Which new Mac is the right one for me?

[Cory5412]

Yeah, I missed the "OS 9" thing on my first read through this thread.

I suppose some helpful information would involve the point at which games stopped being released for Mac OS 9. To be honest, I'm a little bit surprised every time I see or hear someone talking about using a 7300 as their OS 9 gaming machine, but the 7300 always seemed to me like Apple's version of the Dell OptiPlex GX1 -- great for Excel, and comes configured poorly for everything else.

And it has always seemed to me like if you're going to put a gig of ram, a >500MHz processor upgrade and a rage or radeon card in it, you may as well get a blue/white G3 or a sawtooth/gigabit/digiAudio G4 to begin with and just *have* all of that stuff natively on the board. It has been mentioned multiple times in the past week by multiple people that the sawtooth to quicksilver class of system is now essentially what you can pull out of the dumpster for free. (Although ther's a lot to be said for "it's what I had on hand."

there's a lot more where that came from

I'm interested though, is there a listing somewhere? What you've listed is pretty much the well-known pantheon of late '90s or early '00s Mac games. All it's lacking is Myst/Riven and Bugdom/Nanosaur. Oh, and RTS "command the units" games, neverwinter nights (did that make it to Mac OS 9?) and Tomb Raider. (Incidentally, a few of these things I played on my 7300 when I had it the first time 'round in the very early 2000s)

The best you can really get , that still will boot MacOS 9 natively is: /w a USB 2.0 Card Bus.

The PowerBook G4 is not very great. However if an 800MHz upgraded 7300 and a Rage128 will do the job, then I don't see why a TiBook wouldn't. Additionally, if you can find one in even halfway decent condition (because they did not age well at all) then it does meet the noise and electricity requirements, more or less.

Anyway, it sounds like almost anything manufactured by Apple in 2001 and 2002 (aside from the FW800 PowerMac G4 and any iMacs/eMacs/PowerBooks that won't boot Mac OS 9) is within the band of "useful for Mac OS 9 gaming."

 

[Unknown_K]

If you don't care about OSX you might want to track down a 3DFX video card (no OSX support) for a powermac, should run OS 9 fine and works ok for 3d games.

I love old games and have every version of a PC from CGA to the last and best AGP gamer cards along with retro systems like Amiga, Atari 800, Atari ST, IIgs, etc but I never bothered to game on my Macs.

 

[uniserver]

I'm a big fan of 3DFX Voodoo cards!!!!

 

[Macdrone]

I have a couple of quicksilvers, and I will tell you the G4 processor upgrades are getting cheap, since they dont work in a cube or the MDD's. I have a 1400 mhz one in a quicksilver and OS9 is fast as fast can be.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I think I answered the point about the stuff not being on board already (in short, I prefer the form factor), but since you asked about titles:

I'm interested though, is there a listing somewhere? What you've listed is pretty much the well-known pantheon of late '90s or early '00s Mac games. All it's lacking is Myst/Riven and Bugdom/Nanosaur. Oh, and RTS "command the units" games, neverwinter nights (did that make it to Mac OS 9?) and Tomb Raider. (Incidentally, a few of these things I played on my 7300 when I had it the first time 'round in the very early 2000s)

... here's what's on it. There's actually more than what's here, but I haven't hacked Nanosaur yet (it's the iMac version and it has a lockout), and there are a few programs I'm going to load into Mini vMac since they do better there. I mostly favour FPSes and action titles; I use ScummVM on the G5 for the LucasArts games, even the ones I have that are Mac-native. I have Myth around here somewhere, but I never got into it, and I didn't enjoy Myst.

 

[Cory5412]

The 7300 does have a nice form factor, I would probably give that up if I were looking pretty specifically to build an OS 9 gaming system -- although I'm pretty much unsurprised by the listing of what you've got handy, so it may just be that Mac OS 9 games never really got to the level where they required the best possible OS 9 video card and the most possible horsepower.

But I'll also mention again I've done relatively little gaming, I just happened to see the thread and remember the discussion about powerful video cards for G4s.

It's also worth noting that I've always been of the mind that if you're doing something on pretty old systems, it's worth just upgrading to a newer system if you need more performance. (An attitude I've been trying to implement in my own stuff, but I definitely understand getting attached to a specific system or even a specific form factor or model.)

 

[tecneeq]

I'm interested though, is there a listing somewhere?

Well, there is one. but it's an abandonware site and i don't dare mention it's name. It's not the garden. I just finished mirroring it and it's about 90 GB worth of archives.

Most of the games are very old and probably play fine on my iMac 233 or even my trustey old Quadra 650. But some are very new and require a lot more CPU cycles, like Max Payne or Silent Hill 2 for example.

Here is another list, alas without download links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Macintosh_games