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[Greystash]

Hi everyone!

I've been busy squirreling away on multiple projects so I haven't been around much recently, but I've just released one of these projects today.

Here's the spiel:
After realising how difficult it was for my kids to get into vintage Mac gaming with having to deal virtual CDs, resolution/bit-depth changes and other quirks, I built an application to make the process more straight forward.

GameBox is a game library that takes some inspiration from Steam. It tracks your time played on individual games, allows you to specify virtual CDs so they automatically mount and unmount, and supports configurable launch and exit scripts.

This takes the complexity out of launching games that span across different eras/screen sizes, so all that's required is selecting a game from the list and clicking Play.

Check it out at the ManticoreSW Website http://manticore.nz/gamebox.

GameBox is designed to run on a G3 at minimum, but it may run on older machines also. All of my older Macs are packed up so I haven't been able to do extensive testing. I have an OSX release planned, there's just a few more bugs to work through.

For any bug reports/feature requests, please submit them at this URL http://manticore.nz/gamebox-tracker.

I hope you find this application useful!

Happy holidays!

[davecom]

This looks awesome. It sounds like exactly what I may need for my 5 year old who games on his own dedicated Mac mini G4. He can have a bit of issues with mounting/unmounting the virtual CDs. I'll definitely try it out. Out of curiosity, what was the development environment and process like?

[Knezzen]

Love the idea and I have the same "problem" with my kids! They find it easy to boot up the Amiga 600 and just load whatever they want to play from WHDLoad, but using any old Mac is where it becomes tricky (for the same reasons you mentioned).

Any way of seeing this for 68k and System 7 in the near future? Would be great to put on a games only 68k Mac and let them game as much as they like

Keep up the good work!

[Bolkonskij]

This is *extremely* cool. Like stated by others, my kids will love this and I think I will too. There is nothing like that on OS 9. Can't wait for the holidays to start and tinker some with it. Thanks for writing new software for our beloved OS! :-)

Oh and I'd be interested in a potential backport to System 7 as well, because that's what I use a lot of the time.

EDIT: Just registered my copy. Thank you!

[Greystash]

Thank you! I'm currently trying to tidy up an OSX release but after that I'll look at doing a trimmed-down 68k/System 7 release.

@davecom I used RealBasic which I really enjoy. While I could use something less frowned upon, I don't have huge amounts of time to sink into side projects like these. All up this project took 3-4 weeks to make. The downside is slightly higher RAM usage but that was a sacrifice I'm willing to make when I can build exactly what I want and not spend forever building it. My kids are happy and so am I 

[Knezzen]

RealBasic is awesome and nothing to be frowned upon IMO

It's my go-to language and IDE for Macintosh development since I'm in the same position as you, Graystash. I want functionality fast and I don't have a lot of time either.

[Greystash]

RealBasic is awesome and nothing to be frowned upon IMO

It's my go-to language and IDE for Macintosh development since I'm in the same position as you, Graystash. I want functionality fast and I don't have a lot of time either.

Exactly I only wish I started playing with it 10 years earlier haha

[Knezzen]

Yes!

[n8blz]

I love the idea and the application. To be honest, the feature I am most interested in is the ability to reliably unmount the cd image after the game quits. I am wondering if you’d be willing to release or include with the license,  a lighter-weight version that simply mounts a cd image, launches the game, and when the game quits, unmounts the CD image. Something that you could put a copy of in each game’s folder, configure for that game, and use to launch the game. Thanks for considering it!

[Greystash]

I love the idea and the application. To be honest, the feature I am most interested in is the ability to reliably unmount the cd image after the game quits. I am wondering if you’d be willing to release or include with the license,  a lighter-weight version that simply mounts a cd image, launches the game, and when the game quits, unmounts the CD image. Something that you could put a copy of in each game’s folder, configure for that game, and use to launch the game. Thanks for considering it!

The way I implemented the unmounting was a little lazy due to some issues I didn't want to address in the initial release. At the moment it just unmounts every mounted image, and sometimes this is unreliable. I am planning on improving this but it will come with the update after the one I'm currently working on (thanks for reminding me).

I do want to build a lightweight 68k version/GameBox Lite, so it may come as part of that. The build I'm currently working on is almost ready for release and has a ton of nice features (including OSX support) and performance improvements, so I'll have more time to focus on those aspects after this one

[ptricky]

Fantastic, I'm excited to see other folks still developing on mac os 9.

[Greystash]

deleted

[Greystash]

Hey everyone, for the Mac OS X gamers out there I've just released a universal binary of GameBox for Mac OS X 10.2.8 - 10.11 El Capitan.

I've also added cloud syncing, chat rooms, game bundle installation via game packs, and a German localised build to the latest version (OS 8 - OSX). It also supports running and tracking OS 9 games under Classic Environment