Oni engine patches (Mac PPC)
History
The original build of the Oni application (v1.1; 1.5MB) was compiled by Bungie for the PowerPC processor that Macs were using at the time. However, it was also a Classic app, written for Mac OS 9. Mac OS X was being released later that year, but Bungie did not have time to perform "carbonization", the process developers were using at the time to make Classic apps nominally OS X-compatible.
With Bungie's permission, Omni Group released a free, carbonized port by the end of the year (v1.0 (Mac OS X), version 1.36; 4.6MB). At the time, this port allowed Macs running OS X to run Oni without booting into the Classic environment within OS X, a convenience but not a necessity.
However, an unforeseen development years later made the port invaluable: the switching of the Macintosh processor family from Motorola/IBM's PowerPC to Intel's x86 chips. The Intel Macs made today are incapable of running the Classic environment, therefore the Omni port of 2001 is the necessary ingredient in being able to play the game at all.
Various other elements of the OS and hardware have changed over the years besides the processor family, making the original Omni port unable to run on modern Macs without some modifications. Through the efforts of the Oni community, various hex edits have been devised as ways to not only allow the application to run under the latest versions of OS X, but to extend the potential for Oni modding.
List of patches
A brief timeline of the upgrades so far:
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- NOTE
- Increasing the buffer size to accomodate 1024x1024 textures doesn't work because of a limitation elsewhere in the engine.
- Therefore, the patch will only allow for 512x512 until further notice. BTW, 512x512 is plenty for virtually any purpose.
Download
- http://edt.oni2.net/files/Oni.zip -- the latest version, with all above changes made (if stable)