So, I was looking around for old games that would play well on the Mac Cube. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck and the Cube’s new 1.8 GHz (replacing .5 GHz) CPU is on the way. The Cube stands at a turning point in Apple history. It can play OS9 or Classic games and OS X games. It is 8 years old so anything that worked on it when new is long since abandoned now.
Some people still love the games for the Color Computer (1989), Tandy (early 1990’s), and DOS. Just look at the Atari game packs containing the greatest hits of the 1980’s. It’s funny how many more clock cycles our CPUs had compared to even 5 years ago. This computer has two complete CPU on the same space. With that much power you don’t need a Commodore 64 your can run it on any machine with an Emulator.
An Emulator is software that can make the code inside the Atari cartridge, floppy disk, or CD think it is running on the original, old system. This is horribly inefficient. There’s so much speed available you don’t even notice. In fact, most Emulators let you slow down, because the base computer is too faster and certain actions depended on the old timing.
In my quest for Mac games I discovered my old favorites. Games that ran in DOS the year I graduated high school and entered college. The Emulator to run them is DOSBox. It’s an open source project and it has the wonderful feature of running on Linux, Windows, and Mac. There is a text file that contains all the settings. It emulates a number of old Sound Blaster era sound cards and CGA and VGA era video cards. These devices were pretty low quality. The video especially is about what you would get from your standard TV.
Many games from this era have been abandoned or discontinued. If you are lucky you can find a download online. Some have been removed and others are available. Most of these games are 1-3 floppies or 1-6 meg. Most of us get more than that in email everyday.
My favorites are Colonization, the original, which has been remade very recently and is due out in a Mac version. And XCOM: UFO Defense. One more that I find tempting is Master of Magic and maybe Master of Orion. It’s hard to believe that these games are just as fun to play. The sound is marginally acceptable. The video is disastrously atrocious by today’s standards. The game play, the way the elements are balanced and the layout of the action screens, is much better the modern games.
Some other notables are Jagged Alliance and it’s sequel, Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games. Jagged Alliance 2 and it’s variations are worth playing too.
So, if you’re interested in getting back an old game check out DOSBox for the DOS games and look up how to play the Win95 and Win98 games in Vista and XP. If all else fails you can download VMWare Player for free, track down an image of a Win98 install disk, and create a gaming VM. That’s what I did.