Category Archives: Classic Mac

Inside Mac Games website lives again (Sort Of)

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The website Inside Mac Games was taken down a couple years ago, except for the forums. No big surprise– it hadn’t published new content since 2014.

Losing access to it didn’t seem to bother anyone, except the occasional researcher working on an article or book. But I was sad to see it go. In part this was because I had written a some articles for it, but also because I have fond memories of classic Mac gaming and its community.

The issue was that the database hosting the site was old and cost too much money to run. So I offered to help convert the entire site into a static website that would be cheap to host.

The results are now live. Visit www.insidemacgames.com to see all the news, features and reviews originally published from 2000 to 2014. I even managed to link to a few pre-2000 articles being kept by Internet Archive.

The conversion took longer than I expected, but it was a fun excuse to browse old pages and reminisce.

IMG meant a lot to me back in the day so it was nice to try to do it a good turn.

Running classic Mac games on OS X

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3d Brick Bash app
I’d long ago given up being able to run my old games 3D Brick Bash! and 3D Paddle Bash! on Intel Macs, but it turns out to be possible using a program that emulates Classic Macs on modern hardware.

The one I tried was Sheepshaver but another option may be Basilisk. The instructions are a bit fiddly and there are legal issues to emulating old Macs so see the emulator home pages for details.

One step I had trouble with was renaming the ROM file to something Sheepshaver would accept. It turned out that although Finder was showing the correct name “Mac OS ROM”, there was a hidden “.rom” file extension that Finder wasn’t showing.

To see if this is the case, select the file and choose File->Get Info. If the filename in that window has an extension, remove it.

Finder's Get Info command shows the true filename

Finder’s Get Info command shows the true filename

It was a real treat to play my old games again. And now that I have the emulator running I plan to hunt down other classic original Mac games.

p.s. Speaking of original, classic Mac games: if you have fond memories of them please consider supporting Richard Moss’s book The Secret History of Mac Gaming, like I did!