Cannot open Hengband on OSX Mavericks

[FingO1981]

Last week I wanted to play Hengband again and come back from a rather long hiatus in that game. However, in between times I updated my computer and am now working with OSX 10.9.2 and when I try to open hengband a message tells me that I cannot open it. Does anyone know a solution to that problem or can give me hints regarding building up the game from the source?

[Maddz]

I tried recompiling after I did the Mavericks upgrade but it didn't work... I think there's a fair amount of work that needs doing before it will work. Part of the problem is that the Rosetta support was discontinued in Mavericks.

I also tried creating a Mac version of Poschengband:

"Whoever is doing the compiling will need Xcode and probably either X11 or XQuartz installed. The person running the program will need either X11 or XQuartz installed. If you are running 10.7 or earlier, one can find X11 as an optional install in the Installer or System Software disks. If you are running 10.8 or can't find how to install X11 one can install XQuartz here. XQuartz is just an open source and newer version of X11, so I usually use that.

The person doing the compiling will need to download the source code archive from the PosChengband site.
Unpack the archive and open the src directory.
Open the makefile.linux file using a text editor, and find the first line that doesn't start with '#' (line 137) and remove the -D"USE_GCU" from the line.
Open the equip.h file in a text editor and comment out or remove the line that says "typedef bool (*object_p)(object_type *o_ptr);" (line 71).
Open the fear.h file in a text editor and comment out or remove the line that says "typedef struct monster_type monster_type;" (line 4).
Open the bldg.c file in a text editor and comment out or remove the line that says "typedef bool (*object_p)(object_type *o_ptr);" (line 3301).
Change the line in int-map.c and str-map.c that says "#include <malloc.h>" to "#include <malloc/malloc.h>" (without quotes).
Open up a Terminal session, cd to the src directory, and type in "make -f makefile.linux" without the quotes and hit return. If everything went well one will get a massive quantity of text and a bunch of scary looking warnings that hopefully mean nothing, followed by successful completion. The last line should read "cp .. poschengband". If it doesn't then something went wrong with the compilation and one will need to find what error caused the compilation to fail. Generally look at the last few lines and look for the lines that start with "Error:", and try to fix what the compiler is complaining about.
Assuming the compilation completed successfully, move up one level to the main directory in the archive, and copy over the poschengband application and the lib folder to a new folder that will be the game folder.
Move the game folder to the player's computer.
Now for the player to play the game, do the following:
Move the game folder to an appropriate place for applications. I know that recent versions of Mac OS are sandboxed to various degrees, but I am not familiar with that so much.
Open the X11 or XQuartz application.
Open a terminal window (either within the XQuartz or X11 app or using another terminal application) and cd to the game folder.
Type "./poschengband" without quotes but with the ./ and hit return.
If everything went well you will get the splash screen. Hit the space bar to get "Savefile not found" message. Hit the space bar again to start the character creation process. Once you completed you can play the game. To get a listing of commands hit '?'. Hit control-x to quit, saving the game.
There are various command line options, to find those type "./poschengband -?" without quotes and hit return.
PosChengband and similar variants based on older versions of the source code will read and write to the lib folder. I don't know how the sandboxed versions of Mac OS deal with this. Hopefully it will only be a matter of giving the app permission to write to the lib folder. Otherwise one might have to move the app to different locations, such as maybe within your user space. If you have problems with this you might try posting to somewhere like the Angband Forum. There are a lot of users there running more recent versions of Mac OS who may be able to help you."

However neither I nor the bloke got it working, so I suspect more involved work needs doing on the source code. I tried following these instructions on Hengband and didn't get anywhere. I'm kind of resigned that if I want to continue playing Hengband I need to set up the old iBook and use that...

If you get a working version, please post it here!

[hading]

I have to confess that I usually just take the easy way out and use Wine to play the windows versions of bands on OSX.

[debo]

There are a bunch of us who play poscheng on OSX, but we use the GCU/terminal frontend. There are some configure and makefile shenanigans you have to play, but otherwise everything just works.