Pleroma

Pleroma

so here's a fun thought experiment for marchintosh:

what would Apple's computers have been like if Steve Jobs had exited, and Steve Wozniak had assumed leadership of the company and its product development? speculate!

my thought: Apple would have embraced gaming and made game developer-friendly tools a core part of the operating system design. e.g. we would have had the apple equivalent to directX

@vga256 the Mac would have gone away in favor of an overly-complex remote control and set top box based on the GS.
Games? Breakout clones galore.

@juddy truly a dark future

@vga256 Someone made a YouTube video about this very topic a couple of marchintoshes ago, unfortunately I can't find it now.

The gist of it was that the Apple IIgs design/architecture would have driven the company through the 90’s (with the Mac being a niche product that only achieved as much success as the Lisa, and quietly disappeared a couple years after it was introduced).

The Apple platform would be seen as not only viable for gaming, but also for programming, both hardware and software hacking. Clones show up much earlier alongside alternative shells.

@smallsco oh that's awesome!

i honestly forgot about the GS. it was really well loved among GS owners, and i'm sad that it wasn't embraced very well by developers. i suppose it just arrived a little too late.

i would have loved to have an Apple gaming machine that was backwards compatible all the way back to the //

@vga256 We kind of did briefly have an Apple equivalent to DirectX: the GameSprockets libraries. It's just that they went the other way — they squeezed the resources afforded to the team and eventually shut it down (in a moment colourfully documented in my book with lead dev Chris DeLeon swearing at Avie Tevanian).

@MossRC wow! first i've heard of gamesprockets.

@vga256 @MossRC The only GameSprockets I remember actually interacting with were the InputSprockets for setting up controls

@kalleboo @vga256 InputSprockets was user-facing, but there were others for networking, graphics, and sound. This old MacTech article offered a good summary of them and how they made gamedev easier: https://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.02/GameSprocketIntro/index.html
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