Pabloz wrote:Is a mac good for retro gaming? i thought that games from the 90s were not common on the mac, but i saw ports of wolfenstein3d, quake2, civilization, descent, many lucas arts games.
Quite the contrary I would say. 😀
The Macintosh was quite popular from the early 80s to mid 90s.
Macs with System 7 and M68040 or PowerPC were quite popular in the early 90s.
Comparable to PCs running DOS and Windows 3.11, I believe.
Games like Myst, Robot City and many of these early Virtual Reality/CyberPunk-style games
were available on Macintosh. In terms of graphics, Mac games even were superior *sometimes*.
Games that were ports of DOS games, supported FMVs in higher resolutions (640x480 or 512x384 vs 320x200).
Windows 3.x games were usually on par with Mac games.
Anyway, the mid-90s to late-90s were a different matter.
In the "Windows 95" era the PC really took off and the Macintosh platform was declining.
But in the early 2000s, with the iMacs, PowerMac G3 B/W things changed for a short time again.
Pabloz wrote:Another question i have […]
Show full quote
Another question i have
On the Mac world ther must be some kind of minimum and maximum OS right?
for example many games on pc requires a win98 or lower, or winxp or higher for them to work.
On mac you need MacOS 8 for older stuff?
It depends. There were "Old World" Macs and "New World" Macs.
That was essentially a firmware thing (early iMacs could be updated). I could be wrong, but I believe Mac OS 9.0 was the best allrounder,
since it is supported by several emulators, also. In comparison to Mac OS 9.1 or 9.2x, it can still run on Macs without a MMU.
In case of doubt, just try. You can also have two Mac OSes in the system. The second on a CF card, for example.
Classic Mac OS is very flash friendly, just like DOS/Win31. No need for "fixed-media" cards.
In practice, a CF card is even better suited than an SSD, because Mac OS up to 9.2.2 uses an odd alignment, because of legacy reasons.
It emulates the layout of the tool box and other ROM stuff. Because of this, the partition can't be aligned to modern 4K boundaries without breaking the system. OS X is fine, though. It can be aligned with GParted afterwards.
Also, there's something to keep in mind: Mac OS programs were very picky about the OS number.
A program compiled to, say, Mac OS 8.6 would refuse to run on Mac OS 8.5,
even thought the older system has all features / API calls that are required.
No idea, if there exists any tool that reports a fake OS number (like lieversn.exe on Win 3.1).
That beeing said, I'm no "Macintosh Guru". I'm still learning, too. 😀
Edit: I forgot.. Mac OS 8.0 didn't support FAT/FAT32 yet.
I belive support for that was introduced in 8.1 or so.
Speaking of file systems, there's somehting else to keep in mind:
OS8 (and 9) doesn't really care about file extensions (*.jpg, *.doc).
It's the Macintosh user software that does if you're lucky (QuickTime, IE5, etc).
Instead, it looks for meta data in the resource fork.
That means you can't download an *.smi file on your Windows 10 PC,
copy it to your FAT32 pen drive and expect it to work out-of-box on the Macintosh in OS 8.
(Okay, technically you can, if you use somehting like FileType and fix the type code by hand.]
Instead, as a workaround, you either need to download the file on your Macintosh,
or you have to transport that file inside of a disk image (*.dmg,*.dsk,*.sit,*.hqx,..)
and extract it on the Mac side. Id did the first when I got my first iMac.
I told the whole story here: Re: Retro LAN gaming over the internet, how do I do it?
Edit; There's a Win32 utility called HFVExplorer. The core program itself will run on x86-64 still.
It can read/write older Macintosh disk images and display them in a Windows Explorer-style GUI.
so you can drad'n'drop files in and out of the disk images. It's quite useful for emulators like vMac, too.
"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel
//My video channel//