Carroll's Alice stars in this real-time battle of chess moves, written by Apple's Steve Capps during development of the original Macintosh.
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Modding Instructions#
The game stores its sprites in a pair of ordinary, visible MacPaint documents. At the bottom of the file "Pieces" are some tips on how players can modify them.
Unused Icons#
As a bonus, the disk includes a maze generator called Amazing, which holds some unused ICON resources (probably doodles by Capps):
ICON ID 1 shows what must have been a familiar sight around Apple as the Mac's ship date loomed.
ICON 2 depicts one of Apple's FileWare, or "Twiggy", diskettes. In a case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome, these famously unreliable media were used in Mac prototypes until sanity prevailed.
ICON 3 is a caricature of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The nose and lopsided grin recall Susan Kare's Jobs icon, which likely influenced this one. In turn, this particular icon was used in an early "Twiggy" Mac prototype's UI.
ICON 4 is a duplicate of the Cheshire Cat that Capps drew for Through the Looking Glass. It goes unused here in Amazing, as it would again in the third-party game MacCommand.
The remaining nine icons might be sketches for unimplemented maze features, like numbered checkpoints and pop-up messages as you approached a dead end. They're presented in the order they appear in the file, rather than the haphazardly assigned resource IDs.
Hidden Credit#
Another bonus on the disk was called Clock, based on the "Dali Clock" with melting numbers that Capps wrote for the Xerox Alto. To see its credit string, push the mouse downward along the left edge of the screen.
Written by Steve Capps at Apple (and at Xerox).