 100th game on Mac Source Ports, I wanted it to be something special. It turned out to be a quite a doozy as well.

It's not an overstatement to say Half-Life changed everything. It challenged what we thought first person shooters, narrative content, and gaming atmosphere in general were capable of. It spawned spinoffs, sequels, and launched Valve software into the massive force it is today. It says something that in a world filled with tons of games to choose from, everyone is still begging Valve to make another entry in this series to tie off the now fifteen-year cliffhanger of Half-Life 2: Episode Two.

Half-Life and the Mac have an interesting history, as well. Long before Steam was even a thought in their head, Valve announced and began work on porting the game to Mac OS 9, but it was eventually canceled. Then in 2013, Valve decided to release Steam for the Mac, the first non-Windows computer platform for it, and ported their games to Steam in the process, so now finally Half-Life was available on the Mac. However, the releases were 32-bit apps so when macOS 10.15 Catalina cut off support for 32-bit apps, Half-Life became unavailable to anyone who upgraded, and Apple Silicon Macs never had a chance to play it.

Meanwhile, a project arose called Xash3D. Since the engine for Half-Life, now retronymed GoldSrc for various reasons, was derived from Quake and Quake II, and the SDK for mods was also available, theoretically someone could reverse engineer the game with a lot of effort. The Xash3D project and the later successor project, Xash3D FWGS, appear to have done exactly that over the course of many years now. The result is a fascinating Frankenstein project meshing various id Tech engines and source ports together, the net effect of which is Half-Life can be played on everything from an Android phone to a Raspberry Pi.

In 2019, the Xash3D FWGS project dropped any official support for macOS and iOS due to Apple's deprecation of OpenGL and decision to move towards signed and notarized code (they have since restored support). As a result, I've had many people ask me to build this project so I figured I'd eventually do it and the one year anniversary of the site and the 100th game seemed appropriate to me. However the one year anniversary of the site was a month ago, but if there's an appropriate project for Valve Time to affect, it would be this one.

They're waiting for you. In the test chamber...

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you used one of the previous builds of Xash3D FWGS that we hosted here on Mac Source Ports, note that the location of the data has changed from ~/Library/Application Support/Xash3D to ~/Library/Application Support/Xash3D FWGS. If you get an error about how the engine could not find the "valve" folder, this is why.

Developer: Interplay Productions
Release Date: October 10, 1997

Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game is the first game in the Fallout franchise. Originally intended to be a sequel to Wasteland, it follows a retrofuturistic society where you play as an adventurer surfacing from an underground vault designed to protect citizens from nuclear war.

Like the Fallout 2 project, this source port project is the work of an individual who has reverse engineered the original source to the game as well as made a second, parallel version designed to run on modern machines.

  Buy Fallout on GOG.com

  Buy Fallout on the Humble Store

Developer: Black Isle Studios
Release Date: October 29, 1998

From the era when major sequels came out within a year, Fallout 2 improves on just about everything from its predecessor and continued the cult following franchise into a series that persists to this day.

This source port follows a similar path to the Devilution project where an individual has reverse engineered the original source to the game as well as made a second, parallel version designed to run on modern machines. Whereas there have been a few attempts over the years to make an engine that could run the game, this impressive new effort came together in just a few months.

  Buy Fallout 2 on GOG.com

  Buy Fallout 2 on the Humble Store

Developer: id Software
Release Date: December 10, 1993
Source Code Release Date: December 23, 1997

You can't *not* have DOOM on a site like this. With its classic and low system requirements, DOOM famously runs on anything with a screen and a processor, so naturally it (still) runs on the Mac. The most active source port is GZDoom, which is ahead of the curve on having a Universal 2 app with M1 Mac support so we're just linking to it here. Be sure to check out their website for more info.

We've also linked to ZDoom, an older but discontinued predecessor to GZDoom, for those of you who want to run DOOM on an older PowerPC Mac.

  Buy DOOM on GOG.com

Developer: id Software
Release Date: June 22, 1996
Source Code Release Date: December 21, 1999

Quake is a first-person shooter, the first in the Quake series, which added polygonal enemies, advanced geometry, and a soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails. A fascinating example of grappling with technology changes in parallel to gameplay, it spawned entire industries of modders and mutiplayer gaming.

The vkQuake port was derived from the QuakeSpasm Spiked port and uses Vulkan on macOS by way of MoltenVK. In addition, vkQuake recently added support for the remastered version of Quake from Night Dive Studios.

And because I've had a few requests for it, we are now hosting a build of DarkPlaces as an alternative port.

If you want to experience what it was like to play Quake at laumch before the advent of GLQuake or hardware acceleration, we have added Chocolate Quake as an additional option.

  Buy Quake on GOG.com

  Buy Quake on the Humble Store

Developer: Blizard Entertainment
Release Date: January 3, 1997

Diablo more or less invented the modern action RPG, combining addictive gameplay with roguelike elements such as randomly generated levels. You choose from one of three character classes and play as a lone hero from Tristram in the Kingdom of Khanduras who ventures into the dungeons below to fight demons, score loot, and eventually entering Hell to confront Diablo, the Lord of Terror. The formula has been duplicated multiple times over the years and the series has spawned multiple sequels.

The original game in the series, while groundbreaking, has received less attention and updates from Blizzard, but also has a unique distinction in that it's the only entry whose source has been reverse engineered. The story is sort of wild and involves an effort whose catalyst involved the discovery of a debug symbols file on the retail Japanese PlayStation 1 copy of the game. The result was the Devilution project, which recreates the original source code, and the DevilutionX project which enhances the original and allows for ports to everything from the Amiga to the Nintendo Switch.

Mac Source Ports is now handling an official build for the DevilutionX project. As a bonus, another individual on the DevilutionX team has built versions that run on 32-bit Intel and PowerPC Macs so this is the rare entry on our site that can be played as far back as Mac OS X 10.4. Science isn't about why, it's about why not!

  Buy Diablo on GOG.com

Developer: Bullfrog Productions
Release Date: March 28, 1997

Famed Amiga developer Bullfrog released this second entry in the "Theme" series (following Theme Park) which allowed players to design and run a hospital. The name Theme Hospital may not make a ton of sense but the game was ridiculously popular. The CorsixTH project is one of the more thorough and well organized source port projects active today, and Mac Source Ports is handling the Mac build.

  Buy Theme Hospital on GOG.com