Space Debris — asteroids, in colour, at 800×600 Runs here
1997 · Richard Bannister · Mac OS 8 · SheepShaver (Power Macintosh 9500) · 800×600 at 8-bit colour
Guide updated September 2026
Rocks drift towards you, you shoot them, they break into smaller rocks. Space Debris is Asteroids done properly for a colour Macintosh: rendered sprites instead of vectors, a real starfield, and enough going on at once that a PowerPC was the right machine for it.
Richard Bannister wrote a good deal of Macintosh shareware through the late 1990s and this is one of the better-looking things from that period — the title screen alone is a reminder that Mac shareware got properly polished before the platform moved on.
Boots Mac OS 8.6 and opens Space Debris. The shareware notice comes first; dismiss it and the rocks start.
Controls
| Arrow keys | Rotate and thrust |
| Space | Fire |
| Cmd-Q | Quit to the Finder |
Shareware, distributed freely by its author. The copy here is unregistered and unmodified, with the registration notice intact. Richard Bannister is still active in Macintosh software and reachable.
Archives
- Internet Archive — the Tucows Macintosh archive copy this was built from.
How it works & what to expect
| Machine | Power Macintosh 9500, 800×600 in colour |
|---|---|
| System | Mac OS 8.6, shared with every other title of this era |
| Emulator | SheepShaver, compiled to WebAssembly |
| Version | 2.5, PowerPC build |
| Saves | High scores persist inside the emulated Mac |
Space Debris does not carry its own operating system: Mac OS 8.6 comes from the shared image used by Avara, Cythera, Ferazel's Wand and the rest, so if you have opened one of those already it starts much faster.
It is an unregistered shareware copy and says so at startup, exactly as the author intended. Nothing has been patched out.
Why it is remembered
Mac shareware had a golden run and this is from the middle of it. Between about 1995 and 2001 the Macintosh had a genuinely good independent games scene — Ambrosia, Freeverse, Stairways, Factor, and a long tail of individuals — and Space Debris is a clean example of the craft standard.
Richard Bannister is still around. He went on to maintain a well-known family of Macintosh emulators for years, which is a pleasing thing to note on a page that is itself running his game in an emulator.
It is a colour Mac game that still looks good. Much of the 68k catalogue here is historically interesting and visually austere. This one is simply nice to look at.
Getting started
Thrust sparingly. Asteroids-style physics has no brakes, and most first games end by drifting into a rock you had already shot past.
Shoot the big rocks from a distance. They break into pieces that keep the parent's momentum, and being close when one splits is the other common way to die.
Use the screen wrap deliberately. Going off one edge to arrive behind a cluster is a tactic, not an accident.
Questions people ask
Is it free?
It is shareware — freely distributed, fully playable, with a registration notice at startup. The copy here is unregistered and unmodified.
Is it in colour?
Yes — 800×600 in colour on an emulated Power Macintosh, which is a change from most of this catalogue.
Why does it take a while to start?
It boots Mac OS 8.6 first. That image is shared with the other Mac OS 8 titles here, so it is much faster the second time.
Do high scores persist?
Yes, inside the emulated Macintosh in your browser.
Who wrote it?
Richard Bannister, who later maintained a well-known family of Macintosh emulators.
Is this Asteroids?
It is in the same family — rocks that split when you shoot them — with its own artwork and physics.
Put Space Debris on your own site
Free, no permission needed and no account. Paste this where you want the machine to appear; it brings its own emulator and asks nothing of your page.
<iframe src="https://macemu.com/embed/space-debris/"
width="800" height="600"
style="border:0;max-width:100%"
allowfullscreen
title="Space Debris"></iframe>Sized to this title's real screen. How embedding works.
