Game Programming Adventure on the Macintosh 512k: Part 2

Save the Cows: Official Release

Here it is, the latest and greatest video game of 2018: Save the Cows VR version coming soon!

No, there will be no VR version. Ah yes, and the source code on github.

How to create your own game or app for Macintosh 512k

  • First, you'll want to do your actual development and testing on an emulator. The best one (of the two available) in my opinion is by far Mini vMac.
  • If you haven't already, downloaded System 4/Finder 6 ("System 5") software from here
  • Then you need a development environment. I recommend Microsoft QuickBasic 1.0, the successor of Microsoft BASIC, with compiler included (which creates an actual app file from your code).
  • Hopefully you've done some MS Basic programming in the past, because you'll need the familiarity against the lack of documentation. I couldn't find a manual for QuickBASIC for Mac anywhere. But it is very similar to Amiga BASIC and fairly similar to x86 QuickBASIC.
  • You'll also need a blank floppy disk image (choose the 400K one), and a good old Mac disk image editor
  • The hardest part of all is getting your program onto an actual Macintosh 512k! Should you choose to accept this mission, I can only recommend buying the Floppy Emu from BigMessOWires.com for about $109 (it comes with the cable, by the way). Otherwise if you have an old Mac like a Power PC, you may be able to use a different transfer method, for which I hereby refer you to Google.

For all 0 of you that actually do this, good luck and then congratulations! And please let me know if you do actually do it!