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Software and games for mac os 8 that will run on power macintosh 7100/80

Heroes of Might and Magic I and II.   The early Blizzard games.   Warcraft.  Warcraft II.  I think Starcraft and the first Diablo run on 8, but I might be wrong.

The Marathon series from Bungie, if you have a High Performance Video (HPV) card.  Otherwise your frame rates will be painful.

Always Spaceward Ho! on any Mac of any generation...., except maybe the new Intel stuff.

Age of Empires (some doubt of 9 vs. 8 here).

Imperialism from SSI.

 
I use the simple rule of dates. The PM 7100/80 was the second most powerful mac when it was released in Jan. 1995 ( beaten only by the PM8100/110). Any game with a release year up to 1996 will run without any difficulty. These are Macs with NuBus slots. If the game needs lots of VRAM (8MB or more) or acceleration (Voodoo etc.), then the 7100 is not for them.

The old games, like Civilization, run very well on this machine (I have a PM8100/80) as do Marathon and Descent.

Sonnet make great upgrade cards for these machines, if you feel the need to up the processor speed by a factor of 5. The busspeed stays the same though.

 
A lot of great suggestions so far, a few more could be:

Terminal Velocity

Damage Inc

Prime Target

X-Wing

Tie Fighter

Lode Runner

Escape Velocity

If you don't already, grab a copy of SpeedDoubler 8 as well.

In my personal experience, CD-Rs work fine on the older computers but CD-RWs do not. Disk Images should be fine to burn, but burning a folder from a current Mac might not work. 8.1 supports HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) but 8.0 only supports Mac OS Standard (don't have it burn a PC formatted disk :p )

 
If you don't already, grab a copy of SpeedDoubler 8 as well.
Second this advice....

The 68K emulator in the X100 Power Macs is inefficient.   Speed Doubler adds an instruction translation caching function that, in effect turns the 68K emulator from an interpreter to more of a compiler, at least for small looping structures in the code and vastly improves efficiency.

In the PCI Power Macs (X500 and later), Apple either licensed Connectix's solution or implemented their own version, so there's not much benefit to Speed Doubler, but on the X100 Power Macs it makes a big difference.

 
Actually, I think the improvements to the 68k emulator were incorporated into later releases of the system software/Mac OS, so simply running a newer OS will allow one to enjoy the benefits of a faster 68k-on-PPC experience on any x100 Power Mac (and also reap the rewards of said OS having more PPC native code, speeding things up further).

If one wanted to run the stock OS (System 7.1.2 or 7.5.x) on such, however, SpeedDoubler is probably a good idea.

c

 
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