In the late 1990s, Pangea Software was a leading developer of Mac-exclusive games. Apple commissioned them to write demonstration code for the first release of the Quickdraw 3D graphics API, and their subsequent games Nanosaur, Bugdom, and Cro-Mag Rally were bundled with various generations of Apple's iMac and iBook computers.

Nearly 30 years later, Pangea kindly released the source to these games under a Creative Commons license, and Iliyas Jorio has been porting them to modern platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) to keep the games alive.

https://jorio.itch.io/

#macintosh #retrogaming

@vga256 Ah, sorry. I found an open tab for Nanosaur, and couldn't for the life of me remember who had told me about it, so I figured I'd toot about it just in case it wasn't from Mastodon. Turns out, it was!
@Screwtapello the source status is very weird. hard to call it open source when only 1 person has access to it.

@vga256 Looking at the git history, it does seem that the Mighty Mike port started from an unmodified source dump:

https://github.com/jorio/MightyMike/commit/0d1b14366f4ad37b2a5eb9adcd084dff535b46f4

I'm guessing it's unmodified, because the following commits have descriptions like "Convert Pascal string literals to C-style strings" and "It links!" which suggests that it hadn't already been cleaned up in secret.

Of course, I have no idea whether that's a *complete* source dump, and even if it is, the Pippin port might have been in a branch with extra optimisations or something, a bit like how when DOOM was open-sourced, it was only the Linux port without any audio code. It'd be nice to have the complete development history of the original games, but what we have is much better than nothing.

Mighty Mike original code · jorio/MightyMike@0d1b143

Pangea Software's Mighty Mike (Power Pete) for modern systems - Mighty Mike original code · jorio/MightyMike@0d1b143

GitHub
@Screwtapello @vga256 I wonder why it's called "Mighty Mike" now, the version I have is "Power Pete"
@mirth I can't find the citation now, but when I was researching this yesterday I read that Pangea named the game Mighty Mike, but when the publisher MacPlay picked it up they were afraid of a trademark dispute with Mighty Mouse, so they required it to be renamed. When the rights reverted to Pangea, they reverted to the original name.

@Screwtapello Interesting. It's been a very long time since I ran the game, but I found a video of gameplay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11IceWMrpzM

(edit, found a better video of the modern port, the channel also has videos of some of the other Pangea ports)

Mighty Mike / Power Pete Gameplay (4K UHD / 2160p)

YouTube