derSammler wrote:

Emulation of other systems was not even considered, as far as I can see. The question was about playing native Mac ports of DOS games.

Ah, right - I see. my bad. 😦 I often think of emulation when I think of Macs. Perhaps because of the original M68k platform.
Mac OS for PowerPC used a lot of emulation internally to stay compatible with existing code. Parts of the OS (toolbox ?) where still in Motorola 68000 code even.
Speaking of games, the Mac OS on PPC lacked FPU emulation, or so I read. 3rd-party programs attempted to fix that.
Details about Mac OS' internal emulation are described here (I think): The 68LC040 Emulator
That beeing said, my knowledge of the Macintosh platform is limited. I'm still learning. 😁

The worst of it is the build quality with the hardware isn't as good so there is no shortage of age related issues like capacitor rot and cmos barrels of cancer leaking or in some cases exploding all over the board. I am not fond of plastic cases as the plastics age they eventually become brittle, the os and apps are of interest so in my opinion is a reason to consider at least the 68k and ppc macs for retro. I Avoid anything to do with Intel macs.

You can check mobygames:
https://www.mobygames.com/attribute/sheet/att … teId,1024/p,74/

Note that most 68k games will run on PowerPC as well, as long as they are 32-bit compatible.

Classic adventures suffer on various issues on the mac-platform.

Let me tell you my personally opinion. I am into Macs since 2008 and now i am stuck with them. I have 7 Macs and 1 PC. The power of the PC computers is the huge variety of games and the Roland/General Midi support. But i find most Mac games better than PC format. For instance the following:

Monkey Island 1 & 2, Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, Full Throttle, The Dig: They use some kind of filter which makes the graphics clean and sharp. I like them more than PC versions but dos users can hear great music with the Roland or General Midi:
Wolfenstein 3D: lot better graphics and sound than PC, the PC has more speeches from the enemies.
Doom, Heretic: the full detailed graphics are better than the PC version (at least the dos version), the midi music is very nice.
Most Sierra on line adventure games have better fonts and smaller and better icons (at least from the dos version). They also support Roland on Mac
Rise of the Dragon, Willy Beamish: better sound on Mac than sound blaster, not from Roland.
Civilization 1: amazing graphics on Mac, you may use for instance 1024x768 resolution so you can maximize the window and see more area on the screen.
Blachthorne: 32x style graphics, better than PC and audio cd. Fantastic. PC version has fantastic general midi music.

Also, lot of games use the cd audio for music but i haven't searched the pc versions. The cd audio is the only that can be compared with the Roland sound for me. Some games on Mac with cd audio: Warcraft 1 & 2. Zero Critical, Descent I & II, Redneck Rampage, System Shock, The Settlers II, the Incredible Machine 3, etc.

I have a Power Macintosh G3 Minitower 300 Mhz with ATI Radeon 7000 Mac Edition 32mb ram. I have installed Mac Os 8.1 which i find it fantastic and very stable and Mac Os 9.2 for more demanding games. I run with success games from Monkey Island era to newer 3D games like Quake 2 & 3, Unreal, Carmageddon 2, Tomb Raider etc.

I cannot choose which is better. Most Mac games are technically better on Mac but the PC support Roland/General Midi on lot of games. For instance. I was playing Day of the Tentacle on pc with Roland and it was fantastic because of the music. Then i was playing the same game on Macintosh and it was fantastic because of the sharp and clean graphics.

One game that really dissapointed me on Mac is Rex Nebular. It is one of my favourite adventure games but unfortunately: The introduction on Mac has less duration and no speech. The inventory is only text and lot of music is missed although when there is music the quality is great.

Retro-Gaming on Mac is a very good idea. using a PC card makes things even better...

I am using:
- IIgs
- LC (with IIe Card)
- Q700 with Nubus-card 386/25
- 6100/66 with 486-DX2/66 Card (SB/CT)
- PM 7300 + G3/500 + Voodoo Banshee + PCI Pentium1 166 Card (SB/ATI )

When it comes to dos-retro-gaming on these machines I can tell you that the 486/66 is the sweet spot.
The Nubus 386/25 routes the vga over the NUBUS and that is SLOW, so no gaming here.
The 486/66 is excellent, thogh it shares the vram with the macside an only 640x480@256colors are possible, but in terms of compatibility it's excellent. It even has a realy OPL3 on the SB-Daughterboard and the mIdi-routing works (on 630 dos compatible it does not!). The PCI Pentium card is nice, but the used ATI chip has some problems on some older games/demos that are not or not fully working on ATI.

I really love those old hires B&W games for the 68k mac's as well...but if you want to play these, you will probably have to buy a compact-mac with screen like a SE/20.

Doc