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| New application for Mac OS 8-9! |
Hi everyone,
After working away at many projects I've finally finished one of them!
GameBox is a game library partially inspired by Steam, and is built to make the process of gaming on a vintage Mac as straight forward as possible.
My kids have struggled with the quirks of gaming on vintage Macs like having to mount virtual CDs, resolution + bit-depth changes etc., so I built something to take the complexity out of gaming. GameBox allows the creation and organisation of multiple game libraries, auto-mounting and unmounting of virtual CDs, and supports launch/exit scripts for game-specific configurations.
This application is targeted towards machines with a G3 or better, but all of my older Macs are currently packed away so I haven't been able to do extensive testing. I'm hoping it works on first-gen PPCs! An OSX release is scheduled but there are a few bugs to iron out.
Check GameBox out at the Manticore SW website.
For any bug reports/feature requests, please submit them at this URL.
I hope you find this application useful, and happy holidays!
Posted by: greystash on 2025-12-22 15:43:45 |
That’s so cool! What a Dad!
Posted by: Atfphoto on 2025-12-22 16:02:05 |
Anyone have a serial for this? Can't find it in serialbox...
jkjk should support this dude. We've been slaving over apple script the last two years to make games work for our kids.. Need any help with it? Would be interested in contributing or testing. Me and buddy have dozens of systems on the go for our master image. Testing and scripting is our strength.
Posted by: n8blz on 2025-12-22 20:36:11 |
That’s cool, well done!
Posted by: Durosity on 2025-12-23 02:32:05 |
Very cool - will test out on my MDD Mac! The ultimate setup would be to package this with a bunch of games like Total Replay for the Apple II. I imagine that HD image would be pretty large though, so maybe one could just do the classics.
Posted by: Byte Knight on 2025-12-23 06:14:39 |
Very cool !
Posted by: soviet on 2025-12-23 09:22:28 |
realbasic detected
Posted by: finkmac on 2025-12-23 09:38:43 |
realbasic detected better than Claude
Posted by: treellama on 2025-12-23 11:17:59 |
This is…absolutely one of the greatest things I’ve seen in years. My kids constantly ask me why a game won’t work (e.g. screen isn’t set for 256 colors, everything is “small” because the resolution isn’t 640x480), so this is absolutely amazing! Hopefully this will work on my PT Pro with G3 card!
Posted by: LaPorta on 2025-12-23 11:56:59 |
This is customizable I assume?
Posted by: LaPorta on 2025-12-23 11:58:45 |
realbasic detected Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. 😉
Also I find it funny that REALBasic still has a stigma attached to it these days.
Posted by: joshc on 2025-12-23 15:12:13 |
<snip> GameBox is a game library partially inspired by Steam, and is built to make the process of gaming on a vintage Mac as straight forward as possible.
My kids have struggled with the quirks of gaming on vintage Macs<snip>
I hope you find this application useful, and happy holidays! Respect! And you have an iMac Flower Power. Respect!
Happy xmas back!
Posted by: Snial on 2025-12-23 15:25:53 |
Very nice, I've just registered. Happy to support projects like this.
Posted by: chrisrueckert on 2025-12-23 22:40:22 |
Just one question: No way for this to support 7.x? I keep 7.6 on my PT Pro because there are some games that run better under it than 8 or 9.
Posted by: LaPorta on 2025-12-24 02:45:50 |
Thanks everyone!!
@n8blz I'll have an OSX build ready for testing soon, and hopefully a 68k/System 7 build later 🙂
@Byte Knight I'm currently looking into building a tool to create "Game packs" which will auto-install games into the application's library, hopefully this would be a good solution.
@LaPorta Yes it's customisable and comes will a GUI tool for building scripts for games where you can pick and choose options. I can expand the built-in options if they're not sufficient. Also I haven't tested an OS lower than 8.6 (all of my machines are packed for a move in a few weeks), so you may find it works on lower systems (please let me know if you try). I'll look at a trimmed down 68k build after the OSX release
Yes I built it which REALBasic and love it haha. I'm willing to accept a slighlty larger memory footprint if it accomplishes everything I wanted and takes a fraction of the time to build. If I didn't have a busy life I would definitely opt for something else but my time is limited
Posted by: greystash on 2025-12-28 15:01:30 |