As a kid, one of my first games was Maelstrom, a slick Asteroids clone for the Mac by Ambrosia Software (who later went on to publish the Escape Velocity series). I have childhood memories of the two-note soundtrack while playing the two simplest strategies (spin in place without accelerating, and zoom upwards in a straight line firing all the way), of the “You EEdiot” when you accidentally shot a power-up canister, and the “Pretty good, pretty good!” for when you score over 10,000 points in a single stage.

Except if I open up Maelstrom now, it says “Hot damn!” instead.

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My winter break project was getting the files off an old PowerBook from the 90s (my dad’s old work computer) that I’ve had lying around for a while. (There’s probably not anything of interest there to anyone but our family, but who knows?) I’ve looked at this before, but it’s hard to get a 25-year-old computer to talk to a modern OS.

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