Barrack Discretion

Barrack Discretion is a tiny patcher for Ambrosia Software's arcade game Barrack that permanently overwrites two of its more colourful in-game sound effects. It is aimed at parents and players who would rather not hear the game's "Oh My God" and "Shiiiiii" samples during play.

What it does

The utility opens the Barrack Sounds resource file and rewrites the two flagged samples in place with quieter substitutes. The change is not a runtime mute toggle: once applied, the original sounds are gone unless restored from a backup.

Backup before running

Because the patch is destructive, the readme strongly advises duplicating the Barrack Sounds file before running Discretion. Restoring the originals later is simply a matter of dropping the backed-up copy back into the Barrack folder.

Relationship to Barrack

Barrack itself is a Greg Lovette-authored, Ambrosia-published JezzBall/Qix-style arcade game from 1996. Discretion is a small companion release distributed alongside the main game on Ambrosia's site and later mirrored to Info-Mac as info-mac/game/arc/barrack-discretion.hqx.

System requirements

The patcher targets the same System 7 through Mac OS 9 environment as Barrack itself and runs on both 68k and PowerPC machines. Modern users typically apply it inside SheepShaver, Basilisk II, or Mini vMac II.