OSX version improvements


Despite this being sort of a "retro" game, I coulnd't help but provide some builds for a newer plataform, just because I'm a big OSX fan (even with my recent disappointments with Apple). I also absolutely LOVE my PowerMac G4 and was feeling an itch to make one of my games run well on it. Given my efforts on porting Mistral Report to Amiga, this felt like the perfect match.

Such beauty

To be fair, I had builds of the game running on OSX from  early on (around late 2018), but it was always a very rough version, without much care to stability.

One of the first OSX screenshots

Notice the game was not even done by then



Ever since getting the G4, I slowly studied what was needed for it to support the game and how Apple Universal binaries worked - there were, of course, some hurdles along the way - Xcode 2.5 is plain simply weird (mind you, I began using Xcode on 3.2, which now looks like another universe). Surprisingly, Xcode 11 still loads projects saved in 2.5 format reasonably well. After recreating some of the UI using NIBs (precursor to XIBs) and some care taken to support Cocoa most basic audio systems (my first stab at it was using AVFoundation), it was good to go. Gotta admit I was thrilled to see my Universal binary running on a 2012 Mac Mini running Mojave. Sadly, Catalina decided to break that compabilty.


Gives me great joy to see that icon on the dock (and on Launchpad)

There are some issues will pending to fix, but those are quite minor:

  • The menu items are the default stub ones. I never got around to learn much on how to edit those, since my Cocoa knowledge was firmly entrenched on UIKit (iOS)
  • Window resizing doesn't work all that well in a few ocasions, sometimes cropping the game image at the wrong size.
  • PCM audio comes from my work on supporting the Amiga. The Mac deserves better, higher-quality audio.
  • No clue on how it will behave on different keyboard layouts. I'm a QWERTY user. Recently, my CPC demo (https://montyontherun.itch.io/madame-y) got some comments on how it doesn't work all that well with AZERTY users - something I completely forgot about. Don't even get me started on DVORAK.
  • The icons seem very hit or miss. Making icons for OSX apps is, it seems, way too complicated for it's own good. I have no clue on how to create it from the G4 (Xcode 2.5 doesn't provide a good tool for that). In the past, I had those kinda working for Catalina and Mojave. Now, it's all blank. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Pleae, test it and let me know where I could improve things? This is my gift to the classic Mac community and I would love to tailor it to your needs.

68K Classic builds? I'm still trying to figure out Retro68 (https://github.com/autc04/Retro68). In the meantime, I plan to release an Android version (pretty much  done. Went live a couple of months ago, but had a release-only crash and I had to pull it out. Now, I can't release it on Play for legal reasons) and a pure Win32 version (made some advancements on the Noudar95 (https://twitter.com/DanMonteiroNit/status/961362234642522113) demo that makes it playable on pretty much everything....but my original Windows 95 install, sadly).

Files

The Mistral Report for OSX (32-bit Universal PowerPC and Intel Binary) 674 kB
Jun 11, 2020
The Mistral Report for OSX (64-bit Catalina Binary) 636 kB
Jun 11, 2020

Get The Mistral Report: Invisible Affairs

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