Can I play this game on my computer?

[LostKnight]

About OpenGL for OS X
First thing I see:

Important: OpenGL was deprecated in macOS 10.14. To create high-performance code on GPUs, use the Metal framework instead. See Metal.

So I clicked on Metal and see:

Accelerate graphics and much more with Metal

Metal powers hardware-accelerated graphics on Apple platforms by providing a low-overhead API, rich shading language, tight integration between graphics and compute, and an unparalleled suite of GPU profiling and debugging tools. Your games and pro apps can take full advantage of the incredible performance and efficiency of Apple silicon across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV. This year, the new game porting toolkit makes it easier than ever to bring games from other platforms to Mac and the Metal shader converter dramatically simplifies the process of converting your game’s shaders and graphics code.

You will need Comp for this change.

EDIT: Found this:

Is OpenGL deprecated or removed in macOS Catalina 10.15?

I've read that OpenGL was deprecated in macOS Mojave 10.14 in the favour of Metal, Apple's proprietary low-level graphics API. Has it been completely removed in macOS Catalina? glxinfo appears to be not installed.

[SFCheri]

Searched for "opengl for mac download". One of the results was titled "Develop using OpenGL 4.x on OSX Big Sur - stack overflow" dated Jan 20, 2021. On that site I found the following:

"According to Apple, OpenGL is no longer supported. However, it appears v4.1 of OpenGL was supported on many devices as of July 28, 2020." There is a link to supported devices and my system in on the list.

Reading the article, it seems that OpenGL is being phased out for macOS, and in any case, the underlying version is 4.1. I don't know what version is needed for running the game.

I am currently running macOS 12.6.5 (Monterey; Big Sur is 11.x.x) on a MacBook Pro with a Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015 screen. About this Mac says Graphics: Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB.

It may be that I cannot, in fact, run the game on my Mac with the Monterey version of macOS.

Does the game run on macOS Big Sur?

Any additional suggestions?

If the game doesn't run on newer versions of macOS, the download page should be updated to reflect the latest version of macOS that the game does run on.

And, of course, my request would be to update the game to run on newer versions of macOS. But that would probably require significant effort, since the developer would be forced to use the Apple graphical interface rather than the generic OpenGL.

I do appreciate everyone's efforts to help me get this running on my Mac. But unless something else can be tried, it doesn't look possible.

[LostKnight]

{snip} But unless something else can be tried, it doesn't look possible.

Yea it's a tough one.
People running an older version of MacOS can use 'start.sh' as I showed with the shebang and change directory lines:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
cd /path/to/the/directory/ft8/
java -jar desktop.jar 920 640

It comes in the ZIP file with permissions already set to be executable. At least for Linux.

Now, people that have upgraded to a newer macOS version that uses 'metal' instead of openGL are out of luck unless Comp can come up with a fix.

[SFCheri]

What’s the most recent “older version” of macOS that works? This should be documented on the download page, so no one else with more recent versions of macOS wastes time trying to run it. My hardware supports OpenGL 4.1, but the Monterey version of macOS doesn't.

Also, in your version of the start.sh, you keep leaving "-XstartOnFirstThread" out of the java line. The version of java that I downloaded requires it. The version I have is 1.0 (1.8.0_371), per About Java.

By the way, I thought of this question earlier, but forgot it until just now. Is there any way to set the start.sh so that you can just double click on it to get it to run? That's the most intuitive way to start programs of any sort. Having a Mac user who isn't tech savvy have to run it from the terminal app is asking a lot. And the need to make start.sh executable (chmod +x in terminal) and then run it from terminal isn't documented anywhere except in this thread.

Also, if Comp is following along, or can be informed of the issue:

Is there any chance of fixing the game to run using Apple's Metal interface? I imagine it will take a lot of effort to change to the Metal interface.

[SFCheri]

If Comp is willing to do the work, I'd love to be an Alpha tester.

[SFCheri]

The article I pointed to earlier ("Develop using OpenGL 4.x on OSX Big Sur - stack overflow") provides pointers to several overlays on top of Metal that will allow OpenGL to run. But none of them seem to be recommended. And using one of them might require the additional download of apps during the setup to run the game, making it even more difficult for the naive user.

[madmaniacal1]

Do any of the Android emulators out there work on MacOS? If so, you might be able to play FT that way, like we used to do back before Comp added the PC client.

[LostKnight]

Do any of the Android emulators work.....

Yes, there are a few android emulators for MacOS

Looking at a page now, the title of the Page on LiveWire:
The 5 Best Android Emulators for Mac in 2023

01: Best Overall: Nox Player
02: Most Popular: Bluestacks 3
03: More Than Just Games: KO Player
04: No Installation Required: AR Chon
05: Best for Developers: Android Studio

[SFCheri]

I found the page cited by madmanical1 and tried all but one of the suggestions (nothing worked):

01: Best Overall: Nox Player
Installed OK; took me a while, but I figured out how to download the standalone version of Forgotten Tales; game started OK and it looked good, but after moving the character around with a couple of clicks, the game hung. And not only the game. Nox also hung and would not respond to anything but the Quit command from the menu. And even then, it didn't really quit. I had to use Force Quit to get it to actually complete the Quit action. Tried it a couple of times with the same results. I tried a different game that I downloaded and it worked just fine. Probably something to do with FT, not Nox.

02: Most Popular: Bluestacks 3
Actually, the link takes you to Bluestacks 4. Trying to run the app after the install never worked. The app never completed starting up. It kept crashing and I got a crash report form.

03: More Than Just Games: KO Player
There doesn't actually seem to be a Mac version of this, although there's a link to download the Mac version. This link takes you to a page that is in French. It seems the developers may be French. But there's no Mac download.

04: No Installation Required: AR Chon
I've resisted installing Chrome for years but finally gave in to try this option. After installing Chrome, I followed the link to AR Chon and followed the Quick Setup instructions, except none of the versions of AR Chon that i tried seemed to successfully install. I always got a tab that said Errors and the Errors were similar. I decided to ignore the errors and install the Sample App. The instructions say after installing it to press "Launch", but the installation also had errors and there was no "Launch" button that I could find.

05: Best for Developers: Android Studio
Didn't try this one; the summary says it's difficult to install and that it's really for app developers, so I decided to skip this one.

[SFCheri]

I did some of my own research for Android Emulators. Thanks for the pointer as to what to search for. Didn't find anything better than the 5 documented already. And all of those 5 were also cited by other reviewers. There were a couple that you had to run from a separate partition, which could reside on a thumb drive. Several of the ones cited as being both Windows and Mac compatible were not. They only had Windows versions. Even though some of the reviewers said they tested the emulators, I wonder if they really did for the Mac versions. I wonder what it is about FT that causes Nox to hang.