How to play Brain Strainers on Mac

Game summary

Brain Strainers is a collection of two separate games/learning tools. The first game is "Follow The Leader" where a pattern is repeated using a 4-color circle. By keeping track of either the tones generated or the colors flashing, the player can copy the sequence to continue. Higher difficulties increase speed and allow only tone identification of sequences. Additionally it keeps track of your best number of correct identifications in a row. The second game is "Clef Climber" where the player is given a tone that corresponds to a certain musical note and must match the note being played. Lower difficulties provide a constant tone to refer to and visual help on the note being used. Higher difficulties provide a single playing of the tone and no visual help.
First released: Jun 1984

Play Brain Strainers on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Brain Strainers 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).

Brain Strainers 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 Brain Strainers like you would on any PC.
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