After linking to Stacks, his remarkable new modern HyperCard player, I made the terrible mistake of clicking around the rest of Jeff Halter’s website, and fell upon Lunacy:
Created by Ben Haller and released in the early ’90s as
part of the Macintosh More After Dark software package, Lunatic
Fringe was unique among screensavers in that it was not just a
passive animation to watch, but an interactive game! Toggling the
Caps Lock key while the screensaver was running popped you into a
space shooter where you could fly around, collect power-ups, and
blast a variety of baddies all in pursuit of a high score. It was
a blast.Running Lunatic Fringe on a modern computer has been a
challenge. Fringe Player by Greg Parker filled this need
during Apple’s PPC and Intel era, but is not supported on modern
Apple platforms. Lunacy brings Lunatic Fringe to the present: a
native Swift app with a built-in emulation engine that runs the
original module, unchanged, on modern Apple platforms.
Lunatic Fringe is one of my all-time favorite classic Mac games. Lunacy is a great modern player, including CRT simulation to make the game look a lot more like it did back in the day.
