I dunno I hear both sets of terminology for porting - I don't think it really matters since one can specify native or emulated port if one needs to as well as saying port for native port or emulation for anything else. It doesn't really seem like a point of terminology worth debating.

Arcanum is a pretty unlikely candidate. The games currently available for OSX on GOG are either running in the Mac version of DOSBox or recent and have a native port made by the developer.

Arcanum is neither, it's an old Windows game and the developer has been dead for many years. That's not what a port is, that's emulation.
If it's not native, it's not a port. That's like saying "It's an aeroplane! Well ok, it doesn't actually fly but it's still a plane!".

Have you tried it in CrossOver?

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=4196

You seem to equate porting software to it "just working" in multiple environments. How you get things working is irrelevant to the discussion, if it works via emulation, it's not a port. You can argue semantics all day long, but for 99% of people, saying "port" involves modification of the source code or recompilation for a new architecture (among other things), emulation is not porting.

Java also isn't relevant, it was designed so that it could run on multiple platforms, but the interpreter still has to be implemented on the target platform. So even though your Java app will work on anything that can interpret JVM, the interpreter still has to exist in some manner or another (h/w or s/w). So Java working on several platforms has nothing to do with the Java app being ported, it has to do with the interpreter being implemented or not.

You know what, I don't care. Unless someone wants to provide a 100% clear definition without exceptions I'm not interested in arguing mushy semantics. Just like how a Java interpreter has to run natively, so has the emulator to run natively. What about PowerPC applications that were running on intel Macs using Rosetta? See, I can find special cases all day, but what's the point? I might as well argue the definition of "art" or try to find a definition of "hipster" that includes all the steoreotypes but still excludes my friends and me.

I agree with HIPhish. There's a reason people differentiate between a port and a native port. I wouldn't go so far as to say that java has anything to do with portability, but wine (or the accursed Cider ports) are indeed ports.

We've given you a clear definition without exception, I'm not sure what you view as the exception.

The problem is that this DOES matter. If you have a DOSBox release like Shadow Warrior, two components are distributed. First, the original SW binaries, then the DOSBox components that emulate the environment that SW expects. The DOSBox code is accessible, the SW code is (not in this release, anyway*) not. So if there is a bug, who fixes it? If the bug is in SW, someone will have to hotpatch the binary to fix the problem in the release. If the bug is in DOSBox, they can fix the DOSBox distribution to make it work. Further, the same SW binaries are distributed with the GOG release, the only change is to the DOSBox binaries so it can run on OS X or Windows.

If SW was a true Mac port, DOSBox would not be required. You'd run SW directly without DOSBox and any problems would be attributed to SW itself, not an emulated environment.

Compare this to Java, like you mentioned. If you run a Java application on Windows and it works fine, but you run the same Java application on Linux and it does not, the problem has nothing to do with the Java application, but the Java runtime. Technically the Java runtime is ported for various platforms, but that is irrelevant to the Java application you are running, because the environment it needs is supposed to be implemented by the interpreter. In other words, the Java application you are running should (in theory) be completely compatible with anything that emulates the environment it expects, without any source changes. The Java application wasn't a port, but the interpreter was.

So the way to look at it is, Shadow Warrior is not a port, it's the same for both releases, the SW binaries are the exact same for the Windows and OS X. The difference is that you are getting a Mac port of DOSBox, which has changed to work on OS X. This doesn't make Shadow Warrior a port, but it makes the environment it runs in a port because of source changes.

and FWIW Rosetta was a PPC emulator, so PPC apps that ran under Rosetta were also not ports but running under an emulated environment.

*Yes, S/W is open source, but I doubt the GOG release is an open source build.

Porting, emulating; Can you just not all agree that it is just witchcraft :D