How to play Starship Command on Mac

Game summary

The player assumes the role of captain of a battle starship, charged with defending the frontiers of space from hostile alien ships, which come in two sizes — large and small. The larger ships have cloaking devices which make them invisible. Damage is inflicted on ships when they are shot or rammed by other ships. Uniquely for the time, the player vessel remains locked in the centre of the screen and the world rotates and moves around it. Player shots also have limited range and are subject to the same rotation as everything else, which means the player needs to predict where shots will need to go in order to hit the enemies. The ship has both long range scanners and shields but may only use one at a time. By default, the game will automatically switch between them based on the proximity of enemy vessels but the player can optionally take full control. Using shields, thrusting, turning and firing all use up energy which is also depleted when hit by enemies. Energy will automatically replenish, most quickly if the shields are off and the starship is not moving, but this leaves the player open to attack. Unusually, the player is never expected to return their ship from the frontiers. Each individual voyage is a separate command, and lasts either until the player's vessel is destroyed or until they use an escape capsule. If the escape capsule is successfully launched, which means firing it so that it doesn't collide with any enemy ships, and the player is judged by Star-Fleet to have killed enough enemies during his command then he is given a new commission and a new and visually different ship. 8 points are scored for a small ship and 12 for a large ship. Starfleet's opinion of the player's performance ranges from them being "furious" to "delighted". The number of points required to reach the next level is not fixed. Sometimes a score of 60 will suffice and sometimes a score of 80 will not be enough to guarantee automatic promotion to the next level, assuming the e
First released: Dec 1983

Play Starship Command on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Starship Command 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).

Starship Command 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 Starship Command like you would on any PC.
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