No 64-bit version of Marble Blast? Bad news for macOS users planning to update

As some of you may know, yesterday was Apple's WWDC. There, they announced macOS High Sierra, and developers were told that this upcoming version will be the last version to support 32-bit apps. This means you will not be able play MarbleBlast if you upgrade your Mac to a version newer than High Sierra. I acknowledged that TorqueGames lost the rights to own MarbleBlast; therefore there hasn't been any development of a 64-bit version AFAIK, and people active in the MarbleBlast community are mod developers.

If you really want to upgrade to a future version later than High Sierra and still want to play MarbleBlast, then you can either create a virtual machine or partition. If you don't care about upgrading, then you don't have to do anything.

Why I keep thinking Apple keeps going to shit even more: their horrible updates and changes and announcements.

Well shit.
Nope, never using High Sierra ever in my life or anything that doesn't support 32bit gaming.

Screw that.

High Sierra still supports 32-bit I think, but anything after that will not.

Nature Freak wrote: High Sierra still supports 32-bit I think, but anything after that will not.

Yeah I know. Still not upgrading. lol

Just watched that WWDC keynote. The thing to note is that "High Sierra will be the last version of macOS to support 32 bit apps without compromises." After High Sierra they're going to start aggressively warning people about 32-bit apps, although they never said when they would completely remove support for them. Probably the release after that.

Whatever the case is, we don't have the source to Marble Blast Gold's engine so there is no way we can provide a 64 bit binary (fun fact: the MBG binary we use for MBP is actually compiled with PowerPC support... talk about a blast from the past).

Not a mac user but I would like to say about the time people started transitioning from 32 to 64bit. Would be bertter not not happen as rapidly but other than we can't sit in past all the time. If that helps devs focus on other things like stability then be my guest. However i have this odd feeling that keeping 32bit support is not as hard as it seams...

has anyone ever bothered to start reverse engineering this thing?

Of course we've *started,* that's how we got engine mods to work. The game is complicated and has a lot of modifications to base Torque, and instead of trying to recompile for 64-bit, it would probably be faster to just reimplement everything. Of course, that's a significant amount of work.

The good news, of course, is that there exist multiple technologies that will help people get around this. With a VM or a partition, you can immediately eliminate the problem.

Also, here's something to think about: as it stands, the only place to buy MBG legally is on the Mac Games Store, unless I was misinformed. Once that version no longer runs on OS X, IAC has two options. Either they release a new version with 64-bit support like GarageGames did with the universal binary back in the day (unlikely IMO), or IAC just stops selling MB entirely. In the latter case, we theoretically have more ethical grounds for distributing it, though it's a bit of a shaky argument and probably doesn't legally hold water.

pretty sure someones gonna develop a program that will override the 32bit support and let you play them anyway.

I'm not terribly sure of that, given that nobody did the same for PowerPC vs. Intel Mac. However, if nothing else, WINE might be able to run Win32 programs on 64-bit OSX.

eblu wrote: has anyone ever bothered to start reverse engineering this thing?

Reverse-engineering the game's physics engine (and other modifications it made to base Torque) is very, very difficult. I suppose it would be doable given enough time and effort, but those aren't really resources that we have and I don't think it would end up being very practical to do it anyway.

whirligig wrote: Also, here's something to think about: as it stands, the only place to buy MBG legally is on the Mac Games Store, unless I was misinformed. Once that version no longer runs on OS X, IAC has two options. Either they release a new version with 64-bit support like GarageGames did with the universal binary back in the day (unlikely IMO), or IAC just stops selling MB entirely.

I don't think that MB's engine could be trivially recompiled for 64-bit support (Jeff can feel free to correct me). They'll almost certainly stop selling it instead of staffing up teams to port it.

Jiquor wrote: pretty sure someones gonna develop a program that will override the 32bit support and let you play them anyway.

"override" technically isn't the right word here because the operating system explicitly needs code to manage a 32-bit environment. Apple isn't just flipping some switch and saying "ok no more 32-bit support for u sorry lol", they're removing all of the support code for it.

whirligig wrote: I'm not terribly sure of that, given that nobody did the same for PowerPC vs. Intel Mac. However, if nothing else, WINE might be able to run Win32 programs on 64-bit OSX.

I don't know much about OSX internals, but from a very high level it seems plausible to me that you could do this with some sort of third-party kernel extension. It's way less complicated than running PPC programs on Intel Macs because you don't need to do any emulation. In general though I don't think Apple's target audience really cares that much.

Using a VM is almost certainly the best solution here.

What Derpking said is correct, Torque Game Engine cannot even compile to 64bit. The engine was made for Windows 9x/2000/XP and MacOS 10.3 which were 32bit kernels. (Hell, MacOS used PowerPC even, we got lucky GarageGames even gave us a Mac Intel version).

To clear up confusion, MacOS High Sierra releasing this year will still support 32bit applications. Anything higher is going to be a hit or miss.

