Due to my interest in different platforms, I had a go at porting games from macOS to Linux, following
ikuyo's guide for the most part. As described in that guide, the main reason for porting Mac games rather than Windows is that Mac versions tend to support OpenGL while Windows versions do not. I don't have a native Mac or Linux setup, which makes this process extra-fun.
Most of my time has been spent with
Deepest Sword. It was released in 2021 and is quite popular in RTA, and a segmented TAS video exists. More recent Unity games do not have quite the same file structure as the guide. They use MonoBleedingEdge (whatever that is). Similarly the file needed is instead
libmonobdwgc-2.0.so. However the process should be about the same.
ScreenSelector.so doesn't seem to be included.
Eventually I ran into this error message from the Unity log:
[Subsystems] Discovering subsystems at path /mnt/c/Users/User/Downloads/unityporting/DeepestSword-v-0-1-5c-Mac - Copy/DeepestSword_Data/UnitySubsystems
Forcing GfxDevice: OpenGL Core
Forced GfxDevice 'OpenGL Core' was not built from editor, shaders will not be available
PlayerInitEngineGraphics: InitializeEngineGraphics failed
Failed to initialize player
Caught fatal signal - signo:11 code:1 errno:0 addr:(nil)
Obtained 11 stack frames.
#0 0x007fc3150d3520 in __sigaction
#1 0x007fc316336d06 in PhysicsModule::GetDefaultPhysicsSceneHandle() const
#2 0x007fc316263c1b in UnityScene::~UnityScene()
#3 0x007fc316260c7a in RuntimeSceneManager::~RuntimeSceneManager()
#4 0x007fc3162604d5 in StaticDestroyRuntimeSceneManager(void*)
#5 0x007fc315fa2aff in RegisterRuntimeInitializeAndCleanup::ExecuteCleanup()
#6 0x007fc316246d8a in RuntimeCleanup()
#7 0x007fc316424218 in PlayerMain(int, char**)
#8 0x007fc3150bad90 in __libc_init_first
#9 0x007fc3150bae40 in __libc_start_main
#10 0x00000000201029 in _start
I'm not sure what that would suggest except that OpenGL isn't supported. From testing by others this game does work with OpenGL in macOS from what I understand.
I've tried several other games. I'm searching on itch.io with
these filters. Not sure how to find games from a certain date. The best way I found was to search for old Ludum Dare competitions like
this. Some games have a launcher, which will probably interfere with TASing even if they can successfully be ported:
Eventually I found
Shrinking Planet. It matches the guide much more closely and I was able to port it. It runs in libTAS at about 0.5 FPS.
At this point I'm sceptical if macOS should even be its own platform. The integral game files seem independent of any OS. I'm not familiar with the graphics engine differences though. I think these more recent games using MonoBleedingEdge should be portable, but I don't know what else is required.
