Its a good bet that the game was written entirely in something like C. So they would basically have had to recompile the thing and then run a battery of tests and QA.

Apple put in a chunk of effort to make sure porting from PPC to x86 was as easy as possible for devs to do...

Yes, but that didn't mean it was a non-trivial effort either. That was especially true for games specifically optimized to make best use of the G3/G4 and G5's unique architecture and features. I can't speak to how Blizzard/Future Point coded the Mac ports of D2 or SC, but I had the impression that those ports made heavy use of the legacy Carbon APIs, given the amount of legacy PPC code they had. To make them feasible on 10.8+ they'd have to port everything over to Cocoa.

I admit I'm not a coder by trade, but I'm under the impression that even if you did write your app entirely in C, porting your code from Carbon to Cocoa can potentially be a very time- and resource-intensive effort.

Not to mention that they had to rewrite the code relating to the networking stack to achieve compatibility with Mavericks and later. This is what definitely broke Warcraft 3 as well, as it neutered any networking capabilities and effectively turned it into a single-player game. Either way, Blizzard had to spend some resources on this.

I hope that Warcraft 3 patch 1.27 restores Mac compatibility too. Interesting enough, Blizzard said that we can expect more in the future. :-)

Hmm... Blizzard is updating old games for modern OS... Judas mentioned something about a flood of games... Could it be?!

Pipe dream, I know. ;)

Did you know that Blizzard added over 3000 Warcraft 3 assets in higher quality to the StarCraft 2 world editor (link)? They remodelled all units, heroes and buildings and many spells and doodads and they remastered sounds and music. They even added high-resolution artwork for the interface.

There is actually a very promising community project called Warcraft: Armies of Azeroth which seeks to recreate Warcraft 3 in StarCraft 2 using these assets. It is still in early development, but there are some recent reviews available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJJ4K1RAWrM.

It is odd that Blizzard put so much effort into this, but does not seem to bother releasing a Warcraft 3 HD upgrade of some sort. They sure seem to have much money to spend.

WIDESCREEN SUPPORT WHERE?!

There is a group of modders that are doing exactly that. Blizzard even supports them, although I'm not sure the project is going anywhere, since recently they started asking for money and it's highly unlikely they'd be getting that much.

Broken since v1.13

v1.12 is the last version that is interesting to me since it works with the HD hack.

Blizzard won't add nice things, they like to make things worse for many years now.
They'd need to patch Broodwar and Lord of Destruction to widescreen/HD and stop their DRM loving for their new games to get any respect from me again.

I cannot play D2 at 800x600 on a 1920x1080 display, it's unplayable.

im using mine as a coaster

If you redeem retail key on battlenet account... And you download diablo 2 + lod, you... It is DRM free, because it needs no disc to play. But if you want to play ranked-ladder, then you need to be always on. Single player exists, though and works.

You have an expensive taste in coasters I see... :P

it was 2 euro used
so not that expensive ;p

I know and noticed that it doesn't work with my copy of Diablo 2 since I got the gold edition with LoD integrated used after selling my battered original release box. The guy obviously already activated in in Battle.net a long time ago and as soon as someone played online the next owner of the key isn't able to get the DRM-free installer. :(