Try the everymac.com site. It has exactly this information for all Macs ever produced.

Could you have more specific how to find it?

Uh, go to the website, and have a look at the pages for all PowerMac models where the compatible Mac OS versions are listed?

Is not what i want, i need to know which games are compatible within specific 10.4 -> 9.x.x Classic mode.

You'd be better asking at dedicated Apple support forums I'd imagine like Macintosh garden or what ever it is called...

Maybe, Vogons are about old games, i supposed that some Macs gamers are here too, that arent as myth as unicorns.. We will see.

From games perspective i would say, that game availability for PPC mac is quite good.. and in some cases it could be simpler run some game on it than lets say run Win 9x,XP games on Win 10, some ports are even better... So far it looks much smoother, there is no registry, too much drivers hassle, some installer apis problems, rights problem.. etc, as on window.. so simply install game and try to run it and it is working or not and its end of it, maybe maybe you can a bit fiddle with System extensions, but is extension is not there game is usually complaining before it is even started..

This section is far more x86 focused if you haven't noticed already. So asking on a Mac forum makes far better sense.

From your list of the games, I could probably play the DOS/Windows x86 versions all of them on Apple M1 macOS Big Sur in QEMU TCG, very comfortably. I have doubts that PC game wiki listed Vampire Masquerade minimum requirement as Pentium II 233MHz. The game average about 45FPS on QEMU WHPX/KVM on Windows/Linux at 1024x768 32bpp max details. But it is an RPG, so perhaps 15 FPS is considered playable. If 15 FPS is acceptable, then Max Payne 1&2 would also be playable on Apple M1.

This is about Power Macs, i know how to run these games elsewhere, but its not point of this thread, it is run them on real Mac, sometimes have Mac ports even something special and better.. yeah usually are probably worse.

ruthan wrote on 2021-08-12, 02:45:

This is about Power Macs, i know how to run these games elsewhere, but its not point of this thread, it is run them on real Mac, sometimes have Mac ports even something special and better.. yeah usually are probably worse.

PC games ported to Macs often are worse. The other way around though, and games unique to the platform, there can be very good games.
OTOH, Microsoft Office for Mac (OS 9 compatible versions) is clearly superior to the Windows version...

The problem with Classic mode is in hardware support. Certain features of the PowerMac hardware have more limited support in Mac OS Classic (the emulated mode in OS X) than on real Mac OS (9.2.2 or lower). So for a game or other program that depends on hardware support to run properly in Mac OS Classic, the drivers for the hardware should also work in Mac OS Classic. As you have noticed, there are many drivers and system extensions that won't work properly in Classic.

The solution, of course, is to get a Power Mac that can boot 9.2.2 or lower natively. There are several machines that can dual boot OS X and Mac OS 9.2.2.

There also are games that can run natively in either 9.2.2 or OS X (both versions are on the install CD, and depending on the OS the correct version gets started).

ruthan wrote on 2021-08-11, 23:17:

From games perspective i would say, that game availability for PPC mac is quite good.. and in some cases it could be simpler run some game on it than lets say run Win 9x,XP games on Win 10, some ports are even better... So far it looks much smoother, there is no registry, too much drivers hassle, some installer apis problems, rights problem.. etc, as on window.. so simply install game and try to run it and it is working or not and its end of it, maybe maybe you can a bit fiddle with System extensions, but is extension is not there game is usually complaining before it is even started..

Extensions are a pain in the behind because the more different extensions there are installed the higher the chance of extensions being incompatible with each other.

It's one of the things that disappeared with OS X, and that was good.

IMHO it's difficult to compare Power Macs with today's Windows PCs.
The philosophy, the approach of each platform was different, especially in the 90s.

Before that one person returned, System 7 was licensed to third-party companies.
Not much unlike MS-DOS was licensed roughly ten years before.
This allowed for clone systems that were better, more open, more professional than the real thing.
On the other hand, Apple didn't make lot of money that way.

In other words, in the 90s, Apple wasn't Apple (as we know it).
It was more like a research institution with lots of interesting, but strange product studies going on.

It also was a time of transition.
The web was young and Macs were the reference platform when it comes to browsers.
Web designers and professionals used Macs for browsing the web with Mosaic, Netscape and Internet Explorer.
Edit : Desktop Publishing (DTP) also was a thing on the Macintosh early on.
Ventura Publisher (DOS/GEM) and Micrografx Picture Publisher (Win 3.1), successor of Astral Picture Publisher (Win 2) on PC too.

Likewise, the Mac's OS changed. The classic "System" (named Mac OS beginning with v7.5)
was showing its age, and Apple tried to replace it several times.

In the late 80s, Multi Finder was developed to allow for multitasking.
It was a neat hack upon an existing system that couldn't be replaced at the time.

In the early 90s, this was tried again with A/UX, a Unix System IV derivative with a compatibility layer for Mac applications.
It was very sophisticated, but required a gigantic amount of RAM.

After that, several projects like "Star Trek" were being explored but didn't materialize.
Likewise, "Cop Land" never really made it.

