Craig Weber

Having just finished the TV series of the same title, I figured it would be a good time to replay one of my favorite games from my teenage years: Fallout, but I don't own a Windows computer and the game was never released for macOS. Fortunately, the excellent Fallout Community Edition project faithfully reimplements the game, although the installation instructions for macOS are, for the moment, a mess. While those instructions are being ironed out in the issue tracker, I'm hoping this guide can help anyone who just wants to play the game on a Mac with minimal fuss.

One of the maddening things about MacOS is that it lacks ext4 file system support. This is a bummer because I use ext4 on many of my external hard drives as well as boot volumes for various headless Linux machines. Once in a while, these boot drives become corrupted (due to user error) and I find myself wanting to mount the file system on another system to repair the error. Ideally I can just pop it in a SATA<->USB adapter and mount it on my Mac, but alas...

For whatever reason, macOS Catalina and Big Sur were both tinting my external monitor pink. Some research indicated that it had to do with the color mode, notably that I needed to force RGB. MacOS's UI doesn't give the user the ability to change the color mode directly, so you have to hack around the display profile files directly.

This post and its comments from 2013 seem to be the authoritative guide on forcing RGB mode; however, these steps (and the variations found in the comments) make you do a lot of things, including disabling the System Integrity Protection (basically the stuff that prevents even the super user from changing certain files and directories), booting into recovery mode, changing boot files (which can put your system into a boot loop, as I discovered the hard way), and a number of other dangerous, arcane things.

Fortunately, I found a sequence that is much safer and easier (tested on both Big Sur and Catalina on two distinct MacBook Pros):

This is a guide for Unix systems (OS X and Linux), but Windows users shouldn't find it too difficult to figure out the equivalent commands for their platform. I'm not assuming much prior knowledge, but readers should at least be comfortable navigating around a Unix terminal, and any familiarity with environment variables is helpful (a quick Google search for "environment variables" should suffice). Without further ado: