Powermac G4 Games

[Anonymous No.6725437]

Recently I got a hold of a dual cpu powermac G4 with the mirrored doors like pic related with a Radeon 9000 and the fancy pro speakers.

I understand that Mac Gaming is a bit of an oxymoron, doubly so when they weren't x86-based but I'm still curious what games it can run especially since this one can dual boot OS X 10.4 and MacOS 9.2.2

[Anonymous No.6725494]

>>6725437
Marathon

[Anonymous No.6725504]

Back in those days, Macs actually did get ports of a lot of the big PC titles, believe it or not.
Does it happen to be a P57 or P59? Those can boot directly into OS9, which is better for Mac gaming, but also supports OSX as well.

[Anonymous No.6725508]

>>6725437
If it boots into OS9 there’s actually tons of fantastic classic and newish Mac games you can play.

[Anonymous No.6725672]

>>6725504
It's a dual 867, no fw800, it boots 9.2.2 natively with the alt/option key held on boot

[Anonymous No.6725838]

>>6725437
System 1 to 7 and Mac os 8 - 9 are actually bretty good for games, thing is though that there are a lot of clone games, not bad ones, just not the original games. Anyway, most of the stuff can be downloaded at Macintoshgarden

[Anonymous No.6725895]

>>6725672
So what kind of games would you be interested in, anyway?
A lot of the top PC titles from the 90s/early 2000s are there, like Doom, Quake, Duke 3D, Max Payne, Rainbow Six, Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Age of Empires, Alice, Heavy Metal: FAKK 2, Carmageddon, Theme Park, SiN, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Undying, Unreal, and a whole mess of other stuff too. A little favorite of mine is called Stay Tooned, which while also avaliable for Windows 3.1, feels so much more like a Mac game.
Check out the early Bungie catalog too, like Marathon, Myth, and Oni (and perhaps Pathways into Darkness and Abuse as well)

Here's a great little site for finding all sorts of Macintosh games and software: https://macintoshgarden.org/
OS9 already has image mounting software built-in, but sometimes you might need something a little bit more powerful, so I'd recommend downloading one of the versions of Toast available as well. It may be a burning app, but it's also very useful for mounting stuff.
Keep in mind that you can upgrade that system a bit too, up to 2GB of RAM, and a GeForce 4 Ti would definitely help out as well, though that Radeon 9000 should be good enough for most titles up to 2002 at least.

[Anonymous No.6725984]

>>6725437
Soul can't be contained from that sarcophagus Anon. It's gonna blast

[Anonymous No.6726139]

Escape Velocity: Nova
Spaceward Ho!
Bolo
Dark Castle

[Anonymous No.6726343]

>>6725895
Sounds good. I'm just putting together that the PowerPC Macs are just giant piles of abandonware. I mean it's an obsolite isa why would anyone support it in the year of our Lord 2020? There's so much shit for it basically between 1995 and 2010, just free because nobody cares enough to hunt it down. Lots of interesting workstation software and plenty of games.

When I get some time I'll slap classilla on it and just be on my way downloading shit off Ethernet. Or can I just download everything in OS X and copy it to the classic partition? Either way shit's comfy.
>>6725984
I checked the PSU and it got the post recall one. All is well.

[Anonymous No.6726387]

>>6725437
Not retro! REEEEE!
There are only a handful of games this is good for but a few of them are decent. Google mac exclusives and see if anything interests you.

[Anonymous No.6726404]

>>6725437
What are good Japan only games for this bad boy?

[Anonymous No.6726437]

install morphos and play the definitive version of wipeout 2097 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylyhtjbT8fY

[Anonymous No.6726481]

>>6726437
do not do this

[Anonymous No.6726492]

>>6725437
You could probably still put Linux on there. The amount of RAM you have might be an issue.

[Anonymous No.6726496]

>>6726481
???

[Anonymous No.6726528]

>>6726343
PPC Macs are really neat. I have an iMac G3 myself, one of the Grey 700mhz models. I'd love to pick up one of the PowerMac G4s though, they seems ideal for checking out most of the Mac games, both the ports and shareware scene stuff.

