Many, many years ago, I played Escape Velocity on a friend's Mac. It was fun: a top-down 2D game with Elite-like mechanics.

When I got my own Mac (still in the distant past, but about 8 years later), I looked it up and saw that the latest instalment in the series was EV Nova, which improved the graphics and had more story.

A year or two ago, I decided to see if it worked on a new Mac and discovered that there was no x86 version (PowerPC only), so no chance of getting it to work on Apple's Arm cores. Apparently you can run the Windows version under WINE under Rosetta2 but that seemed like way too much effort.

So I was incredibly happy to discover Endless Sky, an open-source game inspired by (but not directly copying) the Escape Velocity series. It has everything I remember enjoying in Escape Velocity. It has wasted quite a lot of hours of my evenings / weekends over the last couple of weeks (but in a good way). And they're constantly adding new bits to the universe, new story lines, and so on. I thought I'd finished it, only to discover that the part of the galaxy I'd explored was only 50% of the whole thing.

#EscapeVelocity #EndlessSky #Games #GamesNostalgia #OpenSource

Escape Velocity (video game) - Wikipedia

@david_chisnall Escape Velocity is one of my favourite game of all time! I still play it on my iBook G3 from time to time. (Ambrosia released a tool to generate valid keys for it before they closed shop.)

Will definitely check out Endless Sky! 

@david_chisnall I loved EV too, but EV: Override was my favorite. EV: Nova felt too railroady.

@david_chisnall I did a remake of another Ambrosia game Bubble Trouble (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Trouble_(1996_video_game)) a few years ago, up to the level of binary reverse-engineering a bunch of the enemy AI.

Unfortunately the authors didn't give me permission to distribute it at the time, and now don't return emails

Bubble Trouble (1996 video game) - Wikipedia

RE: https://mastodon.online/@resistor/116170917078173003

If anyone is able to get a reply from the original authors Alex Metcalf (UK) or David Wareing (AU), I'd love to share this with their permission.