Sedrosken wrote:This may or may not be relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUlCkH5v938 A video by Lazy Game Reviews detailing how he got a PCI Voodoo2 to work in a older PPC Mac.
Supposedly he put it in, hooked up the passthrough, and it just worked provided he used some special glidelib made shortly before 3Dfx went bankrupt or other.
Yes - that's the video I was talking about. Yeah I also flashed my Voodoo 3 2000 at one point but it wasn't really worth it in the long run so I flashed it back and now use that card in my Socket 7 rig. There were some decent DOS/Windows to Mac ports in those OS8/9 days because the one advantage those old Macs has was that they often had CPU power to spare - I liked how well the Descent games worked on Mac and Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft all work well too. I also loved Myth: The Fallen Lords and Myth 2: Soulblighter. I never really got into Marathon or its sequel. The open source ports of the 3D ID stuff was also very good and there's an OS9 open source port of Heretic around that is very good too. Sadly the official Doom and Doom 2 ports don't allow you to use the same keymaps as the DOS version but they look and sound great.
I recently played the System Shock port for Mac OS 9 and it's pretty well done. Definitely runs faster on my PPC Macs than the 486 I originally ran it on - although even my oldest PPC machine would have cost many times as much as my 486 did and came out quite a bit later. Fallout and Fallout 2 also both seem to work well.
Apart from that I'd recommend the standard Myst and Riven stuff if you are into adventure games. Many of the later Sierra games also got fairly reasonable ports - although the ports of the AGI games seem to have been written with the original Macs in mind and tend to crash on anything later than System 7 with a colour display. I was surprised to find that Myst is actually very playable on my Mac IIsi with a SCSI external CD-ROM (68030). There's actually not much that is playable on that Mac.
There are also some very nice Amiga ports and some of them have upgraded graphics - if I'm not mistaken Flashback on Mac is 640x480 and looks great and so does Out Of This World/Another World. Blackthorne is another decent game on there. The Prince Of Persia port looks quite different to the DOS/Amiga versions and has redrawn 640x480 graphics - I didn't take to it though because the animation timing seems a little off.
I don't see that much difference between OS8 and OS9 to be honest. The updates included in OS9 didn't really relate much to gaming so it would come down to how much memory the newer OS uses vs the older one although G3 machines used standard PC-style DIMMs so upgrades will be cheap. The earlier versions of OS 8 still had some 680X0 code in them (8.1 is the last version to work on 68040) but supposedly all of that was eliminated by the time 8.6 came out. Personally I just load 9.2.2 on my G3 and forget about it.
Some games might require you to install GameSprockets which was a kind of DirectX-style API to standardise input and sound output if I remember correctly.
