Game Sprockets
Application programming interfaces for Mac OS
Game Sprockets is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) supporting gaming on the classic Mac OS. It consisted of four main parts, DrawSprocket, InputSprocket, SoundSprocket and NetSprocket, each providing a library of pre-rolled routines for common gaming tasks. SpeechSprocket was a relabelled version of the Speech Recognition Manager that provided speech recognition support, and QuickDraw 3D RAVE provided 3D hardware acceleration.
Game Sprockets was first released in 1996, and saw only minor use before development was cancelled in 1997. OS X included many of the same features in the built-in libraries, while OpenGL replaced RAVE as the 3D acceleration layer. NetSprocket lives on as OpenPlay, although adoption is limited.
History
Background
Early in its history, the Macintosh computer was a strong gaming platform due to its high-resolution screen, digital sound hardware and the fact that every Mac came equipped with a reasonable gaming controller, the mouse. However, gaming was never supported in any strong way within Apple, and in some cases actively discouraged. By the 1990s the Mac platform had greatly increased in complexity through a profusion of models with different features. Supporting a game across the entire lineup required the programmer to learn the intricacies of different models at a time when even figuring out which machine the program was installed on had no standard solution.
By the mid-90s, PC gaming had evolved into a powerful market of its own, one of the drivers for new computer purchases.
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This entry incorporates text from “Game Sprockets” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.