How to play Protector YASI on Mac

Game summary

The Vectrex community was taken by surprise in 2003 when the announcement of the upcoming, original release of Protector LE was revealed, as Alex Herbert envisioned that the arcade classic of Defender could be brought to the Vectrex. Many people were stunned when a downloadable video was posted as well, showing that the fast and furious gameplay from the original did indeed seem to be possible after all. It quickly sold out of its 100 copies in less than three weeks of release[1], which came with an overlay (a bit rare for Vectrex homebrews in general), were numbered and had an embossed foil logo on its box. It also came with the Spike Goes Down game included with it as well as an unlockable bonus. Then later on that year, the unlimited edition of Protector was released, although with a different game included, being Y*A*S*I, which stands for "Yet Another Space Invaders", as that game was a clone of that arcade classic (hence the title of this release being Protector/Y*A*S*I this time around). Again this was a bit of a surprise within the Vectrex community, as a lot of gamers in general didn't know that the Vectrex is capable of producing raster graphics as well, which Y*A*S*I proved by looking almost exactly like it's arcade cousin, having bitmapped, rather than vector graphics (note: Spike Goes Down also had raster graphics as well, it's just that this unlimited version is more well known, especially since the ROM for Spike Goes Down has yet to be released years later). No overlay was provided this time around though. Protector/Y*A*S*I instantly became one of the "must haves" for the Vectrex and was originally sold on the Vectrex carts web site until that was taken over by John Dondzila, where it is still available to this day at his Classic Game Creations site. Both versions are for one player only.
First released: Feb 2003

Play Protector YASI on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Protector YASI 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).

Protector YASI 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 Protector YASI like you would on any PC.
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