History of Mac Oni: Difference between revisions

As seasoned Mac users will recall, the Macintosh has been through three major technology transitions since 1984. '''First''' came the move from [[wikipedia:Complex instruction set computing|CISC]]-based [[wikipedia:Motorola 68000 series|68k]] to [[wikipedia:Reduced instruction set computing|RISC]]-based [[wikipedia:PowerPC|PowerPC]] processors in the early '90s. Thus, when Oni began development in 1997, all Macs ran on PPC processors. Apple was about to release Mac OS 8, but it was still based on System 1 from 1984, and they were hoping to start fresh with a new OS as soon as possible. To that end, Apple acquired Steve Jobs' company [[wikipedia:NeXT|NeXT]] in order to use their OS, OPENSTEP, as the basis for Apple's new OS. The Mac's '''second''' major transition culminated with the release of Mac OS X in spring 2001 -- awkward timing for Oni. (Note that Mac OS X was renamed "macOS" in 2016, but this article uses the original name of the OS for historical consistency.)

In 2000, Bungie was merging into Microsoft, and Take-Two was assuming command of the Oni IP. Having been in development years before Mac OS X released, Mac Oni would initially have been built as a "Classic" app, referring to the Classic Mac OS (anything before 10.0). Given the circumstances, the best that Bungie could do for compatibility before Oni released in January 2001 was to build the Oni application as a "Carbon" app. Carbon apps could be written primarily for OS 9 and still run in OS X. Unfortunately, the Carbon build of Oni was not without issues in the OS X environment.