[HN Gopher] Mac Mini G4 - The best << classic >> Macintosh for r...
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Mac Mini G4 - The best << classic >> Macintosh for retro-gaming?
Author : freediver
Score : 120 points
Date : 2025-01-12 15:53 UTC (7 hours ago)
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| amcaskill wrote:
| Some other classic Mac OS 9.2 compatible games from that era,
| ranked:
|
| 1. Command and Conquer
|
| 2. Rainbow Six
|
| 3. Total Annihilation
|
| 4. Unreal Tournament
| bsimpson wrote:
| MacMall accidentally sent my dad a box of Marathon games,
| probably meant for a store's shelves.
|
| Marathon ended up being one of my favorite games from that era.
| The Windows kids had games like Doom and Quake, but we had
| Marathon.
|
| Mac marketshare was so small at the time that there was an
| implicit craftsmanship that came from anyone targeting Mac -
| you expected higher quality, because they cared enough to use
| Macs in the first place. (Some of that mentality lives on to
| this day.) Of course id made great games too, some of which did
| eventually come to the Mac.
|
| Marathon is a first person shooter, set in space. It has a
| compelling storyline, as well as fun art and weapons.
|
| My dad's office had an AppleTalk network, which was kind of
| like Ethernet but strung together with regular phone cables. I
| used to bribe my little brother to commandeer the network with
| me and play Marathon.
|
| There were ultimately 3 Marathon games, that were eventually
| open sourced and ported everywhere. You can find them online
| and on Steam as Aleph One.
|
| Fun fact: the game that launched the Xbox was originally made
| for the Mac. Bungie, the creators of Marathon, showed off their
| new game Halo at the Macworld conference. The hype train went
| through the ceiling, and Microsoft bought it as a launch title
| for their new gaming project.
|
| Since then, Sony bought the rest of Bungie and is preparing to
| launch a new game in the Marathon universe.
| amcaskill wrote:
| I found the demo version of Marathon so terrifying at that
| age that I never pursued it!
|
| I will have to give it another go.
| goda90 wrote:
| I got into Escape Velocity and EV Override on my brother in
| law's Mac. Since I had a PC at home, I was really excited when
| EV Nova was also released for Windows. Recently I picked up
| Endless Sky which is inspired by those games and is open
| source.
| thepryz wrote:
| While the Mac mini is nice due to its size, personally, if you're
| choosing a hardware over emulation, I'd rather have an iMac G4
| simply because of the aesthetics. It's amazing how well that
| design holds up even today.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| The arm holding the monitor was the weak point on those
| machines. They all seemed to droop after a while. Fixing the
| problem was near impossible.
| freediver wrote:
| Counter point - mine still holding strong after 20 years.
| amatecha wrote:
| Same, I have two of them and the arms are holding up fine.
| I keep them in the fully-vertical position most of the
| time, to reduce strain on the arm (though I'm not sure how
| it works internally).
| crims0n wrote:
| This happened to mine... am sad.
| freediver wrote:
| Sitting on my desk constantly reminding me what timeless
| compute (it can still receive software updates for OSX Tiger it
| runs) and timeless design (need I say more) is.
| vimy wrote:
| It's the most beautiful Mac ever made. I hope they reuse this
| design one day.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| This is a great comprehensive article on the "why" and there are
| good YouTube videos on the "how." What the article is missing
| that makes it even better is putting an SSD in which makes it
| even faster of course. You can get an untested Mac mini G4 for
| about $60 on eBay and the rest of the parts (SSD, PATA-mSATA
| adapter, RAM if less than 1 GB, power adapter, any missing
| screws, clock battery, etc.) will run you another $60 to make the
| ultimate Mac OS 9 machine. If you're comfortable taking things
| apart and putting them back together it's not too bad.
|
| A quick tip: be sure to reset the PRAM with command-alt-p-r
| holding down during restart until you hear 3 chimes. Then while
| the machine is booting hold down command-alt-o-f and type "reset-
| nvram" and then "set-defaults" and then "reset-all" (all of this
| is in open firmware) before installing Mac OS 9 to make sure
| firmware is in its original state.
