Playing Classic Games On Your Mac

If you miss the games from the arcades of the 80s, or the classic Mac, Apple II or other systems, you can still play a lot of them on your Mac today. They are free and you don't even need to install anything.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: 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.

Some links directly to sections of the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/internetarcade
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_mac
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_apple
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_c64_games
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_atari

Comments: 3 Responses to “Playing Classic Games On Your Mac”

c Gest

4 years ago

The Internet Archive was a fun reference. A very nice internet secret (at least to me). Thanks.

Steven Greve

Gary, have you used OpenEmu? It has been around for some time and I've read positive reviews but not downloaded their emulator. Just wondering if you would have any cautions about using it.

Gary Rosenzweig

Steven: No cautions, it is just that for most people it isn't a good option. You need to creator (or find) the game ROMs on your own and add them in separately. If you feel that is something you can handle, then that's good. But otherwise it is much easier to do it the way I show.

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Playing Classic Games On Your Mac

Comments: 3 Responses to “Playing Classic Games On Your Mac”

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