I transfer things over USB myself, it's slow, but it gets the job done. If you can download everything through OSX that's just even better though. I don't have a copy of OSX myself, and my Mac doesn't seem to like burned CDs (though that could very well be an issue with it being burned from a PC)
I think I could install it through an image, but I'm not sure on that.

[Radiochan !FhErN6z1NQ No.6726541]

>>6725437
A lot of the big DOS / Win 3.1 / 9x games came to Mac, so you'll have a lot to choose from here. Most had better graphics because Macs were marketed towards the art industry.

[Anonymous No.6726559]

>>6726541
I'd say that's true for 2D games, but not so much for anything 3D accelerated. I mean, they're not worse either, though.

[Anonymous No.6726626]

So where did you buy this? I'd be interested in having one if the premium isn't too high.

[Anonymous No.6726779]

>>6726528
I think OPs Mac is about the best PPC you can get. About twice as fast as my dual 450 which works pretty well. Your iMac has an ethernet port and it's silly not to use it or pay a few bucks for a wireless card if it doesn't have one. There are issues burning Mac discs from Windows. Just use an external DVD burner on your Mac, or install one if you can be bothered.

[Anonymous No.6726793]

>>6726437
there is a mac port too (and windows) although we all played it on playstation

[Anonymous No.6726812]

>>6726626
I got it from a personal friend in exchange for tech support. He had no use for it because in terms of basic web browsing its obsilite, even with tenfourfox (modern firefox esr port) enough things refused to run on it that he naturally moved on.

That said, the easiest place to get an old mac like this would be facebook marketplace or craigslist (or local equivalent if not american). Ebay has a hipster tax and these are some heavy fukckers with all the metal heat sink in them. Also I hear the handles/feet of G4 towers break in shipping. Honestly I'd go with an emac or something had I not already received it considering all the space it takes.

An old powermac g4 of any working spec bought in person will go $40-80 at a fair rate, more if it has something like an aftermarket cpu accelerator or other rare bits.

[Anonymous No.6726879]

>>6726779
My Mac is the last gen G4 with a dual 867mhz CPU, I gutted a dead Dell dimension and now it has 2gb of ram in it. It's not the best powerpc mac because the Aluminum cheese grater (not retro) dual and quad cpu G5 towers exist, but it is one of the best possible Macs to officially run Macos 9.2.2 as the G5s simply can't do that.

The G5 will toast in in OS X tiger(10.4)/leopard(10.5) which they both can run but the G5 can only run older programs through the "classic" environment, a half baked comparability layer usable in 10.4 and below while the G4 runs the whole of OS9 natively in a dual boot.

Some newer G4 Mac has been forced to run OS9 unofficially (not emulation) with full driver support thanks to the weirdly focused work of the MacOS9Lives forum who managed to get the os running fully accelerated on the G4 Mac Mini, Nvidia based aluminum Powerbooks (such as the first gen 17 inch), later spec eMacs, and some of of those weird metal neck iMacs, all G4 Macs that didn't previously run OS9 until they patched the os to run on them in 2018 for reasons? I think macos9 has a cult following of audio engineers still clinging to it? I don't know I just want to play old games on it.

[Anonymous No.6726891]

>>6725437
Glider is a cute simple game about a paper plane. Someone ported it to HTML5, tho.
https://kodogo.tech/glider/
Besides the already mentioned games, I recommend Wolfenstein 3D (the Mac port is really good and its porter is going to open source it soon), Chop Suey, Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou, Chu-Teng and SimCity.

[Anonymous No.6726924]

>>6725437
Mac got a pretty cool version of Prince of Persia. There's also those Icom point and click games (Shadowgate, Uninvited, Dejavu) that are a new level of creepy in black and white and the occasional digital sound effect.

[Anonymous No.6726943]

>>6726924
How well would a G4 run 68k / Macplus era stuff?

[Anonymous No.6726957]

>>6726943
I wonder how much software for the compact macs would break on something that fast

[Anonymous No.6726991]

>>6725437
anything from ambrosia, spiderweb software, or epic banana. casady and greene too if you wanna go WAY back.

