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Thread: best Macintosh/OS for mid 90's classic gaming

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    Pear (Level 6) Soviet Conscript's Avatar
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    Default best Macintosh/OS for mid 90's classic gaming

    looking to get into some mid 90's era mac gaming (marathon I, II, Full throttle mac edition, ect...) and i'm trying to figure out what would be the best all around MAC. i currently have a SE/30 i'm trying to get up and running for the breally old and b/w stuff but i'm looking for something a bit more expandable and versital. guy near me is selling a G3 desktop with OS 9 for about $30 i was considering but i'm not sure if that may be a little to fast or incompatible for the era i'm looking to game from.

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    ServBot (Level 11) kedawa's Avatar
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    The OS is not really all that important; it's the hardware that counts.
    As long as the game supports PPC(native PPC or FAT binary), you should be okay.

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    Great Puma (Level 12) Steve W's Avatar
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    The G3 should be able to handle anything you can throw at it. It should have PCI slots, you might want to toss in a 3Dfx Voodoo card. I don't know if the software to flash the card's firmware to make it Mac compatible is still out on the internet, though. There was a Voodoo 1 card made specifically for the Mac, with an awkward pass-through cable going from out of the Mac's video output into the card and then out again. I found that the modified PC Voodoo 3 card worked well, but wasn't always compatible with older games. For example, Carmageddon wouldn't render properly with a Voodoo 3, I always had to set it for software render (if you ever pick up Carmageddon 2, no video card can help that one - it's just programmed badly and plays at a terrible frame rate regardless of the speed of your machine) and certain effects like explosions in Future Cop: LAPD wouldn't render properly on a Voodoo 3 but were nice n' purty on a Voodoo 1.

    Of course, if you're going to be playing Marathon, you don't have to worry about hardware acceleration. And speaking of Marathon, there's two or three games based on the Marathon engine, the best being Damage Incorporated. Nice little squad based FPS where you can send your soldiers ahead of you or configure the way they act. Another game based on the same engine is ZPC, which is weird as hell. The artwork's by the artist who did the covers for the band KMFDM, and it's about a Jesus type figure with Chi based force powers in a freaky totalitarian future. It's really strange, and I never managed to play through it because it always refused to play nice with my computers. It's going to be a tricky one to get running.

    I had bought my first Mac in the mid-'90s, and I played a lot of games on it. There were a lot more than most people realize.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Soviet Conscript View Post
    looking to get into some mid 90's era mac gaming (marathon I, II, Full throttle mac edition, ect...) and i'm trying to figure out what would be the best all around MAC. i currently have a SE/30 i'm trying to get up and running for the breally old and b/w stuff but i'm looking for something a bit more expandable and versital. guy near me is selling a G3 desktop with OS 9 for about $30 i was considering but i'm not sure if that may be a little to fast or incompatible for the era i'm looking to game from.
    A great price, snag it! I own two of the G3 CRT Macs, a very nice looking machine. You can expand the memory up to 1gb with two 512 SD Ram cards. The video is built in but adequate for older games. The nice thing about the G3 is that it can operate OSX 10.4 and keep OS9 for the older games. Older Macintosh games may not work without an emulator though.

    Be careful in performing the Firmware Update if it needs it for OSX. Do the Update with OS9 BEFORE installing OSX.
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    Pear (Level 6) Soviet Conscript's Avatar
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    well looks like someone else snagged it unfortunitly but I'll keep an eye out for something else. you mentioned older games may not work. keeping in mind i'm probibly not going to be playing anything past 98 or so should I look for an older Mac for better compatibility with older games?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Soviet Conscript View Post
    looking to get into some mid 90's era mac gaming (marathon I, II, Full throttle mac edition, ect...) and i'm trying to figure out what would be the best all around MAC. i currently have a SE/30 i'm trying to get up and running for the breally old and b/w stuff but i'm looking for something a bit more expandable and versital. guy near me is selling a G3 desktop with OS 9 for about $30 i was considering but i'm not sure if that may be a little to fast or incompatible for the era i'm looking to game from.
    G3 running 8.6 is your best bet. Tis what I use, pretty much runs anything that ran during the 7-9 era. Plus 8.6 was the pinnacle of Operating Systems.

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    I have an ancient Power Macintosh 6100/66 that I haven't touched in a long time. The BIOS battery has probably gone dead again. (It uses a half-size AA – very uncommon.) It has the "DOS Compatible" faceplate, but alas, someone snagged the DOS Compatibility Card before I ever got to it. It's also a rather poor choice for other reasons, such as the nonstandard monitor and ethernet ports.

    Anyway, Lowendmac has a list of "road apples" that you definitely do not want, along with some authoritative links.
    http://lowendmac.com/roadapples/index.shtml

    You may also informative find these links about the versions of Mac OS supported by various machines:
    http://support.apple.com/kb/TA47341?viewlocale=en_US
    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1835

    Pity you missed out on that G3; apparently you can do thinks like run various flavors of Linux and even BeOS on it. A fine choice, I reckon.

    Quote Originally Posted by macdude22 View Post
    G3 running 8.6 is your best bet. Tis what I use, pretty much runs anything that ran during the 7-9 era. Plus 8.6 was the pinnacle of Operating Systems.
    Why not OS 9?

