Ambrosia Software was a predominantly Macintoshsoftware company founded in 1993 and located in Rochester, New York, U.S. Ambrosia Software was best known for its video games, but also published utility software. Its products were distributed as shareware; demo versions could be downloaded and used for up to 30 days. The company also released some products for iOS. Ambrosia's best-selling program was the utility Snapz Pro X, according to a 2002 interview with company president Andrew Welch. In 2017, customers reported on Ambrosia's Facebook page that attempts to contact the company were unsuccessful and they were unable to make new purchases. As of July 2019, the website is offline.
History
Ambrosia Software was incorporated August 18, 1993 by Andrew Welch after he graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1992. The first game produced by Ambrosia was Maelstrom, a 1992 remake of the 1979 Asteroids arcade game. Maelstrom won a number of software awards. This initial success led Ambrosia to release several more arcade-style games, including Apeiron, Swoop, and Barrack. In 1999, Cameron Crotty of Macworld wrote "No other company has gotten so much mileage out of renovating mid-1980s arcade hits." Nearly all of the company's ten employees were laid off in 2013, but Welch denied rumors of the company shutting down.
WireTap Studio — Audio recording, editing and master storage; won a 2007 "Eddy Award" from Macworld
WireTap Anywhere — professional virtual audio patchbay utility, enabling the recording of any Mac OS X application's audio output from within any Mac OS X audio application.
Soundboard — Mac OS X Audio playback
Big Cheese Key X — Mac OS X-compatible version of original
No "Crippled" shareware
One of Ambrosia's founding mantras was that shareware software should not be distributed as crippleware. The company's software was released on the honor system with only a short reminder that you had used the unregistered software for "x" amount of time, creating what is commonly called nagware. This policy was later changed and the company employed typical shareware piracy prevention measures, as well as more innovative ones such as used in the Escape Velocity line of games where the team's mascot, Hector the Parrot, would use her heavily armed ship to ceaselessly attack players of unregistered copies after the trial period had expired. Their software products therefore fell under the category of crippleware. Now that the company no longer provides new expiring license codes, customers who had purchased Ambrosia software are now treated as though they have expired trial versions, for instance meaning that Cap'n Hector's attacks in Escape Velocity games cannot be stopped. Matt Slot has written about the factors that played into the policy change.
