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Gaming On A Mac QS 733Mhz

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First post, by digitalhermit86

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Greetings, I am a new MAC user, about 5 months ago I was at my local recycling center and found a bunch of mac hardware. About 10 Powermac G4 Quicksilver's 733Mhz 256MB 40GB and CD-RW. I only could take home two Quicksilver's and an Emac 1ghz. I have since upgraded one of the Quicksilver's to 1gb of ram and a DVD-RW Superdrive. I then freshly installed OS X 10.4.11, and have been using it like that.

I only have two games loaded on there now 4X4 EVO 2 and Pro quake. What other games can I get that would run well on that system? Also I hear everyone talking about OS 9.22 and I believe this system can do both, would it be worth my while to wipe the drive again and install 9.22 then 10.4? To get a dual boot? For gaming and over all learning a mac system?

Thanks for any and all input!

Reply 1 of 23, by Dominus

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You don't need to learn old MacOS. It's gone and no one needs it anymore 😉

Windows 3.1x guide for DOSBox
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Reply 2 of 23, by swaaye

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Those Macs are too beastly for the 90s Mac games that come to my mind. I think that era primarily had delayed ports from Windows. It was also about the time when all the Apple whackjobs started getting giddy about OSX. Sigh. 😀

Reply 4 of 23, by Dominus

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Don't these run in emulators?

Windows 3.1x guide for DOSBox
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Reply 5 of 23, by Sune Salminen

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digitalhermit86 wrote:

I hear everyone talking about OS 9.22 and I believe this system can do both, would it be worth my while to wipe the drive again and install 9.22 then 10.4? To get a dual boot?

Yes, it can do both, but you don't have to reinstall, you can use 'Classic Environment'.
Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Environment

Are you sure OS 9 isn't already installed on it? I believe the Quicksilver G4s came with OS 9 and 10.4 preinstalled.
Hold down the option key during startup to get to the boot menu.

Reply 6 of 23, by digitalhermit86

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I don't know anything about macs like I do windows. If I did find some MAC games from 1994-2000 era, Would that run in OS 9.22? From my limited understanding anything from the 80's up until OS X will run on OS 9.22?

What are some good classic MAC games from that time frame of 1994-2000 that would run on the Quicksliver 733 with 9.22?

Swaaye, when you say beastly, do you mean the CPU is to fast for most 90's era mac games, like some 286 games on a PII that play at hyper speed.

Classic is not installed, it was before I wiped the drive, and reinstalled fresh from the 10.4 CD Set. How do I get classic mode back or installed.

Reply 7 of 23, by swaaye

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For one there is Dark Forces. The Mac version is 640x480 which makes it vastly superior to the DOS version. I think there may be a 640x480 X-Wing as well, which never happened on PC.

There are quite a few games really. But some (perhaps many) will run too fast on such hardware. For example, the really cool Super Wing Commander. But you can get slowdown apps for Mac too.

Reply 9 of 23, by idspispopd

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Terminal Velocity is supposed to support a higher resolution in the Mac version.
The DOS version doesn't seem to mind a fast CPU so I guess it would run on your machine.

[EDIT] also see Best OS9 and earlier exclusive games?

Reply 11 of 23, by Dominus

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PC guys propaganda

Windows 3.1x guide for DOSBox
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DOSBox SVN snapshot for macOS (10.4-11.x ppc/intel 32/64bit) notarized for gatekeeper

Reply 12 of 23, by nforce4max

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Tiger will run os9 era apps and is the last version of OSX to do so, upgrading the hard drive to something faster will help but if not be sure to scan it for bad sectors.

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

Reply 13 of 23, by Hatta

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I use 9.2.2 on my Quicksilvers and it's great. The Classic environment in Tiger sucks, and sucks hard. Half of what I download won't run, and what does runs like shit. e.g. Marathon runs in a tiny window. Nothing with OpenGL works at all. etc.

It's definitely worth installing 9.2.2 if you game on this thing, and yes you can dual boot. Somewhere on your install CD there's a .dmg that the Classic environment uses for its system folder. You can just make a partition bootable and dump the contents of that dmg on it. I forget the details, but you can google around.

The only real problem is getting a hold of many OS9 games. But I guess we don't talk about that here. 😈

Reply 15 of 23, by Jorpho

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Pegasus Prime used to be the big exclusive, but that's playable everywhere via ScummVM now. I seem to recall the 10th anniversary edition of The Journeyman Project 3 is still superior to what you can get on GOG for Windows, but lots of modern Macs will run that one.

There's Escape Velocity from the link that Mr. Ratfink posted, but Escape Velocity Nova is also available for Windows, so you don't really need OS 9 for that either — and besides, that will run on a 68k Mac. A lot of the fancy Quicktime-based multimedia games like The Dark Eye are also available for Windows. And then there's Bungie's Marathon trilogy, but you can run that under Windows too using Aleph One.

ratfink wrote:

some of these won't run in emulators, sadly

Which ones?

I think the fact that they are charging outrageous prices for twenty-year-old games is the greater sadness. I wish I could buy out the company and give the rights to GOG; they probably haven't sold a single copy of some of those in years.

Reply 16 of 23, by digitalhermit86

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Just an update, I found a OS 9.2.1 CD and booted off that and did a "Clean install" of OS 9.2.1 and everything is working perfectly. I can now dual boot in to both OS's by changing the start up disc under the OS I am in.

Reply 17 of 23, by ratfink

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Jorpho wrote:
ratfink wrote:

some of these won't run in emulators, sadly

Which ones?

I only had Barrack, Apeiron and Mars Rising: Barrack doesn't run in sheepshaver, and it won't run in classic mode under osx either. Mars Rising I think was also problematic but there is the sequel Deimos Rising for windows, though I found it somewhat over-done. Apeiron I don't recall testing but there is a "universal osx" version by the look of it.