I've got a friend who'd like to give the first three Heroes of Might and Magic games a try, but she's only got a Mac. I'd like to do what I can to get Mac versions of the games. Wishlisting seems obvious, but ineffective. I was curious: as members of the GOG community who have seen how the wishlist is treated, does using the Wishlist really seem like the best idea for Mac ports? In general, not just for my situation. We have no procedure! A few users have done it but none have very many votes. It's the best I can think of but I'm open to suggestions.

As nice as it is to have those wishlists, overall they're relatively pointless in the grand scheme of things.

I would imagine GOG will eventually get around to getting a Mac-ified versions of the first two HoMM games since they're both DOS-based, which also means they should be easily transferable to - the same app GOG uses (a specialized version of it, anyway) for it's Mac ports of DOS games - but you'd have to find a way to run the setup files first. I know for a fact that HoMM 3 can easily be run on Mac via the help of [url=http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/tiki-index.php]Wineskin, but that takes a little technical know-how. Not a lot, but it does require a will of some experimentation.

Yeah, exactly about the wishlists.

Maybe Boxer's the best route, I'll give that a shot. Wineskin will be harder for me to work out without a Mac of my own, but maybe if I can get over to her computer I can test my copy of 3 there before she gets her own from the sale. Thanks, I'll see how it goes!

Wineskin is useless for DOS games, go with Boxer. The really neat thing about Boxer is that it can import the DOSBox settings from GoG, so you dont have to tweak them yourself. The tricky part is getting to the game files, since they are inside the installer EXE. The installer is a Windows executable, so you need either a Windows PC (seems no problem to you), a Windows partition on the Mac, a virtual machine or Wine. Personally I always use Wineskin, just create a wrapper, install the game into it, take out the files I need and throw the rest away. You will need the folder the game has been insalled to, for example C:\GoG.com games\Awesome Game, then drag it onto the "Import a new game" in the folder where all the games are and wait a while for Boxer to do its magic. Once boxer is done you can launch the game just by double-clicking it.

EDIT: Oops, didn't notice HoMM 3 is a Windows game. Yeah, Boxer won't do it for that one, you'll need Wineskin.

Hello fellow Canadian! Here's a Christmas offer for you. There's a thrift store next door to me that has a Mac copy of HOMM3 (boxed version) going for $2. I don't own a Mac, so I can't check to make sure it works, but if you're interested I'll pick it up and ship it to you (no charge - Merry Christmas). Have to let me know by this evening, though, as I'm leaving town shortly after tomorrow.

Most (all?) Mac games (and software in general) released before Apple switched to Intel processors don't work on OSX.

Really? Aww. Way to go, Apple, you ruined Christmas!

As far as I know, at least.

I guess HoMM 3 is old enough to be a Classic MacOS release? If so then yeah, it's a no-go. If it's just a PPC OSX release, it depends on which version of OSX they have. They used to have a PPC interpreter for Intel Macs, but they removed that for apparently some reason a release or two ago.

+1 for Azilut anyway, quite a nice offer.

Yes to both! The loss of old Mac games is sad, and kind of irritating. I don't have a Mac now but I did back then, and still have several old, arguably useless disks and discs from the era, and only the ScummVM-able games work. :(

Presumably GOG has solved similar problems with old Windows games, so now that they do Mac releases maybe they'll do the same for old Mac games? Maybe wishful thinking......

Unfortunately it's not that simple. :(

Legacy Windows software is only incidentally incompatible; the underlying functionality is mostly still there, just not presented in the way some games need it to be. 16-bit software can't work on 64-bit versions of Windows (GOG sells the DOS versions instead), but almost any 32-bit software can be made compatible with modern Windows versions given enough effort.

On the Mac side of things, Apple has deliberately dropped support for legacy software. Apple's Classic environment (for pre-OS X software) was removed in Leopard (10.5) followed by Rosetta (for PowerPC OS X software) in Lion (10.7).

As a result GOG will probably only be able to sell Mac OS X versions in cases where the game has a DOS equivalent or modern Intel OS X version unless they adopt a more complicated wrapper solution like Wineskin.

Why wait? ALL of the Might and Magic and Heroes of Might and Magic games that are on GOG (with the notable exception of Crusaders of Might and Magic, which was apparently not really a very good game anyway) all work perfectly (or almost perfectly) on Mac OS X using either Wineskin and/or CrossOver 12:

Heroes of Might and Magic 1-2: Works perfectly out-of-the-box in Boxer. You can extract the data files for both games by either running them in CrossOver/Wineskin or by using Universal Extractor on them. All you need to do is drag-and-drop them onto Boxer's import window to package them as self-contained "gameboxes" which you can double-click to run.

Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Complete: Works perfectly out-of-the-box in both CrossOver 12 and Wineskin (I have not tested multiplayer play, but according to entries on the WineHQ multiplayer is possible with some registry hacking). Use of the unofficial widescreen patch is recommended.

Heroes of Might and Magic 4 Complete: Works almost perfectly out-of-the-box in CrossOver 12; running it in windowed mode solves some minor graphical bugs and speed problems. Use of the Equilibris mod for balance and big fixes is recommended.

Heroes of Might and Magic V Complete: Works almost perfectly out-of-the-box in Wineskin, though it was far too slow to play on my antiquated GMA 950.

First: That's not entirely true as OS X existed for almost five years (six if you count the Public Beta in 2000) as a retail PPC release, at least publicly (yes, I know about Marklar). OS X has always existed with portability in mind; in fact, if the rumors are true, Apple likely has a branch of desktop OS X (not iOS) running on ARM processors in their labs.

Second: That depends. If you have a Mac which can run 10.6, you can still run PPC games in Rosetta, with little or no performance hit or compatibility/performance issues.

A lot of older games even harking back to the System 7-OS 9 days have been open sourced, or have open source ports which allow them to work on modern Intel Macs; Hexen, Heretic, DOOM 1-2, Heretic II, Hexen II, Quake 1-3, Descent 1-2, Duke Nukem 3D, and the Marathon Trilogy are the games which immediately come to mind here.

Also, a lot of older, originally PPC-only games were supported with Universal Binaries after Apple's switch to Intel. Halo, Warcraft 3, Jedi Knight II, Jedi Academy, KOTOR, CoD, and CoD 2 are some of the most prominent examples here.

This also of course extended to many key apps for office applications, productivity apps, and creative apps. In fact, if what you said actually was true and everyone's PPC apps stopped working with the release of the Intel Macs, it would be a complete disaster for Apple: no one would buy a new Mac which would break all of your Mac existing apps, no matter how fast it was.

Well Rosetta support is gone (I think in Snow Leopard?) so stuff that did work with Universal Binaries doesn't anymore. I don't know about everything, but Diablo 2 (which had a Mac version and you can still download it from Blizzard) for example doesn't work because Rosetta support is gone.

So yeah I don't know about everything, but lots of old stuff doesn't work anymore.