In the late 90s, when that other Steve dude returned ("Money for nothing" by Dire Straits plays in the background),
he brought with him that NeXT OS which became Mac OS X,
a custom Unix system based on the Darwin kernal. It got a sub set of the Mac OS 8 API, Carbon.

Carbon was an API that could be accessed on both Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X 10.0 onwards.
Applications using it were natively running on both platforms, without the need for several binaries or application packages.

However, Carbon also had its drawbacks. It was limited to the features of Mac OS 8/9.
Adobe was famous for relying on it for a long time, which made Apple upset. 😁
Things like Photoshop had a code base that had a long history, going back to the early 90s.

Okay, why I'm saying this? 😀
Macintosh systems have a long history and thus,
certain things seem to be odd and unlogical to us nowadays.

For example, the use of a "resource fork" in the file system.
The old System didn't use file extensions originally, but some kind of meta data.
During creation, each file got an application attribute that was defining what kind of file it is meant to be.
Hence, System/Mac OS used disk images (*.dsk,*.dmg etc) or special archives (*.sit) so often instead of more common zip/lzh files.

This was neat and advanced at the time when the Macintosh was released in the early 80s,
but seemed silly in the 2000s when people got used to PCs.
It also caused a headache once a file was copied from a Mac to a PC medium.
File systems like FAT32/NTFS can't store the resource fork data.

In a similar fashion, extensions nowadays seem to be a bad thing.
But back in the early days, it was an elegant way to add functionality to the system.

While the competition, say Ms-DOS platform, was fiddling with autoexec.bat, config.sys, TSRs etc,
on a Macitosh it merely was a matter of copying one or to files into the system/extension folder.

And when Mac OS moved to the Unix platform and became Mac OS X, this method was kept.
The Kernel Extensions (Kexts) are essentially serving the same purpose as loadable modules on Linux (modprobe..).

Without Kexts, the whole Hackintosh scene perhaps wouldn't have existed in first place.
Kexts are (were) the only way to make Mac OS X support unofficial hardware or bypass restrictions from Apple.

It comes to no surprise that Apple wants to prevent this on the shiny new M1 platform.
That's why the restrictions for Extensions are introduced exactly now, I think.
Kexts are the last bit of openness that remained.
By still supporting them on the Intel version of macOS would make the M1 port look inferrior.

Sure, Kexts are insecure and can cause stability issues - they are that way by design.
Just like VXDs were before the advent of WDM. Or the the useful, now defunct extension of old FireFox.
With great power comes great responsibility. 😉

Edit: Formatting fixed.

This is the so-called "Classic Environment" that was dropped in Mac OS 10.5. I have limited experience of it but understand it is not very good for gaming. It was mainly intended for Office-type programs.

My first own computer was a 2003 Powermac MDD G4 with a single core 1.25 Ghz cpu.
Love that machine and still have it (yet significantly upgraded).
At the time I studied some graphics design and therefore chose a mac over a windows machine.
But I loved pc gaming, so that's what I tried to do at the time on that mac as well!

I never enjoyed using the classic environment for gaming.
Many games had bugs, and if they did run, performance wasn't very good.
Luck was however on my side, I didn't know it when I purchased the machine, but it was the last machine to be officially able to boot natively in OS9!
If a game both supported osX and os9 it always performed a lot better in os9 natively.

I do remember that Warcraft 1 used a different method for rendering on mac, making it look a lot differently, but can't remember many games that were better to run on a mac compared to the windows version.

I think if you do a modern build, there are modded versions of macos9 available that support other mac models as well (macos9lives has more infor on that).

yawetaG wrote:

Extensions are a pain in the behind because the more different extensions there are installed the higher the chance of extensions being incompatible with each other.

I would expected that extensions are not made by stupid people so they would be backwards compatible or there would be some fallback.

Jo22 - Thanks for more insight.

Errius wrote:

This is the so-called "Classic Environment" that was dropped in Mac OS 10.5. I have limited experience of it but understand it is not very good for gaming. It was mainly intended for Office-type programs.

I would real like to see some official text about it.. i dont like that implication that games are less important than some office stuff 😀. Games are in some way supported, because they are working, it would be easy to ad some piece of code to disable some API calls for games and disable games it they would really wan to do. it.
Even with my almost zero Mac fiddling knowledge, i made quite a lot games working. Is had to believe that Mac has not any way how to debug things.. Linux has almost always zillion of logs and message in terminal. Windows have Event viewer and magic error codes.. so now MacOS bas nothing, what i know, to check, its not good.

Limpem - Yeah G3 /G4 have official G4, G dont, but G5 is faster on CPU and GPU side has nice IPS 20 inch monitor, 2GB ram ec.. So far i had compatibility issues, not not too slow performance issues. I had exactly opposite problem with Warcraft scrolling is too fast, so i would need some slow down utility for it, is such thing exist... i suspect that even on Mac OS9 which would run natively on on fast G4 would be same problem.
So sure Mac scene seems to be limited with comparison with PC, so far i have found very few community users made patches.. which often exist for Windows. Lots of games have these MacSoft logos etc, so there were some Linux like modern special porting companies (Aspyr,Feral), which are known for not good support, they just port something on current OS, made some money and go to port other project, without to much support to older ones.

