Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to play
classic arcade and computer games on your Mac.
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So usually when you want to play an old classic game you either have to find a developer that has
created a new version of that game or, perhaps, run an emulator on your Mac which is difficult
to do. You've got to install the emulator. Then you've got to go and look for the software to
install on it. It involves lots of steps and some questionable legalities. But an easy way
to do it is actually use the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive has archived many old arcade and
computer games in a format that you can play right in the web browser. So it's actually emulating the
old arcade cabinet or computer in the browser and you can just play it without installing anything.
So the first collection I want to show you is just called Internet Arcade. It's located here.
You're going to see a lot of classic arcade games. It's not a complete list. There's obviously some
that have been left out. Maybe they didn't get the rights to use them. But a lot of ones that
were my favorites are here. Like, for instance, here's Joust. Now when you go to one of these it
loads up a page with lots of information and the game is at the top. You have to click it
to actually load the game. I recommend looking at the information first because you're going
to find important things like what keys on the keyboard to use to control the game. Sometimes
you won't really find that much information. But if you go down to the Comment below you'll
find people talking about what works and what doesn't. What keys work best. That kind of thing.
I'm going to warn you it's very frustrating to use some of these games.
Some features don't work like they used to when these games first were released
on the web. So it takes a little patience and experimentation to get each one going.
Let's try this one here. I'll click to begin and I get this little set of controls here that I find
just simply don't work. So I dismiss those. It usually loads up the game as if it's an arcade
cabinet just starting. So sometimes you'll end up in a test mode. To get around that you have
to hit a special key. What that key is, well, you have to kind of guess. I find that a lot of times
it's an F key. So you have to hit something like F2 or F5. Of course depending up how you keyboard
is setup you may have to hold down the fn key for those F keys to work. So for Joust here
it seems to work if I hold down the fn key and do F2. Then it will finish booting the
machine. Now I have to use the regular number 5 key to insert a coin and 1 for one player.
Now I can play. So the left to right arrow keys seem to work pretty well. The Control key works
for flapping the wings. You could see here it conflicts with other things on the Mac so let
me turn that Off there so I can actually control. Of course if I use left and right
arrow with the Control key it's also going to activate Mission Control and try to move over
to another desktop. So you may need to disable that. So you can see how frustrating this is.
But once you put a few minutes of time into learning how each game works you actually find
that they are pretty playable. It worked fine here in Safari as well as other browsers like
Chrome and Firefox. One thing you'll find that just doesn't work is sound. So a lot
is preventing sound from working in browsers today
and I've never really gotten the sound to work on any of these.
You can search for games over here and, as I said, you could find some popular
games and not others. So, for instance, Tron is there but you won't find games like PacMan.
Tron is one where you really have to go and pay attention to what people say about the keys.
If you scroll down you'll find people giving suggestions about the keys like using z and x
to simulate the wheel that was on the original arcade cabinet. So I'm going to use 5 here to
insert a coin. 1 to play. Then I'm going to go over to the right here to go to the tank game
and now you can see the z and x will actually turn the turret and the arrow keys will move the tank.
A lot of times it's the Control key that acts as the button on the cabinet.
But arcade games aren't the only classic computer games that are out there. You can
also browse a large library of MS DOS games here. You can see this collection is huge. These games
tend to work a bit better because you're using a keyboard. So it fits a little bit better
with the game itself. Here's the original The Oregon Trail game. The keyboard works just fine
with these games, for the most part.
Now how about classic Mac games. Well, there's a collection of those as well
but it's much smaller. This is actually software not just games. So you're going to find a lot of
different pieces of old Mac software here. Even like word processors and things like that. Since
these are emulating a Mac sometimes there's a disk that includes several games on it. Here's a game I
played a long time ago. When you run this you'll see it actually boot a little Mac emulator here
right in your browser. To actually play the game you even need to go and use the cursor,
open up the little drive, and launch the game by double clicking it.
Then you've got to kind of remember how to play it. Like for instance here you go to Game,
Start Game, and then you could play. Use the i, j, k, and m keys to move around.
I always try to remember all the old games I used to play and I realize that actually a lot of them
I didn't play on the early Macs. I played them on the Apple II. So, of course, there is a library of
Apple II games. This one is the largest library of all. It includes lots of software that's not games
though. But I was able to search and find a lot of my favorites. Some of them as cracked versions
probably because the originals couldn't be recovered into this format. So here's Spy Hunter,
a game I wasted a lot of time on. I found that this one took a long time to boot up.
But it finally did and I was able to play. I had to experiment to figure out it is the l
and the semi-colon keys to move left and right. The a and the z key to speedup and break.
So while it's great to have all these games available it can be frustrating to try to
figure out how to play. I find it's best to actually to find one game you want to
play and really focus to figuring out how it works and getting to play it. If you jump around from
game to game it's just too frustrating. But definitely worthwhile if you're nostalgic for
games that you may have played in the arcade or on older computers.
Also if you search you'll find that the Internet Archive has collections of games
from other systems as well. You'll find them, say, for the Commodore 64 or the Atari 800.