How to play Astro Fighter on Mac

Game summary

The game of Astro Fighter consists of 4 waves and a refueling stage, which are then repeated with increasingly higher difficulty. The player's task is to eliminate the four successive waves of different types of attacking craft, while avoiding being hit by missiles and bombs, and then refuel by shooting the 'GS' ship before repeating the process. The player starts with 3 lives and receives a bonus life on reaching a score of 5000. 300 bonus points are received for shooting each 6 falling bombs and for 950 for hitting the GS ship accurately on the first shot. A very large bonus of 10,000 is given for getting through 4 waves and refueling by using exactly 2 shots more than the minimum needed. As the higher levels of Astro Fighter are difficult to survive consistently, even for the best players, the highest scores have been achieved by the achieving the 10,000 bonus deliberately.
First released: Dec 1979

Play Astro Fighter on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Astro Fighter on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.

Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.

Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).

Astro Fighter installation steps for Mac

Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install Astro Fighter like you would on any PC.
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