I for one am happy they are killing 32bit, because it is about damn time. 32bit is OLD. I am happy apple is doing that. I wish Microsoft would stop making 32bit kernels still. Every modern desktop CPU since 2006 has been 64bit. [The last high performance 32bit CPU from Intel was the Intel Core Duo (NOT CORE2)]. 32bit is dead.

I'm still surprised this game runs on windows 10, considering a TON of win9x compatible programs won't launch.

Ah well, this game is old. Run a VM.

I have been planning ahead for a while now on what to do for macOS 10.14. So far, I have been able to get Snow Leopard running under Parallels and Fusion, though both don't support, 3D acceleration, for any version of macOS/Mac OS X. This means when I run MarbleBlast, there is just a black screen, there is sound as you can hear the music and also if you move the mouse around the black window, you hear the buttons being hovered over. Later on a demo starts to play, then crashes.

I tried to do this in both a High Sierra and Snow Leopard VM, (10.6 required an EFI patch to run as a VM to bypass server OS check). Both VMs displayed black screens. I would prefer using Snow Leopard as this also has support for PPC applications. This would mean that it could have more use as well as just for 32-bit support. Though the 3D acceleration is not supported so doesn't run most 3D stuff, just the OS.

I have an iMac 13,1 (Late 2012) and did manage to boot (not virtualise but actually boot) Snow Leopard onto this machine. I used Parallels to run the Installers, and installed it onto a USB Hard Disk. After replacing the mach_kernel for an Ivy Bridge version of it in the root of the USB disk, it could boot, but exactly the same graphics issues happened. Plus, there was no sound.

I tried this same method on a Mac Pro 3,1 (Early 2008) which came with 10.5 (Leopard, not SL). Now the graphics was changed from its original to a GTX 680. The installer DVD would not boot, because of graphics card not supported, so I had to installing using the way I did on the iMac, though kept the default kernel the same. There was sound, but again, black screen for MarbleBlast.

So there are graphics issues on all 3 methods I have tried, for Snow Leopard. VMs won't support 3D acceleration and neither does the 640M in my iMac, and neither does the GTX 680.

Keeping a small partition of High Sierra is probably the best thing to do as then I can run 32-bit apps, though no PPC support, you see it would be nice to have the best of all in one OS, which is Snow Leopard. I have seen someone running Mavericks under QEMU/KVM, on a Linux host, with 3D acceleration in the guest, but I am not sure how he did it and probably wouldn't perform as well than in Fusion/Parallels/Native Boot. What do you think is to be done?

Why not just run a windows partition or use wine? Why go through all that trouble of virtualizing macOS when you can't get 3D acceleration on any hyper-visor on MacOS?

You know I just love those old PPC apps and other Pangea games. Also for some reason Marble Blast seems easier to use in macOS than when I have used it in Windows, not sure why. I will probably just use an old PPC Mac and High Sierra partition, and of course Windows for other games, I managed to find a mac OS 9 app for Windows that works in 7 but not 10, which was cool to use.

Coming back to this topic, just installed 10.14 beta onto a partition, and this is what happens when you run MBG:


As you can see we are warned even more about 32-bit support... But it does indeed still work!

(the About this Mac in this beta still shows High Sierra icon, but I promise it is 10.14)

So maybe we will get just 1 more year of 32-bit support.

On the other hand, DVD player is now 64-Bit, and has a new icon, and is in a different location, (it was 32 in 10.13 and below) :

Indeed we will get 1 more year of support. But that's about it for MBG on macOS natively. Chances are in a year's time we'll have to start shipping a Wine build or just no build at all.

How about the overkill approach?

We could pre-configure a light-weight Marble Blast VM, toss out instructions on installing VirtualBox and installing a VDI image, boom.

~Aayrl

Hence what I mentioned about Wine. It'll still hurt me deep inside though.

I just installed MBG onto WinE and when it launches for the first time (the WinE one), I get a 32-bit warning. So if WinE is making 32-bit Applications, then it won't really help. Maybe new versions of WinE will make the executable inside the app 64-bit?

RossDarker wrote: I just installed MBG onto WinE and when it launches for the first time (the WinE one), I get a 32-bit warning. So if WinE is making 32-bit Applications, then it won't really help. Maybe new versions of WinE will make the executable inside the app 64-bit?

32-bit applications can only be run with 32-bit WINE. There's no way around this because 32-bit and 64-bit code cannot interact with each other and WINE doesn't do CPU emulation.

RIP




Seems also that zsh is now the default shell instead of bash on 10.15

RIP Indeed. We might start distributing qemu or something, but don't get your hopes up on it happening soon. If you want to play PQ in the future, you will have to either not upgrade, use a virtual machine, or install a different operating system.

How frustrating. Was nice while it lasted. This doesn't stop me from updating STOP II for the Mac version, but might as well take this as sign to start stand-alone projects a lot sooner.

It would be a miracle if a member from GarageGames had source code to make a 64-bit version. Would never count on that happening though. Just saying if it did though, I'd win the lottery.

EDIT: This post just ranked my stats up to "Advanced Marbler" for post count. Hooray?