I got my first mac a few years back off the side of the road, a 2009 imac that didn’t work. I went to a lot of trouble to find and install the most up to date mac os I could get on it for the challenge and because I’d never used a intel mac before.
Believe me, they absolutely did just flick a switch. everything about steam worked fine until the day it didn’t even load up. removing support is one thing, actively bricking your product is a total scum fuck move that is just common practice in gaming now.
On the modern ARM based Macs (the M1/2/3/X processors), it isn’t an option. The only real solution is to use desktop virtualisation software like Parallels to install Windows (ARM based) and try to get Steam going. There are cheaper alternatives to Parallels, but they are often a faff.
I have an M2 Air which can run the Windows version of Steam via Whisky. Its ability can be patchy, but the fact it runs any games at all is little short of a miracle. I’ve been playing The Talos Principle II that way, and while my wife thinks the glitchy graphics are hilarious, I’m not too fussed because the gameplay is still there.
Of course, it’s not perfect, and while I can get Fallout 4 to run, it looks like shit even on the lowest settings. However, in the context of the gripes in this thread, it means I can play Portal 2 and its various mod packs on my Mac. And they look great.
It takes non-trivial effort to change the defaults of an IDE/compiler to also support EOL OSes, and a ton more effort if supporting an older version means you have to write a lot of different code for it due to not supporting new APIs.
I got my first mac a few years back off the side of the road, a 2009 imac that didn’t work. I went to a lot of trouble to find and install the most up to date mac os I could get on it for the challenge and because I’d never used a intel mac before.
Believe me, they absolutely did just flick a switch. everything about steam worked fine until the day it didn’t even load up. removing support is one thing, actively bricking your product is a total scum fuck move that is just common practice in gaming now.
Isn’t it trivial to install boot camp on this thing?
On Intel Macs, it is fairly trivial.
On the modern ARM based Macs (the M1/2/3/X processors), it isn’t an option. The only real solution is to use desktop virtualisation software like Parallels to install Windows (ARM based) and try to get Steam going. There are cheaper alternatives to Parallels, but they are often a faff.
I have an M2 Air which can run the Windows version of Steam via Whisky. Its ability can be patchy, but the fact it runs any games at all is little short of a miracle. I’ve been playing The Talos Principle II that way, and while my wife thinks the glitchy graphics are hilarious, I’m not too fussed because the gameplay is still there.
Of course, it’s not perfect, and while I can get Fallout 4 to run, it looks like shit even on the lowest settings. However, in the context of the gripes in this thread, it means I can play Portal 2 and its various mod packs on my Mac. And they look great.
I completely forgot about Whiskey. Managed to get GTA V running at 120FPS on it, which was (and still is, IMHO) absolutely mindblowing.
Yeah, that’s awesome.
Now, let’s see about Red Dead II…
I think they meant the specific “thing” metaStatic has.
It takes non-trivial effort to change the defaults of an IDE/compiler to also support EOL OSes, and a ton more effort if supporting an older version means you have to write a lot of different code for it due to not supporting new APIs.