Retro68 is indeed very cool, I started writing some Think C and it is fun to code on such a tiny screen but Retro68 allowing you to code on your regular dev environment using more modern C has been great. I've been playing around with it last week to make some applications (not a plug because these projects suck!) - If anyone wants a simple Retro68 application boilerplate to start off with:

- Chatbot: https://github.com/yocontra/macintosh-ai/

- Game: https://github.com/yocontra/maccraft (Doesn't work very well atm, making a game run well on a macintosh plus is hard!)

I wasn't even alive when these computers were out but enjoying coding for them - something to be said about the simple interfaces (both in C and UI) and challenge of making things work with the constraints of the hardware.

Retro68 community has some really neat stuff like MacHTTP (https://github.com/antscode/MacHTTP) as well so you can offload some work to services (assuming you buy one of the many SCSI Wifi thingys).

I tried a little bit 20+ years ago. Bought a 'road Apple' Performa for $50, download Pangea's game programming book, can't remember if I used MPW or CodeWarrior...

It wasn't anywhere near as simple as DOS game programming was so I think I just installed YellowDog and used that Mac as a webserver.

https://www.pangeasoft.net/book/buy.html

Edit: I just opened that PDF and I think that's a newer version or I remembered the book wrong.

Perhaps the book was "The Black Art of Macintosh Game Programming" [0]? That was a fun book I got myself.

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[0]: https://archive.org/details/blackartofmacint00ties

I love retro68, but as much as I love it I'm frustrated the"black box" dependency on CMake to specify the build process + app metadata (e.g. distinguishing between apps and desktop accessories which treat system globals differently, rsrc compiling, resource fork creation, etc.) My first instinct with (hobbyist) programs is to go for a lean and mean makefile.