First Person Shooter 'Shadow Warrior Classic' is a Free Download for Mac

Looks like it might be a 32 bit app. Sierra will be the last macOS to support it.
Unless your like the a majority of users like me that are still running snow leopard on our everyday desktops.

You mean High Sierra, so another ~1 1/2 years to run on the latest macOS release.

And I think these metrics contradict heavily your claim that the majority of users are still running Snow Leopard: https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0

Can't wait for my iMac Pro to ship so I can play this old gem

Looks like it might be a 32 bit app. Sierra will be the last macOS to support it.
Unless your like the a majority of users like me that are still running snow leopard on our everyday desktops.

Looks like it might be a 32 bit app. Sierra will be the last macOS to support it.

As already pointed out, the upcoming High Sierra will be the last macOS to support it directly, not Sierra. In addition, given the vintage of the game and the hardware it was written for, I suspect it may run reasonably well under Snow Leopard (or other version of OS X) running in a VM on a newer Mac.

Free games and lossless soundtracks are a good thing. Nice. :) Also, I see GOG offers a money back guarantee for 30 days, so if you miss your 0.00 of money you can ask for it back, which is also nice. :D

You mean High Sierra, so another ~1 1/2 years to run on the latest macOS release.

And I think these metrics contradict heavily your claim that the majority of users are still running Snow Leopard: https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0

Yeah, I keep seeing some (to some degree understandable given Apple's history of abandoning legacy support at the drop of a hat) confusion over when 32-bit apps are going to stop working. It's worth repeating the point that High Sierra is supposedly the last version of Mac OS that WILL run 32-bit apps, not the first that won't. Maybe Mac OS 10.14 (or MacOS v11? Whichever... ) should be called 'Bye Sierra' :p

On those metrics, maybe it's my bias (I stuck with Snow Leopard for as long as I could and ended up skipping Lion altogether) but I find it interesting that that 10.6 is still above 10.8, 10.7 and 10.5 yet I think I'd be right (?) that sales of macs have gone up over that time period, meaning a lot of those users on 10.6 could update to later versions but chose no to. Still not huge percentage wise of course, either way, but still a fair number of actual users. Thanks for posting that, interesting.

The most surprising thing from that chart is that Windows 8, likely the worst version of Windows ever (even worse than Vista), is still more common than Windows 10, easily the best version of Windows ever.

For those that haven't had the displeasure of using Windows 8, it's basically like if Apple put out a new version of macOS where they got rid of Finder, the Dock, and Spotlight, and it required you to hold a spork (included) whenever you used it.

I hated Windows 8 when I tried it, although you could get back to a semi-normal desktop experience once you figure it out a bit. That said, isn't Windows 10 utterly privacy invading compared to all earlier versions (security vulnerabilities notwithstanding)? Or did they roll that back a bit since the launch? (I lost interest so didn't follow what happened... *confesses ignorance on subject*).

Only ancient games come to Mac.

In addition, given the vintage of the game and the hardware it was written for, I suspect it may run reasonably well under Snow Leopard (or other version of OS X) running in a VM on a newer Mac.

This is already running in an emulator (DOSBox). Many games at GoG run that way — a branded version of Boxer, which in turn uses DOSBox.

You'd be virtualizing 32-bit x86 in order to, in turn, emulate 16-bit x86.

I am no programmer, but how difficult is it to turn an app from 32-bit to 64-bit?

Depends a lot on how low-level you go. A high-level GUI app like, say, a calculator is trivial to port.

This, however, emulates old DOS/PC hardware and has lots of low-level optimizations to get that to work. Thus, it is difficult. (But already underway.)

I am no programmer, but how difficult is it to turn an app from 32-bit to 64-bit?

32-bit to 64-bit by itself is easy for anyone using high-level languages. The problems are in dependencies. If the app were just Python or C source code with no dependencies on libraries only available as 32-bit binaries, it would be trivial, assuming no special optimizations for the older architecture.

Realistically, the transition for a dev in the OS X environment amounts to what's described here ('https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/64bitPorting/HighLevelAPIs/HighLevelAPIs.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001064-CH224-SW6'), ignoring third-party dependencies. Anything using Carbon will likely take some difficult reworking, and I'm not sure whether that even has to do with 64-bit or just Apple deciding to deprecate it. I'm guessing most devs won't have these kinds of problems, but I could be wrong. Computer games are a whole 'nother world, with weird dependencies for graphics, and I've never dealt with them.

Can't wait for my iMac Pro to ship so I can play this old gem

Hope that was sarcasm....

Though this 1997 gem will still overheat the iMac pro and cause throttling ...

Unless your like the a majority of users like me that are still running snow leopard on our everyday desktops.

Oh how I wish my main Mac Pro could, but I needed to put in a new graphics card so I lost Snow Leopard compatibility. I need to grab an old Mini sometime and use that as my Snow Leopard machine.