Seek. Medical. Attention.
God I still love this game. The welcome speech of the Mark IV. How the scientist talk to each other, and how different the talk is when they speak with guards. How they first hope for a government rescue which decides to kill any and all in black mesa. How fearsome those black assassins are. That you can tickle that insect-bomb thing. In my opinion, HL2 felt much more scripted and less lively. No mention of a recompile for Intel 64bit Macs though.
Hmm it won‘t start on a High Sierra iMac after the update. It did before, happened to play it just 3 hours ago :) Guess they didn’t do a lot of testing on 10+ year old hardware, CRT or not.
Yes, Portal 2 and Half-Life 2 are both more playable because they don't use x87 to the same extent. It's only HL that uses it heavily enough that it becomes unplayable.
Side note, I think HL2 does for physics, or something; fast moving objects and explosions cause drastic frame drops via Rosetta. I haven't been able to look into it in detail to confirm the cause.
Edit: The best "official" way to play Half-Life on an Apple Silicon machine is through Parallels, which uses WoW64's x87 translation instead of Rosetta. I've also heard you can compile Half-Life yourself using the leaked Source Engine code, but I haven't tried it myself.
x87 is different from modern floating-point, including the modern floating-point operations on x86 CPUs (SSE and later instructions) and ARM64.
x87 calculates with 80-bit floats ("long double" in C), but the host CPU's FPU typically supports only 64-bit floats ("double").
So accurate x87 emulation can't translate all operations directly to host FPU operations. It must use software floating-point on the host instead, which is much slower.
