What is Design Your Own Home?

Design Your Own Home (DYOH) is to computer-aided design what MacPaint 1.0 is to drawing. It’s simple, straightforward, and a little clumsy. With DYOH you can lay out a house or office in a matter of minutes, then walk through the 3D rooms. No complex tools here — just a quaint look and feel.

DYOH uses a combination of 2D and 3D views — 2D for building and 3D for walking around. It took only a little playing to build a room without a hitch. We created walls, a table or two, even fish tanks and pool tables. DYOH also provides scores of furniture choices and renders finished rooms well.

Unfortunately, scroll bars aren’t enabled in the 3D view. Navigation requires using arrow keys or clicking arrow buttons in the toolbar. On a Power Mac 9500/150 DYOH is fast enough, but on a 40MHz 68040 it is painfully slow. Speedy navigation is important because when you drop into a 3D view, you’re about 20 virtual feet away from your building. You must walk up to and through a wall to get inside. You can’t go directly to a spot, nor is there any way to tell where you are via the 2D view, except to note the furniture.

DYOH doesn’t seem quite finished in other ways as well. For example, color is available only through a color wheel. Don’t expect Pantone palettes or numerical RGB entries.

The manual is comprehensive and clear, and technical support was fast and friendly. Although DYOH is a bit clumsy, at about one-tenth the retail price of Diehl Graphsoft’s MiniCad, it’s not a bad deal for creating your dream house.

Boylan, T. Kelley. (July 1997). Design Your Own Home. MacAddict. (pg. 66).

Download Design Your Own Home for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: 68K + PPC (both versions included)

At least 4MB of free RAM for 68K version and 7MB for PPC version (more is recommended for larger documents)

Mac OS 7.x - Mac OS 9.2.2

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver