Hardware Mac OS 9 and games

[winterlight]

Hi guys,

So there are some games that I want to run from MacIntosh Garden which need Mac OS 9.

(Marathon in particular, anything in color)

I've been looking around to see what my options are. There are a few but being so new to Mac I can't figure out which is the best one.

So I need your help guys.  Any feedback would be appreciated.

Here are the options that I can see:

1 - Run SheepShaver on my iBook G4 to get Mac OS 9 going.  I'm not sure how well the games will run considering the iBook specs

2 - Run Mac OS natively(?) on this iBook G4  ( not sure if this is even possible with my hardware)

3 - Buy a PowerMac G4 and run MacOS 9 natively.  I like this solution but you need a treasure map to navigate the compatibility landmines of G4 hardware and Mac OS 9  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_9

4 - Buy a modern Mac to run SheepShaver upon.  This is a very expensive solution 

I'm sure there are options I haven't thought of and also nuances to these options that I might not understand at this time.

Any help on this topic is appreciated.

 

[ArmorAlley]

Marathon doesn't require Mac OS 9. I'm sure that it can be played on Quadras.

Games that require Mac OS 9 tend to require a video card. I'm not sure if emulation will cut it.

I'd go for option 3 and get a PM G4. Be warned that power supplies on the MDD have a tendency to die.

Get a G4 with an AGP slot (AGP, Digital Audio, Quicksilver, Gigabit Ethernet, MDD). The faster the G4, the better.

I'd go for the cheapest, or almost the cheapest, G4 that you can find.

You may want to spend more money on an ATi Radeon or nVidia GeForce4 card, although the cards that the G4s come with are grand.

This being said, I have a 450MHz B&W G3 for mac OS 8.6 era games and a dual 1.2GHz G4 MDD for Mac OS 9.2.2 / Mac OS X 10.2-3 games.

 

[trag]

You can run original Marathon on a IIci, but it's not great -- low res everything to get acceptable frame rates. A fast video card doesn't really help much. The frame rate is bandwidth limited.

A Quadra 605 (LC or Perf. 475/476) is decent. A Quadra 630 works really quite well because Marathon has a special mode to take advantage of the on board video somehow on that particular machine.

Anything above that will be great, although, on the Nubus powerMacs you'd want the HPV card for the high bandwidth. A Nubus card will take you back to Quadra performance levels. Marathon really depends on video bandwidth.

 

[Gorgonops]

If it's Marathon in particular you want to play you can actually do that on OS X, Windows, and Linux natively.

 

[winterlight]

O_O

Thank you Gorgonops!

That made my week!

The Aleph One ports are awesome and it's the WHOLE trilogy!

I may wind playing through these and then going through the Halo games just for nostalgia....