The Minecraft PCGamer Demo was the first publically available demonstration version of Minecraft requiring no actual paid product or even a Minecraft account. For many players it was one of the first steps into this creative endevour but sadly it was only available for Windows users at that time and no port has been released ever since.

This little research project explains the journey of porting the distribution to macOS with the goal of it being able to run as good as possible on macOS Ventura (13). This custom version is based on Beta 1.3 from April 2011 and a higly outdated version of Java (1.6) and the LWJGL library (2.6) used.

As those constraints apply to this project, there is no focus on the security aspect of outdated software but rather the discovery aspect of viable software to be used and the availability (or the lack of it) nowadays.

This work was heavily boosted by three resources found throughout the research phase:

• Jeremie Long's old script for updating LWJGL
• Eugen Mihalache's tricks for making Java 6 usable on new macOS versions
• The still downloadable Minecraft Demo hosted by PCGamer