|
| I came across this idea of SSD upgrading and installing Mac OS 9
| in April 2024 and bought three broken ones to build one for my
| son. [0] When the first one worked, I ended up figuring, why not
| just finish the other two and sell them on eBay?
|
| That led me into a hobby business. I've now cleaned, upgraded
| with SSDs, and sold about 70 of them. The "business" basically
| breaks even, so it truly is a hobby. In fact I invested so much
| in inventory buying 90 of them in a lot at the end of 2024 that I
| am negative right now. I will probably turn a slight profit in
| 2025. But it's fun and if you want you can buy one from me at:
| https://os9.shop
|
| Sorry for the self-promotion, but very relevant!
|
| 0: https://x.com/davekopec/status/1795872492386398683
| haunter wrote:
| How fast do modern SSDs die in older systems without TRIM?
| WoodenChair wrote:
| I am yet to hear about 1 dying from a customer. But I can't
| give you a scientific answer to that and I've only been doing
| this since April. There's a whole community of people doing
| these upgrades. You can find them at https://macos9lives.com
|
| That's where the hacked Mac OS 9 comes from and there are
| threads about Mac mini SSDs. There are also threads at
| https://68kmla.org
|
| I would ask there.
| elliotnunn wrote:
| This is the patch that I wrote to make the "Mac OS ROM"
| file bootable on the mini. The original development
| happened at MacOS9Lives. Anyone interested in Classic Mac
| OS hacking is very welcome to join us at #mac68k on Libera.
|
| https://github.com/elliotnunn/tbxi-
| patches/blob/master/macmi...
| mistyvales wrote:
| Most good/modern SSD's should have built in capabilities for
| at least the bare minimum of garbage cleanup
| LocutusOfBorges wrote:
| Is this actually enough? I've never been able to find a
| clear answer on this - it's become increasingly common to
| install SATA SSDs in retro game consoles, for example, but
| nobody seems to have ever done any testing to see if the
| functionality on newer SSDs is adequate to handle systems
| without TRIM support.
|
| You used to hear all kinds of horror stories about people
| who threw a SSD into their PS3 and found their whole system
| grinding to a halt within a year.
| p_ing wrote:
| While a year of lifetime would suck, does it ultimately
| matter? This is old equipment not used for anything
| critical in the context of the discussion in this thread.
| LocutusOfBorges wrote:
| It only matters insofar as it has the potential to cause
| people some annoyance down the line which they'd likely
| prefer to avoid.
|
| People don't tend to want to have to actively maintain
| their old tech any more than they absolutely have to.
| p_ing wrote:
| Oh absolutely, do not disagree.
|
| Though I do think that if one is using old tech, they
| should be aware of the pitfalls. There was a good run of
| the capacitor plague, for example. I avoid this equipment
| in general as I don't have soldering skills (but man oh
| man, I would love to have a working SE/30! People trying
| to sell repaired SE/30s on eBay for $1400USD!) to repair
| them. I know the VRM on my G4 Cube can potentially have
| issues, as can the power brick. Fortunately there are
| small batch available replacements should I need them.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's still cheaper than actually having pay for the games
| that's going unpaid for with these systems, so it all
| comes out in the wash for the user
| wat10000 wrote:
| Can you work around it by massively overprovision by
| partitioning the drive and leaving half of it
| unallocated? The amount of space you need for an older
| system like this should be tiny compared to modern
| storage.
| jsheard wrote:
| That works as long as you prepare the drive on a machine
| that _does_ support TRIM, to ensure the unpartitioned
| area gets TRIMed one last time before the drive is moved
| to the old machine. Then it should remain in that state
| as long as it 's never written to.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Even if you didn't do that, I wouldn't expect the
| partitioning to write to the unallocated space. If you
| start with a fresh drive I'd think it should work.
| bogantech wrote:
| How can the SSD controller do any garbage collection if it
| isn't told which blocks are no longer in use?
| wtallis wrote:
| The SSD may not know which _logical_ blocks are no longer
| in use, but it 's quite easy to simply have lots more
| logical blocks that never get used in the first place.
| Not having TRIM is only an issue if your OS actually
| touches the whole drive. A vintage MacOS game library
| would be tens of gigabytes at most, and any SATA SSD you
| buy these days is going to be at least double the
| capacity of a first-gen Mac Mini's hard drive.
