Wallops - A modern IRC client for classic Mac OS

Wallops is a modern IRC client that I wrote on and for my Macintosh Plus. It is written for System 6 and has been tested on up to Mac OS 9.

It requires MacTCP and supports multiple connections, channels, and query windows in a tabbed interface. When run under MultiFinder, it can run in the background using Notification Manager to flash the Apple menu icon when one's nick is mentioned while the window is hidden.

Wallops is free software and its source code is available under an ISC license. I also have some videos about its development and C programming on System 6 in general.

Latest Update: Wallops 2.2 Released (2026-02-02)

A new release of my Wallops IRC client is available:

• wallops-2.2.sit (StuffIt 3 archive)
  SHA256: adc2b473664ec0960b5b028335566831dd69f4a1de40f79e22bf1337292cca88
  SHA1: 603c5080c41a0d5752cae49a08376db4e18628b1

This update includes a number of new features and bugfixes:

• Auto-connect with the last saved settings on startup, if they are available, unless the Command key is held down
• Add support for sending Pushover notifications when the user's nick is mentioned or directly messaged, when a screen saver is detected to be running; sends to Pushover's API over plain-text HTTP
• Improve nick highlighting when the user's nick is not at the beginning of the line
• Speed up parsing of nicknames when joining large channels
• Add support for the /monitor command which is sent directly to the server
• Fix bug that may have caused a crash when initially connecting, and when reconnecting