Solarian II was first written about 15 years ago, and was one of the first color games for the new color Macs that came out in 1988. It ran happily for years, but Mac OS X broke it — it never ran well under Classic. We kept getting email about this, and so we've ported it to Mac OS X. It's now a native Cocoa app (!), and should be good to go for another 15 years, we hope! (Please note that it now requires OS X 10.3, however; those of you on 10.2 and earlier will have to upgrade!)
Solarian II is shareware (which means we rely on you to pay for it if you use it). It costs $10. Feel free to try it out for a little while before paying, but please don't forget that it is ultimately your responsibility to pay for it if you use it. For details on how we handle payments, see our main software page. Thanks!
Folks who paid for the old Classic version are not registered for this version of Solarian II. Usually we provide free upgrades for registered users, but this is not just a new version, it's a complete port to what is effectively a new operating system. The amount of effort expended seems to us to justify a new registration fee. Additionally, we don't have any payment records from the old version of Solarian II, so we could not verify who had already paid. We hope nobody is outraged by this; please keep in mind you had more than a decade of playing paid for by your first $25. :->
For those who are confused by some aspect of Solarian II, we have an online manual that covers the common questions like display configuration and game performance (and there is a 72K PDF version of the manual for download if you wish). Most users should find that they can play the game without the need for the manual at all, however.
Solarian II's new icon is courtesy of SOHO/EIT consortium and is used with permission. SOHO is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA. They produce amazing images of the sun, worth checking out.
For those who are curious: yes, there was a Solarian I. It was a class project (big hello here to Doug Ierardi!), and was never released publicly. As to whether there will ever be a Solarian III: well, that depends a lot on how much interest there seems to be in this port of Solarian II. Our last game, Trisection, has not done very well despite being (in our humble opinion) a great game, and so we're feeling a little leery of the Mac game market lately. Is there anybody out there who wants to play games besides first-person shooters? Show your interest by paying for this port of Solarian II!
If you have ideas or feature requests for us, feel free to email us. To those hoping for a similar port to OS X of Lunatic Fringe: sorry, we don't own the copyright on it, and thus can't do anything with it. We wish we could. If anybody reading this knows who owns the copyright on After Dark now (Berkeley Systems is no more), and wants to try to obtain permission for me to release a shareware port of it, feel free to try; but please don't contact us about it until you've actually got things lined up; a long line of people have contacted us in the past, gotten us excited about the idea, and then taken it nowhere.
Comments