TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:You're absolutely correct. Its a G3 233 Bondi Gen1 Rev B tray loader upgraded to 384MB Main Memory. I bought it that way about a year ago and got it running correctly several months ago and I've messed with it and vintage Macintosh software infrequently since then. The only annoying thing is that games like to switch the internal CRT to resolutions it doesn't support. I've noticed the internal CRT only supports certain resolutions at various odd refresh rates. If a game (For example: Quake) switchs it to something else you have to restart the machine while holding a specific key combo to reset the screen resolution otherwise it will start to a black screen due to the incompatible resolution being set and not being unset when the application is closed out. An example is Quake switching to 60hz full screen when the CRT only supports said resolution (the Mac 640x480 equivalent) at 85 hertz or 800x600 at 75. It's odd in that it won't accept refresh rates lower than its maximum for a given resolution.
Fun fact: When I got this machine it had 10.4 Tiger on it. It took the machine 20 minutes just to boot up. I bought it from some old lady who said she wasn't the original owner for 25 dollars. I have no clue what whoever did that was thinking when they installed OSX 10.4 on a Macintosh that old. Even upgraded 128MB beyond the apple recommend on RAM that isn't going to work well. It's like running Windows 7 on a Willamette P4. It was an absolute nightmare. Anywho I'm much more of a fan of my late 2005 eMac. It's the last consumer model with the 1.42GHZ G4 and the Radeon 9600 Pro. Sadly it's CRT brightness is too low and I need to open it up and turn the brightness knob up a bit. The sad thing is even a late eMac with the relatively powerful 9600 Pro can't run Halo for Macintosh worth a damn. It lags at any resolution at any setting.
My current experience with Macs has been frustrating. PPC machine are just a completely different ball game than X86 PCs.
Hmmm, still some room for RAM expansion (swap your 128 MB stick for a 256 MB one for 512 MB max), but I doubt it would be worth it unless you really want to run OS X on it. Tiger wants at least 512 MB to feel comfortable, even better if you can go up to 1 GB or beyond, but only slot-loader G3s can hit the 1 GB mark. Even then, from my memories with a 400 MHz Pismo, it's hardly ideal when the Rage 128 isn't exactly Quartz Extreme-compatible and there's no AltiVec like a G4.
320 MB in my own iMac feels like plenty for OS 9.2.2. Maybe not the greatest for leaving Classilla open in the background and then running a game afterward (without virtual memory, I should emphasize), but I don't actually have to worry about RAM limits like I do on my IIcx and its "I can only get 4 MB of RAM to come up in this thing!" predicament. I can't even run Wolfenstein 3D with sound on that thing when booting from System 7.5 on the HDD; I have to use a System 6 boot floppy just for the lower RAM footprint!
I've never run into the out-of-range sync problem on the internal CRT for said iMac, though, but I haven't tested a whole lot of games yet, certainly not Quake.
As for OS X gaming, that's where I run into one hell of a wake-up call with my MDD G4 and iBook G4 1.42 GHz: neither can run Battlefield 1942 worth a crap. The old Athlon XP 1800+/512 MB DDR-266/Radeon 9600 XT box I had to use for most of last decade didn't run it flawlessly either, but it certainly ran BF1942 a hell of a lot more smoothly overall, as well as Halo! It's pretty clear to me that Mac gaming was clearly second-class going into the new millenium, as even late-'90s titles on the Classic Mac OS still lose out on A3D/EAX support (without use of SoundSprocket in their place) despite being on par in other respects (even boasting InputSprocket support fairly frequently), and enhanced Mac versions like Wolf3D, X-Wing/TIE Fighter and maybe System Shock were a thing of the past.
Also, Unreal Tournament's OS X port is kinda lackluster. No music, for starters, and UT without those UMX tunes is just wrong! Quake III Arena fares better on OS X because it's open-source, but then you get to deal with recent builds of ioquake3 no longer supporting PowerPC. Meanwhile, you can still run the original UT'99 release on modern versions of Windows, with the OldUnreal OpenAL patch and the Direct3D10/11 renderer for good measure, and still get the definitive experience (aside from lack of mouse button 4/5 support, something that the Mac version could do through InputSprocket).
With all that in mind, I'm wondering if it's best to limit my scope of a Mac vs. PC Gaming Showdown sorta series to '90s Classic Mac OS sorta stuff, as that's the one period where's it's not clear-cut one way or the other.
'80s stuff wouldn't even be a contest because both Macs and PCs were thoroughly outclassed by Amigas and X68000s to the point that you might as well go for those versions if possible. Like, imagine if DOS MechWarrior looked and sounded like this instead:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI8-Oq3G9CI