I also have to push this amazing roguelike FPS that nobody ever played but me called Mazeworld Catacombs. you can download it (and lots of other crap too) from https://archive.info-mac.org/game/ in the Arcade/ folder.

[Anonymous No.6726998]

mac had a better version of the first Master of Orion game than the original DOS one, you can probably find it on some abandonware site. still my favorite 4X game of all time.

[Anonymous No.6727000]

>>6726957
Anything made before the original powermac 6300/120 runs off a 68k emulator baked into macos7 (which was carried over to 9).

[Anonymous No.6727017]

>>6726812
Yeah, I had one of these in the house as a kid (father in video production work). I quite like the aesthetics of this transitionary period between classic Mac and OSX.

[Anonymous No.6727020]

>>6725437
This thing is literally not meant for gaming, 'ol chad dad steve-o said so himself

[Anonymous No.6727045]

>>6725437
the Graphing Calculator game: https://www.pacifict.com/Story/

[Anonymous No.6727138]

>>6726879
It's the "best" because it's the most powerful machine can run Mac OS without emulation or fucking around. If you want speedy emulation in 10.5+ you can run that shit in a virtual machine on cheaper PC hardware.
It's also nice yours can run 10.5 without fucking around which mine can't because Apple can't into math. 450+450=900<867.

[Anonymous No.6727735]

>>6726793
windows port is shit and doesn't run at a consistent framerate, even at the correct specs

[Anonymous No.6727857]

>>6726943
I can only speak based off SheepShaver experience recently, but it seems to be mostly okay with some glitches here and there. If you already have the G4, might as well try it. It runs under emulation, but for the time and CPU power it seems pretty good.

[Anonymous No.6727891]

>>6726879
It also works fine with QEMU. I only haven't figured out how to get on the internet inside the emulated system yet.
https://www.jamesbadger.ca/2018/11/07/emulate-mac-os-9-with-qemu/

[Anonymous No.6728184]

https://macintoshgarden.org/games/jewel-of-arabia-dreamers

[Anonymous No.6728774]

>>6726812
i have a 2004 emac and i can't recommend it. it gets extremely hot, but worse, the gpu is total garbage that struggles to play ut and it can't be upgraded. It also locks me out of os9. If you have an earlier model that can run os9 that's somewhat better, but still not much of a gaming machine and not much good for anything else these days. The screen is really nice, I wish I could just use it as a vga monitor.

[Anonymous No.6729172]

>>6728774
You could probably get it to run MacOS9 using patches from the MacOS9Lives forum. The reason the screen itself is so nice is because it's a high end aperture grille NEC/Mitsubishi Diamondtron tube intergrated in there, same tube as a Lacie Electron and several other high end CRTs at the time.

[Anonymous No.6729280]

>>6725437
XIII and Tony Hawk‘s Pro Skater 2

[Anonymous No.6729301]

>>6725437
I’ve got the same model, great for OS9 games and runs most games released during the PPC OS X years as well.

[Anonymous No.6730003]

>>6729172
i tried that for a bit. maybe my cd drive is just dying but it just doesn't want to boot from the unofficial os9 lives iso. oh well, there are not really any games on there i can't play on windows or playstation, i just really like that damn screen. I did have a good time playing Ceasar tho.

[Anonymous No.6730027]

>>6725437
Are the CPU's upgradeable?

[Anonymous No.6730140]

>>6730027
They're on a daughter card under that shitload of heatsink, while you can move up by buying/swapping a cpu from a better specked machine some companies also made aftermarket CPU accelerators up to the mid 00s for these macs, though they are stupid expensive used.

[Anonymous No.6730612]

Back in the day I would play the sims, Everquest, never winter nights, quake 3 arena, Ut2004.

