• As far as I know, the closest we Mac users ever got to a "native" model ripping method was a build of GLIntercept and OGLE a long time ago. It could rip polygons out from any 32bit application using OpenGL versions below 4.1. It was shit.
• BMDView has (had?) a Mac build, I vividly remember looking at Super Mario Galaxy models a decade ago on an iMac running OSX 10.5.
• Many Open Source tools can be built on Mac. If you have the macOS developer tools installed, you can use gcc to build native applications from source. I've had much luck compiling open source software from GitHub to fit my needs as a Mac user.
But even so, that's usually not enough, so in many cases you have to follow this flowchart:
1. Try
Wine. If it does not work:
2. Try
Codeweavers Crossover. If it does not work:
3. Try
VMWare Fusion. If it does not work:
4. Try
Boot Camp. If
even this does not work, you must:
5. Buy a dedicated machine. This was my setup when I did my research on the Steam version of Umihara Kawase Shun, as it absolutely could not run in tandem with NINJA Ripper on any of the options listed above:
![[Image: xWL37CT.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/xWL37CT.jpg)
^ sorry for the shitty image, but essentially, I had my Mac hooked up to the two monitors on the right and the PC hooked up to my Mac through an Ethernet cable. The PC was a bottom-of-the-barrel netbook that could barely stay on, but it did exactly what I needed it to do – run DirectX and run NINJA Ripper. I pirated and installed the Tiny7 version of Windows and turned on full sharing on both machines and gave both full Write/Read access so everything was as smooth as possible. All my memory dumps/3D rips went straight to my Mac desktop for analysis, and all the edits I did were transfered immediately to the Windows side. Technically, this isn't "ripping on a Mac" but as I wanted to work as little as possible on Windows, I used it only for the "heavy lifting" and all my output analysis was done on macOS.
Lastly (though this is a non-solution for beginners) you can always write your own software. Tomba! and Tomba! 2 for PSX did not have a model exporter for any OS, but we did research on its model format so in the end I wrote a Python program that converts the game model files to OBJ. I also wrote a model converter to the Steam version of Umihara Kawase Shun. Whereas writing a model
viewer is very difficult, writing a model
converter is not. OBJ is a very common file format, so if you can convert your .whatever to .obj, you can use third party applications for Mac (Blender, Cinema 4D) to work with your self-generated OBJs.
The situation is much more forgiving on traditional sprite based game ripping, as most tools run on Wine or at
least Crossover. There are many Open Source tools readily compiled for macOS too, and you can always build them yourself.
The tools I use the most as a Mac user are Tile Molester 0.19 (for graphics analysis and ripping), HexEdit (for general analysis), and TextMate2 (for writing my Python stuff).
