I went and did something dumb and bought an iMac G4 that I’ve wanted for nearly two decades. Here it is without an OS installed because I just finished swapping the internal fan and changing the hard drive for an SD card adapter:
It’s a 15 inch USB 2.0 model iMac G4, with a 1GHz processor and 1GB of RAM that I’m planning to bump to 2GB.
I’m going to install OS X 10.4 along with the not normally supported for this model Mac OS 9.2.2 thanks to a custom ISO from Mac OS 9 Lives.
Trouble is uh… what do I play on it?
It’s not got a great graphics chip for OS X (a lowly Geforce 4MX), and the number of OS X games for PPC is pretty limited. Or am I missing something interesting? I want to see how UT2004 runs on this.
For classic it should be near the top of the line, certainly overkill for anything I could throw at it. I’d love to hear some suggestions here.
So are there RGBers that do classic mac gaming? Or am I making another tumbleweed alley thread like my awesome Wonderswan OT?
UT2004 runs like a dog on that. I had one growing up. Quake 3 and the original UT will run smoothly but I’d recommend you install Mac OS 9 for games. The performance increase is significant.
Edit: I thought OS 9 was native to the 15" iMac G4? We specifically had the 700MHz model and it was preinstalled with 9.2.
I have a 550MHz TiBook G4 for OS 9 nostalgia purposes. Would’ve preferred a non widescreen display in hindsight but the other laptops that run OS 9 have some issues or are less powerful.
OS 9 is native to the original model 15 inch iMacs, the ones that have 700MHz, a Geforce 2 MX, and a Garamond font iMac on the face. It also works with the original 17 inch model. But they took out support for booting to OS 9 with later iMac G4 (ones with faster processors and USB 2.0 support) for whatever reason; thankfully people have worked around that.
First computer I ever used was one of these at the public library:
I don’t remember what I played on it, but it was definitely educational and not as fun as what was on my NES at the time. I still thought it was cool as a kid that a librarian hooked me up with a video game experience though.
Otherwise, I have very little experience playing on Macs.
Not yet, mostly because I’m lacking the space. But I really want an iMac G3. I toyed a bit with sheepshaver, which looks really nice with a PC CRT, but I want the real thing. As to what to play on it, uh… I have the Myst 10th anniversary DVD edition which is both PC and MAC compatible and I saw that the Mac version is better. There are several DOS games that received an upgrade to be in real 640x480 like Wolfenstein 3D and Dark Forces. Games that integrate with the OS like Civilization II look better with a Mac interface imo, but that’s very subjective.
We had these at school. I remember them being pretty fun. We used to play a lot of Sim City and use the text-to-speak option to diss each other or say rude things loudly without being identified by the teacher. Good times
I’ll have to look into DOS ports. I heard some of the lucasarts ports are pretty good; have to see if it’s possible to hook up my mt-32 + sc-88 to an imac for that.
Kinda running into a wall getting OS X and OS 9 installed the way I want.
First of all, if anyone else goes down this rabbit hole, the only way (far as I can tell) to properly burn .dmg images to a disc not on a mac is to use a program called TransMac. Otherwise you’ll end up with a non-bootable coaster instead of an OS X install dvd.
Otherwise, I can get OS 9 working great via the OS9Lives version if installed on it’s own, but as soon as I install OS X to the same partition or to a separate partition the graphics drivers stop working in OS 9. And it becomes difficult to boot cause my iMac doesn’t normally support restarting into Classic.
I think I need to wait for my new SD card extension cable to show up so that I can give OS 9 and OS X their own independant drives via separate SD cards. Hopefully my order from China shows up soon. After that I’ll dig into getting things set up nice.
