Posted April 16, 2019
I wonder if we could have the Macintosh version of Warcraft too, since it uses redrawn high-resolution graphics compared to the DOS version (alongside some quality of life updates in the UI department, IIRC you don't have to press Ctrl or whatever its Mac equivalent to group-select units etc.).
The problem is, most Macintosh emulators require a ROM and a copy of MacOS to work. However, a while ago I found an emulator called Executor which does not have this limitation - its developers wrote workarounds for the ROM and their own equivalents of MacOS software like the file browser to facilitate running of Mac apps. Executor has been long discontinued, it is now freeware and its source code is available.
I was able to run the Macintosh demo in Executor, which worked almost seamlessly except the palette is garbled:
https://forum.dune2k.com/topic/26865-warcraft-orcs-humans-mac-version/
Yet otherwise the game works, I was able to complete the demo scenarios, all game mechanics work and sound effects play fine (there's no music but I can't tell if this was supposed to be like that in the demo). The Mac demo ran in the same state (everything fine except the wrong palette) both in the Windows and DOS versions of Executor (the latter running in DOSBox).
Theoretically, I believe that if someone took a look at the Executor code, maybe they would be able to fix the palette problem and thus make the game runnable both in DOS and Windows. In fact, Executor developers back in the day had plans for making individual wrappers for Mac apps to make them cross-platform compatible but this never happened. Perhaps such wrapper could be made for the Mac version now.
Another solution would be, since Blizzard still has the source code for Warcraft and the Classic Games team even built a working port a while ago, perhaps they could add support for the Mac data files, making a Windows/Linux version of the game running natively at a higher resolution.
The problem is, most Macintosh emulators require a ROM and a copy of MacOS to work. However, a while ago I found an emulator called Executor which does not have this limitation - its developers wrote workarounds for the ROM and their own equivalents of MacOS software like the file browser to facilitate running of Mac apps. Executor has been long discontinued, it is now freeware and its source code is available.
I was able to run the Macintosh demo in Executor, which worked almost seamlessly except the palette is garbled:
https://forum.dune2k.com/topic/26865-warcraft-orcs-humans-mac-version/
Yet otherwise the game works, I was able to complete the demo scenarios, all game mechanics work and sound effects play fine (there's no music but I can't tell if this was supposed to be like that in the demo). The Mac demo ran in the same state (everything fine except the wrong palette) both in the Windows and DOS versions of Executor (the latter running in DOSBox).
Theoretically, I believe that if someone took a look at the Executor code, maybe they would be able to fix the palette problem and thus make the game runnable both in DOS and Windows. In fact, Executor developers back in the day had plans for making individual wrappers for Mac apps to make them cross-platform compatible but this never happened. Perhaps such wrapper could be made for the Mac version now.
Another solution would be, since Blizzard still has the source code for Warcraft and the Classic Games team even built a working port a while ago, perhaps they could add support for the Mac data files, making a Windows/Linux version of the game running natively at a higher resolution.