Here is other thread with games which are better on Mac, is not so impression and lots of it is not about PPC Macs, but still nothing to sneeze on:
Which games are better on a Macintosh?

ruthan wrote on 2021-08-12, 19:44:

yawetaG wrote:

Extensions are a pain in the behind because the more different extensions there are installed the higher the chance of extensions being incompatible with each other.

I would expected that extensions are not made by stupid people so they would be backwards compatible or there would be some fallback.

Those who create were never stupid, only those who don't know how to use or understand the technicality of one's creation were.

I really can't speak of my Apple macOS experience, but expecting any forward/backward compatibility with system/kernel extensions is plain unattainable. My biggest complain of Apple macOS Big Sur is missing "stereo mix" in recording that requires 3rd-party virtual audio driver Soundflower/BlackHole to achieve the same thing any Windows can just get it right out-of-box. And look how much they charged for it commercially, USD $99, holy shit! When I see BlackHole virtual audio driver is actually implemented as kernel extensions/Kext, I just forget about it. In fact, Apple macOS Big Sur security update had removed it silently. However, I also discovered that Apple Mac audio engineering could actually use the built-mics to record from its own speakers and the recording was actually great provided there is minimal environmental noise. So I guess the product designs expects professionals who own and work in sound-proof studios to use Macs.

IMHO, Apple macOS has never been a great platform for games ever since IBM PC with VGA were born. The call for "32-bit software must die" further alienated games ported to macOS leaving nowhere for those games to be run on 64-bit only macOS starting with macOS Catalina. Apple just wouldn't care, they already have the best mobile gaming platform, the iPhone. Once they bridged the ecosystem between iOS and macOS, there will be no short of great games for the ecosystem as "one Apple platform".

ruthan wrote on 2021-08-12, 19:44:

yawetaG wrote:

Extensions are a pain in the behind because the more different extensions there are installed the higher the chance of extensions being incompatible with each other.

I would expected that extensions are not made by stupid people so they would be backwards compatible or there would be some fallback.

Apple-made extensions, yes. Third-party, not so much. There is a reason disabling extensions is one of the first troubleshooting steps on pre-Mac OS X Macs...

Furthermore, pre Mac OS X Mac OS versions have some very big incompatibilities between versions (besides, as you've noticed, the usual speed problems on more modern systems). This is partially because they span two different system architectures: Motorola 68K and IBM PowerPC. Later versions of Mac OS for PPC can run 68k apps because they contain an emulator for those apps. Classic environment in Mac OS X also contains that emulator, so technically you can run software that is 3 decades old on a PPC Mac running OS X.

However, the moment you need specific hardware to run something in Classic on Mac OS X things get complicated (as I noticed myself in this thread). The most likely reason for that is that emulated systems always use a fairly baseline virtual machine that only emulates very basic hardware. If you need any special capabilities, the emulator is dependent on whatever was programmed into it and the capabilities of the host system. For example, on a late PPC Mac you won't be able to run anything requiring a connection over a serial port. This is simply because late PPC Macs don't have those ports and Classic does not include any special programming that lets you connect an adapter to a USB port (besides the problem of driver availability).

So if your game needs anything non-standard, chances are it won't run properly in Classic, but might run properly in native OS 9.2.2.

Even with my almost zero Mac fiddling knowledge, i made quite a lot games working. Is had to believe that Mac has not any way how to debug things.. Linux has almost always zillion of logs and message in terminal. Windows have Event viewer and magic error codes.. so now MacOS bas nothing, what i know, to check, its not good.

Look in the Applications folder, in Utilities of Classic (not Mac OS X). Most separate system utilities will be in there. Furthermore, some utilities are hidden in the Apple menu, and you need to specifically look in the Classic Apple menu (use "switch to Classic" to get it). Possibly you also need to press the option key on the keyboard (you need a Mac keyboard, it won't work with a generic USB keyboard), as some options are hidden by default unless you press that key.

By the way, another reason for non-functional Mac OS 9.x and earlier applications can be broken resource forks. This often happens to Mac programs that were zipped on a PC. Also, Stuffit Expander for Mac OS X can corrupt resource forks, so better use the Classic version in the (Classic) Utilities folder if you need to expand a stuffit archive for a pre-OS X program...

Well, I think the question you'll also need to ask is...is it running MacOS9 native, or "Classic mode"? The former runs on PPC Macs prior to the debut of USB2 in Mac hardware, while the latter runs on the USB machines. As for the compatible, are you asking for just MacOS9, or both MacOS 9 and 10?

A few more apps to add in terms of MacOS 10 compatibility (tested with MacOS Panther/Tiger):

Tested on my Pismo G4 Powerbook:
Incoming
Wipeout XL/2097
Quake 3 Arena
RealMyst

Tested on a 1.52GHz PowerBook 15":
Unreal Tournament 2004SE
X2 The Threat
Halo (the original, not the Intel 32bit only HaloMD build)
Battlefield 2142

@ragefury32- I can give right to edit online sheet..