How to play Darius Alpha on Mac

Game summary

Darius Alpha is a promotional version of Darius Plus released in 1990 for the PC Engine. It was a mail-order exclusive, obtainable by sending in a pair of coupons found in the manuals of Super Darius and Darius Plus. There were only 800 copies of the card produced, making it one of the rarest, and the absolute most expensive, PC Engine HuCard ever made. This version is only a Boss Rush, where the player faces against all Plus bosses one after another. Like Plus, Alpha features SuperGrafx support, which greatly reduces sprite flickering. Pressing Select on the title screen starts the game with a 4-minute time limit.
First released: Dec 1990

Play Darius Alpha on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Darius Alpha 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).

Darius Alpha 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 Darius Alpha like you would on any PC.
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