After enjoying a bit of a Tetris Max revival on my new collection of classic Macs, I've discovered something I never could have back in the early days: the gameplay feels substantially different on different models of Macs. I only ever had one machine to test it on, so I never noticed this, but the difference is pretty huge! The game uses TickCount to drop the pieces at a constant real-time rate, but somehow it still feels slower on some Macs than others.

I had been playing the game a fair bit using the Basilisk II emulator, and was finding it pretty difficult. I decided my reflexes just weren't what they used to be, and I consistently lost at about 90-95 rows. Then the first time I tried the game on the Power Mac 8500, I got 104 rows, and I'm sure I could have done more with a few more tries. This morning I tried it on my new LC II (thanks Coius!), and I got 204 rows without hardly trying! Who wrote this buggy software anyway??

So after all these years, it seems that any direct comparison of high scores obtained on different Mac models is invalid.