I'm Making a Note Here: Huge Success
May. 9th, 2024 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerOn some level I’ve always been a bit distanced from most computer and video games. This stretches all the way from the low-resolution TRS-80 and four-colour Color Computer knockoffs of games for other platforms to the modern complaints that Apple never does enough to get developers putting games on its (conventional) computers. In these recent days of getting my hands on Apple Silicon myself, though, I did start thinking about certain claims about a program I’ve used for less demanding things (including running a particular Color Computer 3 emulator, if not so much to “play games” for it these days...)
Once I’d installed the Steam client at last in CrossOver, I turned to some games I hadn’t been able to play since (or hadn’t got around to playing until) “32-bit support” was taken out of the Macintosh operating system. The first one I took a chance on was Portal, which I had finished and replayed before, but may remain the latest “now that’s a real game running on real computers” game I’ve taken on. That it worked at all was something. There were occasional unfortunate moments where the program would freeze as a fragment of sound looped endlessly (the most unfortunate after managing at last a string of “place new portals with seconds to spare”), but I was able to get my computer to where I could “force quit” the game. In the end, too, I got to the closing credits of the game, still a little conscious of my computer’s cooling fan having to speed up to where I could hear it. I’m not sure how many more Steam games I might be able to get running the same way. At the same time, I’m aware of having faced “not playing a lot of computer games” through frittering my time away in different ways.
Once I’d installed the Steam client at last in CrossOver, I turned to some games I hadn’t been able to play since (or hadn’t got around to playing until) “32-bit support” was taken out of the Macintosh operating system. The first one I took a chance on was Portal, which I had finished and replayed before, but may remain the latest “now that’s a real game running on real computers” game I’ve taken on. That it worked at all was something. There were occasional unfortunate moments where the program would freeze as a fragment of sound looped endlessly (the most unfortunate after managing at last a string of “place new portals with seconds to spare”), but I was able to get my computer to where I could “force quit” the game. In the end, too, I got to the closing credits of the game, still a little conscious of my computer’s cooling fan having to speed up to where I could hear it. I’m not sure how many more Steam games I might be able to get running the same way. At the same time, I’m aware of having faced “not playing a lot of computer games” through frittering my time away in different ways.