[Anonymous No.6730903]

>>6730027
Were talking about macs here buddy

[Anonymous No.6730935]

>>6730903
Yet weirdly enough the answer is yes, it even had aftermarket accelerators cards made for it surpassing the top spec configs

[Anonymous No.6730948]

>>6730903
You could have just said yes
If you knew the answer

[Anonymous No.6731021]

>>6725437
Virtual Valerie 2

http://macintoshgarden.org/games/virtual-valerie-2

[Anonymous No.6732345]

Glider Pro and The Factory are good games for the Mac.
Also http://macintoshgarden.org/ is your friend for old Mac games and software.

[Anonymous No.6732779]

lode runner: the legend returns or mad monks' revenge

[Anonymous No.6733790]

>>6725437
Puyo puyo fever

[Anonymous No.6734054]

>>6725437
Abuse. There is a cool soccer game for it. Iike Theme Park. This will also run emulators. Dark Forces is on there. There is lots of shit at Macintosh Garden. Unreal Tournament is a good one. It should be able to play DVDs. Maybe get the LCD screen for it. A lot of shareware from the late 80s and early 90s will still run on OS9.

[Anonymous No.6735331]

Bump

[Anonymous No.6736798]

My grandma gave me her old iBook, im going to load up my original copy of starcraft for pc/power Mac onto it and see how it plays.
Its a 300mhz G3, and I have no idea how much ram it has, although I'm certain it's the stock amount. I haven't played around with it yet, because the screen needs replacing and you need to literally take the WHOLE thing apart just to do that, and if I'm taking it apart anyway I may as well upgrade the HDD to an SSD and slap some fresh ram in there.
Anyone know what the max capacity of storage is that this thing can handle? I know the ram maxes out at 512mb.
Not my image, but it's similar.

[Anonymous No.6736834]

>>6736798
128GB is enough, that's what I put in mine. RAM doesn't max out at 512MB but you can add this much. My ibook has 576MB RAM. Replacing the screen is not difficult but yeah it's long to get there, did it twice myself.

[Anonymous No.6736865]

>>6736834
Is there a particular part number for the replacement screen? I've seen "clamshell g3 replacement screen" listed online for as low as 15 bucks and as high as 80+.

[Anonymous No.6736920]

>>6736798
Pismo is better, missus was using hers until 2010

[Anonymous No.6736959]

>>6725437
... are all mirrored doors Dual CPU? I have one of those but I haven't hooked it up in years. I have no idea what's in it.

[Anonymous No.6736975]

>>6726437
What's the point of MorphOS on a Mac? Honest Question.

[Anonymous No.6737103]

>>6736959
No, actually the "fw800" models could be specked as single CPU and also couldn't boot os9 without a patch. Neither of those are big problems though because you can upgrade the cpu card and install a patch to make it boot os9. They were sold as the default "low end Mac desktop" for those who didn't want an iMac before the G4 Mini came out.

[Anonymous No.6737480]

>>6736975
to run the amiga ppc port of wipeout 2097 which seems to run much better than the pc one

[Anonymous No.6737701]

>>6736975
Pure novelty

[Anonymous No.6738345]

>>6725437
i have a mac like this in my closet, kinda want to get rid of it since its taking up space. should i just trash it or find someone who will take it?

[Anonymous No.6738474]

>>6725437
Thanks for the suggestions anons, will download plenty of shit soon

[Anonymous No.6740217]

>>6738474
make sure you look at the space desktop backgrounds. they have a lot of REALLY nice bg photos in old macos x

[Anonymous No.6740242]

>>6737480
i have no complaint with the actual mac os x port though. runs great on x86 mac with rosetta as well.

As for gaming or actually using the emac and older ppc macs, the slowness of these things and their hard drives is unbearable. I think my hdd is dying too. So what's the best way to get a faster, more reliable boot drive? It is usb 1 but I think I could do a firewire sata adapter with an SSD. or maybe network boot off of a modern pc with a vm running server 10.6.8? Has either of those worked for you guys?

[Anonymous No.6740246]

>>6738345
Definitely give it to someone even if everything inside of it is fucked to shit the case is unique looking enough that someone will want it for something

[Anonymous No.6740293]

>>6740242

[Anonymous No.6742308]

>>6740242
If the Mac is PCI then you can use a sonnet sata card with it, otherwise there are various adapters to adapt msata to ide or pata, but be warned that even 10.5, the lastest PPC Mac os x has no concept of "trim" so that's a bad idea if you use it very often.

