So the good news, right off the bat here, is that I got it all working. EDuke32, the HRP, Duke it out in DC, Duke Caribbean, Duke Nuclear Winter... it's all running on my Mac Mini. It looks great, it plays great. I'm having a ton of fun with it.
The bad news? It was one wild ride getting there. It took several hours to figure it all out. One of my obstacles is that I'm sort of new to Macs (I grew up on DOS and Windows). But even then, the current HRP sites don't give a lot of support to folks who are trying to get things running on Mac OSX.
So I was curious: are there any plans to put together a better package for Mac users?
It's alright if the answer is "no". After all, I think I've got it all figured out now. But, I would love to help write some better instructions, especially if I could get it put up on the EDuke32 wiki or as a sticky on these forums.
As some background information, here are some of the obstacles I ran into
- The FAQ hosted here doesn't even mention that Macs can indeed run EDuke32 (http://hrp.duke4.net/faq.php)
- The EDuke32 site makes a passing mention to it, but they only provide a Windows version for download (http://www.eduke32.com/)
- This "Spam-Filter" guy from Germany has compiled a Mac version from the latest source snapshot (http://www.spam-filt...eduke32_on_os_x). As utterly grateful as I am for that, his instructions for getting it up and running only get you so far. His video tutorial doesn't leave you with a very clean install (lots of unnecessary files still around) and it doesn't help you out much with the expansion packs.
- Unpackssi.exe is only available on PCs. Which means you need a PC around in order to get the .con and .grp files from the expansions.
- The link to Iggy's site referenced by the FAQ doesn't seem to take you to the place it suggests it will take you. There's no obvious information about taking the extracted information from the .ssi and reconstituting it into the .con and .grp files.
- Making things more complicated for getting the expansion packs to work, the Mac-compiled version from "Spam-Filter" doesn't respect the "/?" or "-?" parameter for EDuke32. Furthermore, the EDuke32 wiki doesn't list all the parameters. So unless you have a Windows machine handy (and luckily I do), there's no way for Mac users to discover the allowable parameters.
- Finally, if you're a UNIX-shell n00b that's more used to DOS (and that describes me) it can be pretty frustrating just getting a .exe to run in Mac's "Terminal" app.
As I said, I'd love to put together a more complete, step-by-step guide if it seems like that would be handy. I'm also curious whether or not we could start getting "official" Mac builds. I'm extremely grateful to "Spam-Filter" for his Mac compile, but it's unknown how long his interest in EDuke32 will continue. :^)