About
Nanosaur is Pangea Software's 1998 third-person shooter, originally a Mac-only game bundled with the original iMac and a showcase for Apple's QuickDraw 3D; its player is a cybernetic dinosaur sent back in time just before an asteroid strikes the Earth. This is Pangea Software's Nanosaur updated to run on modern macOS, Windows and Linux, based on the source code Pangea released in 1999 and re-released with Pangea's permission. It aims to be the best way to play the game today while staying faithful to the original design.
How it differs from the original
The port adds modern comforts such as arbitrary resolutions and fixes some gameplay bugs, while changes to the game's design are deliberately out of scope. It now uses a tailor-made renderer instead of QuickDraw 3D.
Getting started
Ready-to-play builds for macOS, Windows and Linux are available from the project's GitHub releases page, and a build guide plus the original instruction manual are included in the repository.
History
To port the game, the author wrote Pomme, a partial cross-platform implementation of the Macintosh Toolbox API, later reused for several other Pangea ports. The first release rendered 3D graphics through a fork of Quesa, an independent QuickDraw 3D implementation, before switching to its own renderer in version 1.4.2.
Additional notes
- License
- This version is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
- External link
- Downloads: https://github.com/jorio/Nanosaur/releases