How to play Hero of the Golden Talisman on Mac

Game summary

The town of the game's hero is under a curse from an evil wizard. He has stolen the Golden Talisman that had protected the city in the past. Broken into five pieces, the Talisman is hidden in a labyrinth filled with monsters. Now the hero has to find all five pieces of the Talisman and destroy the evil wizard in order to restore peace to the city. The labyrinth is explored from a side scrolling perspective. It is composed of 64 rooms spread over five levels. Each room is 8 screens large, providing a total of 512 screens to explore. The goal of each level is to find a piece of the Talisman while fighting off lots of different monsters ranging from birds to jumping eyeballs to fire-breathing dragons. The hero can jump, climb ropes, swim and shoot as well as pick up different power-ups and objects. He can carry five objects, but only hold/use one at a time. Pressing the space bar changes the object in use. Usable objects include keys, ropes, lamps to light dark rooms, flags that improve the hero's firepower and others. Power-ups can be collected to replenish health or air. If the hero runs out of air, being underwater will slowly decrease his health. To help the hero finding his way through the labyrinth, a map is shown at the lower left side of the screen. It marks all visited rooms, shows his current position and indicates whether there are any items in a room.
First released: Dec 1985

Play Hero of the Golden Talisman on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Hero of the Golden Talisman 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).

Hero of the Golden Talisman 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 Hero of the Golden Talisman like you would on any PC.
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