After realising how difficult it was for my kids to get into vintage Mac gaming and having to deal with 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, and allows you to organise and categorise multiple game libraries. It tracks your time played on individual games, auto-mounts and unmounts virtual CDs, and supports configurable launch and exit scripts for game-specific configurations.

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.

GameBox also comes with Script Maker, a utility for creating custom launch/exit scripts for ultimate configuration. For example, If you had a game that requires a specific resolution/colour set and has loud sound effects, you can create a script that sets the correct resolution + depth, and sets the volume to 10% on launch, and then restores the original resolution/depth/volume on exit. Gamebox also has the ability to run AppleScript Applets on launch.

The initial release of GameBox targets PowerPC systems that can run Mac OS 8.6 - 9.2.2. I haven't yet tested earlier systems. There will be a Mac OSX version released in the near future. GameBox is not compatible with 68k based machines, but I may release a trimmed down version in the future.

GameBox comes with a free trial and costs $10USD to register. If you'd like to support the ongoing development of projects for vintage Macintosh computers, then please register a copy at Manticore SW.