Best games/apps to showcase B&W mac?

[sixsevenco]

I'm looking for suggestions on what games and apps best showcase a B&W compact mac. (This request is a bit different than subjective, personal preference.)  I have a Classic II.  Here's what I have so far:

OS:

• System 7.0.1 (I like the bells and whistles with the newer versions, but I keep coming back to this for the speed.)
  

Games:

• Spectre 1.0
  
• Tetris
  
• Prince of Persia
  
• Glider 4.06
  
• Shanghai 2.0
  
• Lode Runner
  

Apps:

• Word 5.1a (the best word processing app ever!)
  
• Excel 4.0
  
• After Dark 2.0 (I need my flying toasters)
  

I really want to get Star Wars running, but the file on the 'garden' appears to be corrupt.  Anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

 

[Mu0n]

Dark Castle (not sure it can run on a Classic II)

Beyond Dark Castle

Uninvited

Shadowgate

Déjà Vu

Déjà Vu II: Lost in Las Vegas

Won't run on a Classic II:

Archon

Winter Games

Pinball Construction Set

 

[LaPorta]

You will have much more luck running the titles mentioned above if you are using System 6 of some flavor.

 

[Crutch]

I prefer Tetris Max (shareware) to the original Tetris.  Nice Jesus Jones music in the early versions.  (The author later replaced it with some generic tunes, copyright issue maybe?)

Dark Castle is of course the all-time showpiece game.

Crystal Quest will work nicely.  And I’m partial to Glypha (though Glypha II is far better, but needs 640x480).

Star Wars is a good call.  I have a working copy on my SE/30 that I inherited from my own 1993-vintage Power Mac 8100 hard drive (the Power Mac motherboard died long ago, but the SCSI HD still works great...).  At some point I’ll see if it differs somehow from the one on the Garden.

@Mu0n wow, Archon.  An all-time favorite.  I haven’t been able to get it to run even on my Plus, though (which admittedly has 4MB of RAM and an 020).  Does it maybe make fixed assumptions about the location of screenBits or something the needs a 128k/512k?

 

[Mu0n]

@Mu0n wow, Archon.  An all-time favorite.  I haven’t been able to get it to run even on my Plus, though (which admittedly has 4MB of RAM and an 020).  Does it maybe make fixed assumptions about the location of screenBits or something the needs a 128k/512k?

Nope, runs on my Mac Plus with 1.5 MB. That's what we had at home and I played it plenty with my brother (him, dark side on keyboard and me, light side on mouse). I was able to clone the disk IIRC but not make a working disk image of it (I barely recall how that could be a thing). 

 

[Mu0n]

More games!

Unsure if the Classic can run those:

Ancient Art of War

Ancient Art of War: At Sea

Puppy Love

Airborne!

World Builder games (there were lots)

Playmaker Football

Definitely can't run this:

Chipwits (requires Mac 512k, nothing else will do unless you really aggressively tax the RAM and run a weird stripped down finder, made it work once on my Mac Plus but couldn't repeat the feat later - it runs on a compiled for Mac512k mini-vMac tho).

 

[sixsevenco]

Star Wars is a good call.  I have a working copy on my SE/30 that I inherited from my own 1993-vintage Power Mac 8100 hard drive (the Power Mac motherboard died long ago, but the SCSI HD still works great...).  At some point I’ll see if it differs somehow from the one on the Garden.

Thanks.  The garden one is a .zip file, and I can't get a usable file from it.

 

[sixsevenco]

LaPorta, Crutch, and MuOn,

Thanks!  I've already downloaded a few.  I'll also get System 6.08 running on a partition.

 

[Mu0n]

The Sierra games are also okay on black and white macs. They ported the engine on macs and mostly did a simple graphics conversion, which means you'll get a lower res chunky style graphics (which did not exploit the superior 512x342 res of compacts) but some games made use of the high resolution dialogs and textboxes as you got alerts and inputs.

Off the top of my head:

Space Quest

Space Quest II

Space Quest III

King's Quest

King's Quest II

King's Quest III

Police Quest

Leisure Suit Larry

Gold Rush!

Manhunter: New York (easy to find)

Manhunter: San Francisco (super hard to find) 

I used to be so jealous of any color computer that could run these games. The Mac Plus was all I had - don't get me wrong, it gave me access to a form of computing that wasn't matched elsewhere, but I was a Sierra catalog maniac-peruser and lusted after these native colored graphics.

 

[dcr]

Can we build on this by suggesting games/applications that would showcase each compact Mac?  Things that would not only look good but also highlight what was important historically or maybe even ahead of its time for each model early Mac?  (The original Mac, Mac 512k, Mac Plus, Mac SE, Mac SE/30, Classics, etc.)

I have a Macintosh 512ke and I have PageMaker 2 for it, which I think demonstrates the role early Macs had in getting the whole desktop publishing revolution started.  (Perhaps version 1 would be better, but 2 is what I have.)

I'm less sure of what to use on other compact Macs.  I think, especially if you plan to show anyone not a vintage Mac enthusiast, that you want stuff that really demonstrates the capabilities of the machine.  You know, something more than, Look!  It's a 35 year old Mac and it still boots up!

 

[dcr]

Just thought of an application that might be good for showcasing a B&W compact Mac: HyperCard.

You could create a HyperCard stack to present the history of the machine or make an interactive game of your own or whatever.

 

[Crutch]

HyperCard is a great call. Will The Manhole run on a 512k? It’s a beautiful game. 

 

[Mk.558]

Oxyd is good, really helps to have an optical mouse though

Bolo is good, but works better in color

Airborne! is neat but only runs under pre-System 7

Armor Alley works well too

 

[LaPorta]

dcr, that is really a neat idea. I am thinking of showcasing some early Macs for kids at my old middle school...having a HyperCard presentation would be amazing!

 

[sixsevenco]

So it took me a while to locate a copy of 6.0.8L.  I can't believe how fast it is!  My first Mac was a Classic II, and I've never used anything prior to System 7.  There are a few things I don't understand:

• I have an orangepi running netatalk and acting as a file and print server.  My orangepi is not showing up in the chooser in 6.0.8L.  I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, but I'm not sure what...  I'm assuming that System 6 has networking, right? The default install did not include AppleShare.  I copied over AppleShare and AppleShare Prep from the install floppy. 
  
• I don't know what app to use to mount disk images.  Everything I've tried seems to require System 7 or greater.
  

I didn't mean to, but I'm happy I might have sparked interest in showcasing the compact macs.  One game I forgot to mention was Kung-Fu Chivalry. If you haven't tried it, it's worth a look.  I think it's impressive. (and hard)

Lastly, I still wish I could get Star Wars working.  Like I said before the file at the garden (1989 version) appears to be corrupt.  I can't get the images to do anything.

 

[Mu0n]

Try Disk Copy 3.5 (though it may only write to disk? I don't remember). There might be others, and I can find that for you if you need it.

 

[nglevin]

It’s come up before; you want to look for MountImage to mount DC4.2 images in System 6.

For games I can strongly recommend Hidden Agenda and The Colony, both work great on a compact Mac. I liked Hidden Agenda more myself. It is a very good political intrigue simulation game.

 

[omidimo]

Shufflepuck Cafe, SimCity 1.1, Manhole to name a few good ones from that era.

 

[Crutch]

@sixsevenco I’ll mess around with Star Wars this weekend and see if I can get a fix to the Garden.