    Quote Originally Posted by Steve W View Post
    Another game based on the same engine is ZPC, which is weird as hell. The artwork's by the artist who did the covers for the band KMFDM, and it's about a Jesus type figure with Chi based force powers in a freaky totalitarian future. It's really strange, and I never managed to play through it because it always refused to play nice with my computers. It's going to be a tricky one to get running.
    There's a Windows version, you know, and apparently it runs without too much trouble. Nonetheless, it is a terrible game. There was a really great FAQ about it on GameFAQs once, but it vanished tragically. (Where are you, XWarzone, and why did you choose to deny the world your gift?)
    Last edited by Jorpho; 10-09-2012 at 09:20 PM.
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    I believe that the G4 with the mirror door on the CD drive (MDD?) is the last Mac that could boot into OS 9 natively. Find one with the dual processor and you're good to go. It's the set up I am currently running for a pre-OS X box and it runs beautifully.

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    I ended up picking up a 5200CD for $2. I suppose this is considered one of the worst macs but for $2 i suppose it will hold me over till I can grab a g3 or something like it. Its also nice since space is currently at a premium for me. it has OS 7.5, should I bother an upgrade to 8?

    *eh, just read OS 8 "smooths out" alot of issues with this system so i guess its worth getting
    Last edited by Soviet Conscript; 11-18-2012 at 12:49 PM.

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    In my opinion 8.6 was the pinnacle of the classic era. It fixes most of the bugs without the instability introduced by 9.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jorpho View Post
    Pity you missed out on that G3; apparently you can do things like run various flavors of Linux and even BeOS on it.
    I remember that the BeOS was allegedly supporting machines like my then-current UMAX C500 Mac clone, so I picked up BeOS and tried installing it. That junk heap of a computer refused to play nice with it. In the end, I never got it to work. But then again, I never got much of anything to work on the C500. It had PCI 1.0 slots (the C500's motherboard was based on Apple's PowerMac 7200, which I believe was the only machine of theirs to use PCI 1.0, the machines that came after used 1.1) that refused to work properly with the ATI Rage 128 card I blew $200 on, forcing me to return it and installing a PC Voodoo 3 card and flashing its firmware to make it Mac compatible. Then the hard drive kept screwing up, turns out Apple's drivers didn't like this particular motherboard and I had to track down special HD drivers to get it to constantly recognize the internal drive. Bought an external SCSI CD-ROM burner that only worked two or three times then kept ruining discs repeatedly. It pissed me off, considering that the Mac version cost $100 more than the PC version, and with less software bundled than the PC which was mostly 'Lite' versions. Anyway, I pestered the manufacturer over and over for a year but they never sent out a shipping box for me to return it to them like they told me several times they would, so I was screwed out of $329. After the warranty was up I pulled out the CD burner from the external case (turns out the drive itself was made by Ricoh) and installed it in my C500, and it worked fine. Turns out the problem was that company's crappy SCSI case. That drive worked for a year or two but petered out and died, probably due to the heat coming from the Voodoo 3 card.

    What I'm saying is, avoid the UMAX C500. The most problematic computer I've ever owned. The only good thing I can say about it was that mine was a floor model and it only cost me $500. And then a month after I bought it, the first iMac came out. If I had only waited (and had several hundreds of dollars more to spend).

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    Just another Retro Game Geek Derxst's Avatar
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    I use a PowerMac 9600 with MacOS 8.6.

    Amazing that this thing cost $3800 when new!

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    drowning in medals Ed Oscuro's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jorpho View Post
    Anyway, Lowendmac has a list of "road apples" that you definitely do not want, along with some authoritative links.
    http://lowendmac.com/roadapples/index.shtml
    I have at least a couple of those and I can vouch for their badness.

    However, some of them still have nice-enough cases

    Honestly, though, I'd like to get either an iMac or one of the classic G3-style boxes, except that there is a problem with software compatibility when you get to the 68000 / PowerPC divide.

    Man, this topic makes me want to go set up one of my classic Macs right now.

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    I always wanted a power mac 6400. I always thought they had sweet modern styling.

    Having a 5200 I can also attest to the near uselessness of the road apples, that thing was a dog when it was new.

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    well, i finally did snag a G3 minitower with a Sonnet G4 500mhz upgrade. upgraded it to 768MB RAM and got OS 9.2.2 on it.

    my issue is though that some games the sound/music is choppy. Full throttle for instance on the opening cinema the videa flows smooth but the sound is very choppy almost unintelligable. sad to say the game ran better on my 5200CD. The Dig gives me the same issue.

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    Maybe you need to use the correct extension/version of Quicktime, or increase the RAM available to the application?
    "There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." --Bertrand Russel (attributed)

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jorpho View Post
    Maybe you need to use the correct extension/version of Quicktime, or increase the RAM available to the application?
    not sure if its the quicktime version. before i upgraded to 9.2.2 i had the same 8.1 OS installed on it as I had installed on my 5200CD and it was still choppy on the g3 but not on the 5200CD.

    my 5200CD had 64MB and ran it fine my G3 has 768MB so that should be more then enough. following your advice though i went back and allocated more RAM to the game even up to an insanely large amount to no effect, then i went and tried disabling every extension except the cd drive and sound manager to no effect. i even tried disabling the sound manager and still choppy music/voice acting same thing with "the dig"

    tried the demo of dark forces on the same mac and it sounded fine. also ran the demo video for rebel assault II that's on the disk and it played fine except for maybe 1 or to brief stutters.

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    any suggestions for the PCI slots? I was thinking a firewire/usb card and for graphics a radeon 7000 64MB paired with a voodoo 2. my other idea for video was a mac voodoo 3 but they seem a bit rare and pricey and i'm thinking since i'm not completly going all out for glide games on this thing i may get better overall results with the radeon/voodoo 2 combo.

    they never made sound cards for the Mac line huh?

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    I seem to recall that the PC version of some Voodoo video card or another could be BIOS-flashed and made useable on a Macintosh, but I don't know the details.
    "There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." --Bertrand Russel (attributed)

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