How to play Sonic Crackers on Mac

Game summary

Sonic Crackers is an early prototype build of the game Knuckles' Chaotix, incorporating many of the elements that would appear in the final game. Its name comes from a peculiar, and clearly quickly made, ASCII-art title screen. Sonic Crackers is thought to be an engine test, composed of various different game engines, which are swapped out using RAM coding. The game features Sonic and Tails, who, in the main demonstration of its link to Knuckles' Chaotix, are held together by rings that they carry and that are joined by an elastic force. Also, Sonic can pick up Tails and throw him upwards, to make it easier to reach higher platforms. The stages and music are also similar to those in Chaotix. There are no sound effects at all during gameplay. There are no badniks to be found, however there are spikes, and you lose rings when hitting them (even though you have none).
First released: May 2009

Play Sonic Crackers on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Sonic Crackers 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).

Sonic Crackers 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 Sonic Crackers like you would on any PC.
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