classic-mac
Software for the black-and-white compact Macintosh (Mac Plus / SE / Classic, System 6–7),
written in C and built with the Retro68 cross-compiler
on a modern Mac. Everything here runs on a stock 8 MHz 68000 with 1–4 MB of RAM — real
hardware or emulators (Mini vMac, Basilisk II, PCE).
Case study and video: mitchellv.me/work/classic-mac · by Mitchell Vizensky, game UX designer
Most projects include a prebuilt .dsk floppy image you can mount directly in an emulator
or copy over with a Floppy Emu / BlueSCSI. The disk images contain only our own software —
you supply your own System boot disk.
Games
Toys & desk accessories
| Project | What it is |
|---|
| pip | Pip — a desk pet who lives on your Mac: yawns, scratches, gets startled, grumps, wanders, and speaks. |
| antfarm | AntFarm — an ant colony simulation in 1-bit. |
| aquarium | Aquarium — a desktop fish tank. |
| dock-mac | A macOS-style dock for System 6/7. |
After Dark modules
after-dark-mac — native screensaver modules (ADgm) for Berkeley Systems'
After Dark 2.0, built with Retro68's --mac-flat output:
- Ants — the farm, after hours
- Claude Show — a three-act animated show
- Cinema — streams a film library to your screensaver
Demos
demos-mac — a little demoscene set pushing the 68000: cube, plasma,
starfield, tunnel, and the obligatory spinning donut.
lum-mac — a frame-streamed animation piece (fan art of Lum from Urusei
Yatsura; character © Rumiko Takahashi).
movie-mac — our early full-motion-video player experiment, with the
Python frame-stream generators. For real video on a compact Mac we now use Fred Stark's
excellent MacFlim — this stays here as the road we
took to get there.
Tooling
pce-measure — configs and notes for measuring true 8 MHz frame rates with
the cycle-accurate PCE emulator (brew install pce), instead of
the too-fast timing most emulators give you. Bring your own ROM images.
Building
Each project has a build.sh (CMake + the Retro68 toolchain). Install
Retro68, then:
cd <project> && ./build.sh
Output is a classic Mac application plus a mountable .dsk image.
Credits & licensing
Original code here is MIT-licensed (see LICENSE).
The two ports are fan projects; the games belong to their creators:
If you're a rights holder and want something changed or removed, open an issue.
