RetroMac
Turn your Mac into a time machine
519 followers
Turn your Mac into a time machine
519 followers
RetroMac turns your modern Mac into a live retro machine: CRT, classic Macintosh, VHS, Game Boy and more. Apply 30+ shader presets to your whole screen or a single window, swap your Dock for classic Mac and Windows looks, and capture themed screenshots. Free with optional extra presets.
This is the 2nd launch from RetroMac. View more
RetroMac
Launched this week
RetroMac wraps your everyday macOS in the look and feel of classic computers: authentic CRT shaders over your whole screen, themed docks and desktops (Mac OS 9, Windows XP/98, BeOS, Amiga…), retro widgets and games, and a virtual webcam that pipes the CRT look into Zoom, Meet or Teams.
Open source, free to use with an optional one-time upgrade for extra presets and webcam support.
Free
Launch Team
simplebanking
simplebanking
@infinitydigits Its getting more and more serious instead of a toy. Thats why Im working on settings like dock only mode, so you can modify your mac as little as you like instead of changing the whole look & feel
the dock for classic mac OS 9 is the unlocked badge of every developer who's quietly been wanting this since they were 14. shut up and take my money.
real question though: does the CRT shader work with external monitors? half my screen real estate is at 27" and i don't trust most shader presets to scale clean across resolutions.
simplebanking
@thenameisarian yes! I use it with my external Monitor as well
@maik_klotz that's the green light i needed. installing tonight. if it survives my dual monitor setup i'm posting the cosplay screenshot.
Congrats on the launch! 🚀
The attention to detail is impressive, especially recreating the Windows 98/XP taskbar behavior instead of just changing the visuals.
I'm curious: since the shaders run across the whole desktop, how much GPU overhead do they add during everyday work or video calls? It would be interesting to know how they perform on older Intel Macs versus Apple Silicon.
simplebanking
@prashant_patil14 There is a performance mode so your Mac doesn't need that many resources. And a bunch of "lite" presets, which are pretty fast too.
This is genuinely delightful. The CRT shader on a single window is a nice touch — you can keep your workflow normal and just make the one app you're vibing with look like 1987.
Curious whether the shaders work with external displays or if it's limited to the built-in screen. And is there any performance hit on M-series chips running the full-screen presets?
Solid free tier strategy too — let people fall in love with it before asking for money.
From a systems-level perspective, how are you intercepting the window server/compositor to inject the vintage display rendering and retro behaviors without triggering major layout lag or shattering native macOS window-snapping frameworks?
Dirac
Hey, I saw this relaunch and immediately saw something good was coming (and I was right)!
Anyways, whens the windows version coming...
simplebanking
@peterz_shu Thank you! I hope a win version ios coming within the next 2 months ◡̈
@maik_klotz This is the kind of app people open “just to try once” and then accidentally spend an hour changing their whole setup. The virtual webcam part is a fun touch too — showing up to a call with a CRT look is weirdly tempting.