[Anonymous No.6742665]

God I miss my old mac. The thing I miss the most is the soundfont. It was so pleasant compared to DOS stuff

[Anonymous No.6742684]

>>6725504
>>6725838
If a game had DOS and MacOS versions the MacOS version was almost always better because it ran in native 640x480 and had GUI menus

[Anonymous No.6742732]

>>6742308
right it's an emac, an all in one, but i was thinking sata to firewire would be faster right? it's something like 800 mbs right compared to ide not even 150. I just was wondering if someone has booted an emac from firewire, let alone the obscure combination of firewire sata ssd. Thanks for the warning about trim but i think it would pretty much be fine. I would just play games.

[Anonymous No.6742748]

>>6742684
>the MacOS version was almost always better
Depends on the game and what era we're talking about really. Pentium era DOS games were just about always better on PC. Even pre-pentium era, Mac versions had drawbacks, like always forward facing sprites in Wolf 3D, despite almost everything else being superior in Mac Wolf.
I will say just about all the pre-Simcity 2000 Sim games were objectively better on Macintosh though.

[Anonymous No.6742840]

Anything from Ambrosia or Freeverse:
Farazel's Wand
Barrack
Escape Velocity
Burning Monkey Puzzle Lab and Burning Monkey Solitaire
Maelstrom
Asteriks
Aeres
Agora- Soul of the Oracle is weird and won't work, but historically unknown never seen anyone ever mention it....
Cithera (Ultima-like)
Harry the Handsome Executive

Prince of Destruction is a multiplayer zelda-like quest game...

Action:
Gridz
Damage Incorporated
The Marathons
Chaos Overlords
Future Cop LAPD
Carmageddon

CD-ROM:
All the weird old CD-ROM games, and especially the super weirdest ever: the ones by the Residents: Freak Show and Bad Day on the Midway. These games make Five Nights at Freddy's look normal.
Total Distortion

Puzzlers:
3 in Three
Systems Twilight
Any Pinball game by Little Wing.
Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble (Not dirty, great game)
Get Surfers Serials somewhere online to get serial numbers for all these.

RPGS:
Realmz
Exile Series

And my favorite by far, the long unknown Taskmaker. Such a delightful RPG full of live and secrets even in the tutorial. Has a sequel too.

[Anonymous No.6742847]

6742840 adding more:

Archive.org is your best friend. Go download cover CDs from MacHome, MacAddict, and MacFormat: https://archive.org/search.php?query=macformat%20cd

[Anonymous No.6743142]

Sup /vr/
Could you tell me what it was like to be a mac gamer in the 90s?

[Anonymous No.6743160]

>>6743142
Lame as fuck. Waiting months for 1 game. Friends playing Civ and Tie Fighter and C&C and all I can do is run SimCity 2000. Stores didn't carry anything. You had to go to Tower Records and buy import Mac magazines to get CDs after I got a 3X CD ROM drive. Those CDs and anything by Owen Linzmeyer were great.

[Anonymous No.6743179]

>>6743142
Pretty much like it is today. Sucking locks of cock and playing the few shitty games available.

[Anonymous No.6743232]

>>6725437
Bumping Taskmaker, as it is radical.

My Mac is an iBook 2001, white 2 USB port model. The bad thing about it is they used this adhesive on the keyboard to afix this big sticker on the bottom. That heats up, and it makes the whole thing smell like body odor. It's stinky as fuck. When I got it, I thought the woman who sold it to me for $50 at the beginning of lockdown had kept it in her pants for 20 yeras, but it really is a thing. Some dood online tried to get rid of it in a half dozen ways and had no success. I called a parts supplier and had them sniff boxes before I told them I wanted to cancel my replacement keyboard order when they said they did indeed smell bad through the box, 19 years later...

Still, fast machine.

For that G4, you need Classilla for a browser, stuffit expander and disk copy to mounting things, and toast for dealing with mounting CD images. Crack em all with Surfers Serials