Mac Qubic

MacQubic is a Macintosh implementation of Qubic, the classic 3D tic-tac-toe game played across four stacked 4x4 boards. Written by Eric David Belsley and David A. Belsley, the program has long been considered the strongest Mac entry in the genre. The version preserved here is 3.2, released in August 1995 as a fat binary for 680x0 and Power Macs.

Gameplay

Qubic is played on a 4x4x4 cube. Players take turns claiming cells, and the first to line up four marks in a row, column, diagonal, or any of the cube's space diagonals wins. MacQubic provides a strong computer opponent and a clean classic Mac interface for navigating between the four stacked boards.

Version 3.2

According to the authors' release note, MacQubic 3.2 is an "upgraded and modernized" build of what they describe as "the undisputed king of the 3D tic-tac-toe games." The 3.2 release adds fat binary code so that it runs natively on Power Macs as well as on the older machines it was originally developed for.

Authors

The program is co-authored by Eric D. Belsley (then at the University of Miami) and David A. Belsley (then at Boston College), with contact addresses included in the original distribution.

Distribution

MacQubic ships as the BinHex archive mac-qubic-32.hqx in info-mac/game/brd and is preserved on Macintosh Garden as a 1995 release. The .hqx file must be unbinhexed and unstuffed before use.