[John Calhoun] was digging around their old MAC hard drives, revisiting some abandoned shareware games they wrote over three decades ago, and has uploaded the recovered disk images to GitHub for everyone to take apart and play with. This repository has a few of the games complete with their development files and the compiler environment, a mixture of Think Pascal and C.
Back then, [John] had a solid mantra when creating projects, specifically prototyping fast and abandoning things quickly if they were not working out. The blog shows a list of twenty-eight projects, of which only five ever made it to release, with all the rest left to rot. This is reminiscent of the attitude around Silicon Valley of moving fast and breaking things. Anyway, reasons for ditching a project ranged from ‘too much sprite work’ for a D’n’D style game to simply ‘not fun’ for some with clunky control mechanisms. [John] even abandoned a neat-looking steampunk flight simulator due to the sheer amount of work needed. Of course, it’s not all lost effort. Much of the code written was reused across multiple projects; after all, there’s no point in re-writing a cosine lookup table if you’ve already got one kicking around in another project.
Still, it’s a fun trip down memory lane, looking deep into projects that never were and the development journey to becoming a successful programmer.
While it isn’t hard to find old Macintosh hardware, some are not in great shape. Here’s a fun Hackintosh project that uses retro parts. [John] was featured a while back, with his homage to his first mac, a sleek Rpi-powered eInk desk ornament. Finally, we can’t talk about recovering retro software without looking in detail at the floppy disk themselves.
In future, when people choose to write “Mac” in all caps, instead of flying into a rage, I should make a fun game out of guessing what it’s supposed to stand for. Multipurpose Action Computer? Mothers Against Communism? Miniaturised Agony Cubicle? We’ll never know!
Mutually Assured Confusion?
Multiple Access Corridor?
Military Approved Cornbread?
Most Acrid Cheese
Millennials Are Clueless?
Mini Alien Crabs?
Mostly A Crank?
Monsters Around Coordinates?
Macintosh by Apple Computer
C’mon, everybody knows it stands for ‘Medium Access Control’
How about the original MAC computer?
The Lockheed MAC-16 minicomputer from 1969
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_MAC-16
I just wondered how we got to network addresses from old games…
Mediocre ‘Ackaday Comments?
Mac is of course short for Macintosh, which is an acronym:
Most Applications Crash, If Not The Operating System Hangs.
(Chuckle!)
Meticulous Ass Cleaning
Wow. I remember playing Pararena off of a Mac demo disk that came with my Centris 610… I’ve thought about it off and on for the past 30 years and it felt like no one had ever heard of it.
Glider on the other hand is something that I’m pretty sure I owned. It was fun, but pretty difficult and I never got that far in it.
Wow, does that logo bring back memories. A friend of mine in middle school used to kill whole lunch breaks trying to optimize his glider runs
I wonder what the relation is of KDE’s Ktuberling and the ‘Mac Tuberling’. Same dev of based on it? The early versions of Ktuberling look exactly like that Mac one but I’m not experienced enough with the software to know the whole story.
holy crap!! NO WONDER why that graphic seems familiar! Felt like a core memory unlocked when I saw it…could not place where I saw it tho