As usual, I embody the policy "spout off first, research later". :-P Here is an (old) "news" article explaining the state of HL on Mac:
------------ Thursday 21st October 1999 MAC GAMERS FURY OVER HALF-LIFE Vehement backlash stings Sierra Following the cancellation of Half-Life for Mac, the Inside Mac Games forum has erupted in the last 24 hours, with vitriolic gamers pulling no punches in their criticism of Sierra, Valve, and Logicware. A petition has now been set up here. "We need your help badly," said DemandMac webmaster Paul Wharff. "After months of production, the makers of Half-Life have halted the Mac version of the game. We cannot let this happen. They stand to lose more money stopping now than putting the game on the market. "We need everyone's help to get them to reverse their decision," he added. "We can only make this happen if we move quickly. If there is a demand for the game, it will be made."Others were less restrained with their views. "Sierra doesn't know crap about how to make a game," bawled one irritated punter. "Look at Unreal! Unreal is by far a more graphic and Internet intensive game than Half-life will ever be, and it's doing fine on both platforms... And Sierra can't hire a guy to do a decent job at a port for a lower-end game? If you ask me the guy who was doing the port just got lazy and did a lousy-ass job. Sierra hired the wrong guy. The dumb ass even sold out his Mac and got an Athalon! I think the guy is a frickin' traitor."Posts on the forum range from despondent, eloquent resignation to out-and-out personal hostility towards the companies involved. Sierra has made no official comment on the subject so far. ------------ Had they released this product, you would (probably) have been able to host a dedicated server on legacy Mac OS -- but the Linux version would still compiled for x86, so no dice for Linux users on other architectures (AFAIK). Curtis -----Original Message----- From: Curtis Sloan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: October 8, 2003 11:32 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: (clug-talk) (OT) Half-life server for linux Er, yes that's a good point. I see now -- it's about architecture not OS. :-P My bad. I'm pretty sure that HL is compiled for x86 only. Sorry about that. On a side note, I don't believe that full source code is available (for obvious proprietary reasons), but the SDK is the code that VALVe released to allow other parties to develop other games/mods, etc. based on the HL engine. Curtis -----Original Message----- From: Jeffrey Clement [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Jeffrey Clement Sent: October 8, 2003 11:21 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: (clug-talk) (OT) Half-life server for linux > From my knowledge and experience with HL, there should be no problem running > a Linux server on a Mac -- so long as the Mac is running Linux. :-P The > dedicated server mostly just handles traffic and algorithms -- nothing > really OS specific. Do they actually give out the source for the HL server? From a quick google it looks like they provide binaries only and most likely these are for i386. If they only provide binaries for i386 that isn't going to work on a Mac. Linux binaries will only work for the architecture they were compiled for. This is assuming that the binary packages are not java code or something like that. Jeff
