Enemy Territory for MAC's, is it dead?

[Blunt]

Have a friend who want to play ET but owns a 2 year old MAC Mini.   Don't know much about MAC's and looking up ET for MAC's is not direct, some say no way, since ET is 32bit and MAC's now only support 64bit, while others say WINE might be worth a shot.   Need some general guidance. 

 

[RedBaird]

I think that we do have a MAC version in the downloads section.  

 

The original version of ET definitely had a Macintosh version, but I am not sure about the more modern 2.6b OR about ETLegacy.  Okay, I found that the 2.6 version for Mac is called 2.6c.  

 

You can search in our downloads section and check out the ETL site.

 

Okay, here is the ETL Download site : https://www.etlegacy.com/download But it mentions only Mac OS X, 32-bit.  (Last OSX was released in 2015).

 

Here is advice on how to run 32-bit Mac apps in the current OS, but it requires "macOS 10.14 Mojave" to be installed in a Virtual Machine. 

PCMag article from October, 2019.      https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-run-32-bit-apps-in-macos-catalina

 

MAC  quit supporting 32-bit apps in October 2019, with "macOS 10.15    Catalina".    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history 

 

 

We need more Expert Mac-users to reply here.  I only did some "maybe helpful" searches.

 

 

💤

 

 

 

 

 

[RedBaird]

@Blunt why the  reaction?  I just searched out stuff, trying to find info-trails that your friend might follow.

 

I certainly don't have a direct and simple answer as I don't know the Mac-World at all! 😄  Someone here probably does. 👍

[bLade.]

Not sure if this will help, but it's definitely worth a shot.

 

[Blunt]

I think that helps, but will find out.  Play on Mac is a great tip.  Found this write up for POM and they even talk about how great the FA server is  

Friend is in another state, so when I can get him to try will follow up with results.  Thanks.
 

  S

[the cake is a lie]

The last version of Mac OS X that ET 2.60d ran on natively without any extra effort was 10.6 Snow Leopard released around 2009. Later versions of OS X from 10.7 Lion up to I think 10.0 Yosemite could be made to work if you fought enough with the changes apple made to the sandboxing (added security around installing software) and X11 support. I haven't heard of anyone getting the native ET client to work on macOS beyond. It also shouldn't be possible on anything after 10.15 Catalina because of the drop of 32bit support.

 

WINE or one of the wrappers for it like playonmac work okay if you don't mind playing with slightly more input lag and a much lower frame rate than with a native client. If your friend is/was/or wants to be a moderately skilled player or better the experience of playing via WINE may be frustrating. If your friend tries this approach he will need to set r_primitives to 2 to get a halfway decent framerate and do something in terminal like "defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling -1" to get rid of mouse acceleration. As long as your friend isn't using 10.15 Catalina this should work okay and only take a few minutes to get running.

 

ET:Legacy on mac is, in my experience, a buggy and crash-prone mess. Only a 32bit Legacy client is available for the mac so Legacy won't work at all on 10.15 Catalina or later. When I tried the 32bit client I was able to connect to jaymod and silent mod servers but the game crashed whenever I took damage or spectated someone who took damage so I wouldn't recommend wasting time on installing it.

 

The best option for performance is to install Windows or Ubuntu Linux on a separate partition or external drive. The native clients for windows and linux both work well. Either will take some time to get running since you need to install a separate OS. Getting sound working on Ubuntu or other Linux flavors takes another 5-10 minutes of effort but otherwise seems to work as well as the Windows client.

 

I would recommend that your friend try out ET using WINE or playonmac if his macOS version is older than Catalina. If he later wants better performance (or he is running macOS Catalina or newer) then the best option is to setup a separate operating system.

[RedBaird]

6 hours ago, the cake is a lie said:

that ET 2.60d ran on

 

See?  I knew that a MAC-expert would show up here. 

 

(I had hoped for "sooner or later", but this was even better.) 😄

 

A Big Thanks to whoever marked Cake's post as "solution".  I forgot to do that when I was first here!  

Edited September 21, 2020 by RedBaird