// the take
Avara is a from-scratch SDL2/OpenGL reimplementation of a 1996 Mac networked multiplayer FPS, replacing the original's Mac Toolbox dependencies so it runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux at 60fps. It's for people interested in game preservation or legacy system porting, not for anyone looking for a modern engine or active new-game development.
The porting work itself is the interesting part: they reverse-engineered Mac Toolbox-era resource formats (see appledouble.py, levelset2rsrc.py, bsp2obj.py) and wrote real tooling to convert old BSP/ALF level data rather than just wrapping the original binary. They kept the original netcode model and ported it to work over SDL2/OpenGL while targeting a fixed 60fps, which is a nontrivial rewrite of 1990s synchronous-era multiplayer logic. Build support spans Xcode, MSVC, and a plain Makefile, all wired into GitHub Actions CI, so the cross-platform claim is actually exercised on every push. There's also an independent server tracker with a public JSON API, giving you a live view into actual multiplayer activity.
The only download is a 0.7.0-nightly tag from December 2020 — despite a push as recent as yesterday, there's been no tagged release in roughly five years, so anyone wanting a working build has to compile from source via wiki instructions rather than grab a binary. Online play depends on tracker.avara.gg, a single third-party service with no mention of self-hosting, so server discovery has a central point of failure. It's a small-team hobby project (152 stars, support is Discord/IRC only) carrying forward C code originally written for System 7-era Mac Toolbox, which means inherited memory-safety and portability assumptions from 30-year-old code rather than a clean modern codebase. Multiplayer-only design with bipedal mecha combat is also a narrow niche — there's no single-player content to speak of.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →