chinny22 wrote:

Also my CD's install OSX 10.2 from looking around I can go as far as 10.4 and still duel boot to OS9
Keeping in mind this will only be used for early B&W to mid 90's games is the upgrade worth it?

Well, it depends on your taste really. I like the design of the early versions (10.0-10.2).
Mac OS 10.4 has more features, better Classic support, newer graphics APIs, bug fixes, etc.
Overall compatibility is about the same, IMHO. Except for networking, maybe.
And support for newer Macintosh applications that need it (VPC 7 can't print on 10.2)
10.2 was the last one to fully support the old non-TCP/IP AppleTalk/AppleShare procotols.
But since you've got a real OS9 anyway, it's no loss.

chinny22 wrote:

Anything else I should be aware of? this is all new to me.

This not really an issue, but when I flashed my GF2 for my G4, I had a bad experience with OS 10.4.3+:
The mouse pointer became a white rectangle for some reason. Die-hard Mac fans on web argued,
that this was because "PC hardware" was per-se not compatible. That was nonsense, of course.
As I found out, it was a compatibility issue with the GF2 firmware. Using a newer one fixed the issues.
The only real compatibility issue were the slower RAM chips. The GF2 firmware (Mac) was programmed for faster RAM,
so I had to edit that "VGA BIOS" to take care of that difference.

Edit: Typos fixed.

a mac g4 is crying out for morphos! 😀

chinny22 wrote:

Also my CD's install OSX 10.2 from looking around I can go as far as 10.4 and still duel boot to OS9
Keeping in mind this will only be used for early B&W to mid 90's games is the upgrade worth it?

Anything else I should be aware of? this is all new to me.

For that era of games, I think you'll seriously struggle with anything as new as that G4. Not sure if you're aware, but backwards compatibility for really old Mac games is extremely limited and on that Mac you can't go any lower than Mac OS 9, which does not support a lot of the older games that required System 7 or earlier. You can of course run an emulator to play those games that OS 9 struggles with natively.

That Mac is generally more suited towards late 1990s/early 2000s games, plus some early OS X based games.

With regards to the OS X question. 10.4 Tiger gives you access to more newer software, so if you have a copy of it I'd say go ahead. I've ran Tiger on much lesser specced Macs without issue.

chinny22 wrote:

From memory that's undesirable noisy one but really no matter what you do this thing is never going to be quiet.

Actually, it's not too difficult to take the "Wind Tunnel" noise out of an MDD like that - if you're willing to replace the PSU fans or just swap it out with a much quieter ATX PSU.

No, seriously, the 60mm screamers in the PSU are the single biggest noisemakers in the system by far, moreso than the 120mm fan between the front drive cage and the CPU heatsink. The ATX mod was worth it just for that, although chances are you're not going to find one off the shelf that'll just fit inside nicely without removing the optical drive cage entirely.

chinny22 wrote:

Also my CD's install OSX 10.2 from looking around I can go as far as 10.4 and still duel boot to OS9
Keeping in mind this will only be used for early B&W to mid 90's games is the upgrade worth it?

Anything else I should be aware of? this is all new to me.

Any version of OS X prior to 10.4 Tiger is more useless than Mac OS 9 due to lack of compatible software, and even then, I'd still recommend upgrading to 10.5 Leopard if you care about OS X that much. Much easier to find software, and you won't really miss Classic Mode because you can just natively boot OS 9.2.2 anyway.

However, I should warn you that Leopard really wants you to max the RAM out to 2 GB to feel cozy, and on top of that, the UI is prone to framedrops if you have anything weaker than a Radeon 9600 installed because of the lack of Core Image support.

This, in turn, highlights another issue you're going to have if you want to make this an ideal dual-boot system: Core Image-compatible cards are all AGP 8x models, which means you need to electrically insulate AGP pins 3 and 11 on the back side of the card for it to work in the MDD, on top of any flashing you might have to do (and PCB retainer tab trimming, in the case of G5 AGP cards that don't rely on ADC power, like the Radeon 9600).

Unfortunately, anything recent enough to support Core Image also does not have proper graphics acceleration support under OS 9 at all. I got around this by installing a flashed, resistor-modded Radeon 9200/9250 PCI, and even when leaving the ATI extensions on with the Radeon 9600 in AGP, OS 9 actually runs pretty well, not taking forever to redraw windows or anything, the only obvious catch being that 3D-accelerated games have to run on a monitor connected directly to a PCI card. (And that's when they're nice enough to ask you upon startup; Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex are two examples of games that don't ask you and just launch on whichever is your "primary" monitor, the one with the menu bar at the top.)

With that said, your MDD is already quite capable even with just 1 GB of RAM, the Radeon 9000 and OS X Tiger. I'd probably use OS X for grabbing software off the 'net, then copying it over to an OS 9 drive/partition and running it from there as a native boot. Also worth noting is that I highly recommend partitioning or adding a second drive for each OS, because instead of having to change bootable System Folders from the Startup Disk preference pane (which, naturally, requires the OS itself to be bootable and working properly), you can just hold down Option on boot and get a boot menu, choosing your OS that way.

Definitely would recommend running Tiger. Basically the equivalent of XP for OS X so there's still software being made for it to this day. You can run Leopard as well, but due to a lot of people preferring Tiger there's not really a huge difference in third party application support between the two.

As for OS 9, while I haven't personally ran into compatibility problems on my 1.25GHz G4, I will note that classic Mac games are quite often speed sensitive. That G3 was probably more suitable for the era you're trying to run for that reason alone (IIRC the beige G3 is really easy to ATX convert, but might be thinking of one of the later powermacs). Software slow down tools exist, but they don't work all that great.

Another thing I found is sometimes if the game is 68k compatible it's actually better to run the 68k version than the native PPC version. For example Wolfenstein 3D freezes on my G4, but works beautifully emulating the 68k binary. There's a tool called "I Love Native!" that can split the fat binaries so you can force use of the 68k binary.

@Jo22
Good point about backward compatibility not being an issue with an entire separate OS for that!
Keeping an eye of for a Ti4600, well not really but I like the idea of one but not the price. Otherwise the currant video card will do. Have no desire to flash a GF2 or anything like that.

@BloodyCactus
Had a look at morphos! but doesn't look like its much use for running old games?

@qPTherapist
Yeh I always knew the G4 was newer then my desired era, it was the fact it had duel CPU's what sold it.
Guess I was hoping that as it was called "classic" OS9 would let me go back a few generations. Still you answered one of my questions I wondered. If a G4 was really upto running tiger or not and everyone seems in agreement tiger is the better OS overall.

@NamelessPlayer
You can boot to OS 9 natively? I didn't know that was possible! I'll definitely be going down the separate drive now. If nothing else its a pain to boot into an OS simply to switch back to the other.

@Blzut3
I'll have to check out "I Love Native!" especially as you name one of the games I'm interested in. Fingers crossed it gets round the issues in any really old games I'm interested in.

Really my exposure to mac was limited to the one my best friend had in the late 80's early 90's. where we played Stunt copter, Daleks Forever, SimCity and Mac Playmate (when his parents were out) but only when it was raining as we were more outdoors type then.
Wolf3d and Warcraft came later and never in real life, so I could have gone emulation really, but where is the fun in that!? This was always going to be a bit of a compromise machine

+1 for the G4, was the best of the new Mac's in my opinion. I had the dual 800mhz MDD when apple was still the standard for the graphics and media industry and it's what made me leave pcs back in '05 when at university.

Stick with Tiger and get the update rollup DMG from macgarden... Don't bother with leopard, that was best for the G5's and dropped classic support. Really by then apple was well on the way to x86 and support was poor really for those still on PPC. Media work was where apple really shined at this time. These ran circles round much more powerful x86 hardware when doing that kind of work...really the Core era killed them.

Morph is is great if you where into Amigas and want an environment that will pickup the current next gen stuff (Tower57 for instance) whilst being great with classic Amiga support through its UAE wrapper.

Leopard crawls on G5 1.8Ghz even with 4gb ram.

The Best is Tiger for me , blazing fast 😀 and you get classic 9 enviroment

PPC was dropped because ibm could not deliver enough ppc cpu's to serve the demand.

matze79 wrote:

PPC was dropped because ibm could not deliver enough ppc cpu's to serve the demand.

I think it was more the case that the PowerPC simply couldn't compete in performance with it's PC rival CPUs at the time. The G5 also ran too hot and used too much power so couldn't be used in laptops, hence Apple stuck using the dreadfully slow G4 even in 2005.

PTherapist wrote:

matze79 wrote:

PPC was dropped because ibm could not deliver enough ppc cpu's to serve the demand.

I think it was more the case that the PowerPC simply couldn't compete in performance with it's PC rival CPUs at the time. The G5 also ran too hot and used too much power so couldn't be used in laptops, hence Apple stuck using the dreadfully slow G4 even in 2005.

PPC Gigahertz designations can't be directly compared to x86 GHz designations (also, RISC processors). So a 1.5 GHz PPC G4 could run the same software as x86 with a higher GHz rating.

The G5 runs much better on Reason 3 with more tracks and samples open then a similar P4..

Thats like comparing Pear's and Apple's
The P4 also draws a lot of Power..

Another reason is that the g5 was not suitable for mobile devices.. 😒 thats why G4 was used soo long..

I have the same Mac G4 dual CPU PPC. with Mirror doors, I think it's a dual 1.25ghz but I am not sure.
Lucky you got the installation media with yours.
I also have the Cinema display.

I have mine setup with Mac OS Tiger and then I copied the MacOS 9.1 system folder into the root disk.
and setup to start 9.1 at boot within the System settings.

So I can run old apps too.