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."
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."
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."
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)there's a lot more where that came from
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.The best you can really get , that still will boot MacOS 9 natively is: /w a USB 2.0 Card Bus.
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."