: If someone's going to port PF, does that mean The Burning of Eden, Operation
: Tantalus, and Repurposing Bob could also be ported eventually? Or would it
: be a better goal to write an open-source M1 engine to play them directly?
The problem with this is that the terminals are stored in the resource fork of the M1 engine itself. This is perhaps the main reason why Forge was never designed to import more than the polygonal layout of an M1 map, although one could argue that it should have been designed to import the textures and object layout as well. An open source M1 engine would need to somehow extract terminal info from the modified game engine - not an ideal approach. IMO much more effort should be going into building editing tools than into game engine development at this stage. Once upon a time, Pfhorte sprang up virtually overnight to meet the insatiable demand for a way creat M1 mods. Although the pace of AO has been slow, the development of Pfhorge into a viable map editor is still in progress. There is no doubt in my mind that the M:Ressurection project would have been completed by now had Mac editors been available from the start. The holy grail is an open source universal game editing package that can import all formats of Marathon games, edit them and export them as files for use with a modern game engine such as UT or Q3. I'm not optimistic about developing another game engine.
: Or maybe a Mac emulator that doesn't require a ROM, or a ROM available for
: legal download (released by Apple or reverse-engineered). I think that's
: the list.
I'm not going to touch that one. Let's just let Matt and Andrew and anyone else they can bring on board do the work of converting PF to run on AO.
