Mac Pipes

MacPipes X is Federico Filipponi / Factor Software's Carbon/OS X rewrite of the long-running MacPipes arcade puzzler, in which you race a rising tide of water to assemble a working pipeline from randomly dealt pipe segments. This OS X edition restarts version numbering at 1.0, with the archived release being v1.1.3.

How it plays

Each level deals you a queue of pipe shapes; you must place enough of them end-to-end on the grid to reach a required pipeline length before the timer runs out and water starts to flow. Bonus points reward connecting more pipes than the minimum and forming closed loops.

Lineage

MacPipes is not a clone of LucasArts' Pipe Dream but a rendition of a late-80s Amiga game called Pipeline. The author began programming it in Turbo Pascal on a Macintosh SE in 1988, released the first color classic version publicly in 1995, and shipped the final classic build (2.2.7) in early 1999 before the OS X rewrite.

System requirements

MacPipes X requires a PowerPC processor and runs on Mac OS 9.0 or later with CarbonLib, and natively on Mac OS X. (The earlier classic line, archived separately, supported 68020/030/040 Macs back to System 7.0.1.)

Distribution

Shareware from Factor Software (Federico Filipponi, ffilipponi@fub.it). Free to evaluate and redistribute unmodified, with a small registration fee to unlock the full game. Inclusion on commercial CD-ROM compilations requires prior agreement.