I had a dream last night about Freedom Force, a game I haven't played since I was a kid 20 years ago.
I vaguely remember not being able to finish it at the time, and now that I've been laid off I'd like to fire it up again and revisit.
Only problem is, Steam only has the Windows version, and I have a Mac. The only place I can find to download the Mac version is this site (https://www.macintoshrepository.org/4582-freedom-force), and I'm not sure if it's safe or how it works.
I found this forum and figured if anyone knows it would be one of you! What do you think - how can I play Freedom Force on Mac?
Not much help since I don't own or know mac, but you could;
1) Buy a mac version off of ebay or Amazon
2) I saw looking around that the windows version was playable under wine if you could set that up.
3) the macintoshrepo site looks likes it uses iso images that would be rips of the original discs so they might be safe.
4) the repo site was considered fairly safe when I googled about it, but the macintoshgarden site was mentioned as a better alternative.
Interesting - I'll look into macintoshgarden as an alternative to macintoshrepository, but I can't buy off of Amazon or eBay because those are discs and I don't have a CD drive either. The difficulties of old tech!
In either case, I'm a bit out of my depth trying to figure out what to do with a .sit.md5 file, etc., so if anyone has any general advice please let me know. Will keep researching from scratch in the meantime. (I just used the CD on my Dad's desktop computer back in the day!)
My newest PC didn't have a CD drive either. I bought an external one from Amazon that connects to a usb port and it works fine.
Unless you have a truly ancient Mac, the MacOS version of the game won't work. It's for PowerPC processors... Since then, Apple has switched its processor architecture to Intel and then to custom-built ARM (in Apple's marketing lingo, "Apple Silicon"). The first OS versions of Intel Macs supported PowerPC apps through software emulation, but that's long gone.
What you can do, however, is use the Windows version, either from Steam or from gog.com (the latter might work better). This requires one of the following solutions:
1. If you have an Intel Mac, as this is the same processor architecture as Windows has traditionally targeted, you can use Apple's Bootcamp to dual-boot to Windows (licence required for the latter).
2. You can also buy Parallel desktop to create a virtual machine (Windows licence required). If using an Intel Mac, it should work okay, as long as you have enough memory (RAM and hard disk) and your computer isn't too old; this kind of virtual machine is always going to be significantly slower than running native code, but Freedom Force is old enough that it's not very demanding by today's standards. If using an ARM-based Apple chip (M1, M2, M3, M4 or M5), you'll need the ARM version of Windows, and may or may not work... I haven't used Parallels since moving from an Intel Mac (it was a 2012 model, and FF was barely playable, so I was using Bootcamp instead) to an ARM one, so I can't help you here.
3. What I'm using now: You can use an app based on the open-source Wine project, which provides a compatibility layer by simulating Windows (if you heard of the Steam Deck, it only exists because of Wine); no Windows licence required (and yes, it's perfectly legal, as the contributors reverse-engineered the Windows application calls without using the Windows code... crazy stuff). Amazingly, this now works better under Mac ARM than when using Intel processors! It's not perfect, mind you; not every game works, and not every game works perfectly or out of the box. There are a few different Mac apps based on Wine: If money isn't an issue, I suggest using Crossover (https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover) (there's a free trial available). Otherwise, you could try one of the free alternatives, such as Porting Kit (https://www.portingkit.com/). Personally, I'm using Crossover, as it tends to work better out of the box.
In short: If you have an Intel Mac, use Bootcamp. If an Apple Silicon Mac, try Crossover. Skip the Parallels option. If you have a PowerPC Mac... well, you don´t since they all had CD drives. ;)