| jasomill wrote:
| While it's true that mechanisms like TRIM can in many
| cases improve performance and extend drive lifespan, the
| only thing that's required for SSD garbage collection is
| for the SSD to be aware of which internal blocks map to
| logical blocks written by the OS (obviously always true
| for any standard SSD where garbage collection is even
| conceptually possible).
|
| In practice, all SSDs have internal capacity greater than
| the nameplate capacity exposed to the OS, so all SSDs
| start with a reasonable amount of spare capacity;
| enabling TRIM merely increases the available spare
| capacity in proportion to the number of currently unused
| logical blocks vs. never written logical blocks -- blocks
| outside all allocated partitions (unless written by
| something other than a filesystem [e.g., manually, or via
| a naive disk imaging, diagnostic, or RAID rebuilding
| tool]) and blocks that allocated filesystems have never
| had the need to use (unlike SSD firmware, traditional
| filesystems don't practice "wear leveling" when
| allocating space, so, e.g., a 1TB filesystem that has
| never contained more than, say, 100GB worth of data at
| any point will probably contain a large number of LBAs
| that have never been written, independent of how much
| data has been deleted and overwritten).
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Given the tiny filesizes of the games involved, if durability
| is a worry I'd just overprovision space. SATA SSDs are dirt
| cheap these days and it'd take ages for an OS 9 install to
| write to all the cells in a 256GB drive (assuming adequate
| RAM + disabled virtual memory), let alone with 500GB+ drives.
| jmb99 wrote:
| There exist (very cheap) SSDs without TRIM support at all
| currently for sale. I own one. It won't die, but writes will
| suck if you're writing more than the overprovisioned space
| all at once. For this use case, that'll probably never happen
| (and it'll probably still be faster than the original HDD
| both in throughput and random I/O).
|
| Some SSDs also support primitive garbage collection if
| sequences of 1s are written to the disk in unused spaces. I
| don't know how to accomplish that on OS 9, but it might be
| possible with 10.4 or 10.5's disk utility. If I remember
| correctly, there's an "erase free space" function. Whether
| that writes 1s or 0s I'm not sure, though.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Wait looks like you ship to Canada! I'll take a closer look
| now.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| I do ship to Canada, but unfortunately the (auto-calculated
| by Shopify/UPS/DHL/USPS) international shipping prices are
| quite high (I've seen about $30 to Canada and $50 to Germany
| in the past). Plus in some countries the purchaser ends up
| having to pay duties, so check your local laws. A way
| somewhat around this is to buy from me on eBay since they
| take care of the shipping and duties, and have lower shipping
| costs:
|
| https://www.ebay.com/usr/oaksnowconsultingllc
|
| The downside is packages through eBay International Shipping
| tend to take like a month whereas UPS ships packages in less
| than a week pretty much anywhere. I sold one on os9.shop to
| Germany last month that got to Germany in 3 days and to the
| person's door in 5.
|
| My prices on os9.shop are also lower to begin with because I
| don't have any eBay fees. The equivalent package on os9.shop
| to the eBay packages is the Average Condition bundles. US
| customers should definitely buy at https://os9.shop since
| it's the same stuff and the prices are lower and the shipping
| is the same.
| amatecha wrote:
| RE: shipping to Canada: use USPS. Using Fedex or UPS will
| incur gigantic "brokerage fees" which you are not charged
| when using USPS + Canada Post. We're talking like $30+ on a
| $100 package, and that's upon arrival to your door, after
| you already paid $20-30 shipping. I got a plexiglass trophy
| from an event at my work and it cost me $25 to receive it
| because they used UPS to ship it.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| When customers are checking out they have the option to
| choose USPS, UPS, etc. I've seen prices to Canada be more
| for USPS than UPS. Shopify handles most of this. I don't
| charge any handling so it's just whatever the raw
| shipping cost that is calculated by Shopify/USPS/etc.
| amatecha wrote:
| Oh, perfect! I didn't realize there was a choice during
| checkout. I can imagine the initial price is more, but it
| will be less in total once the package arrives to the
| door.
|
| My "favorite" thing about UPS is they like to leave a COD
| invoice, when they were _supposed_ to collect the fee
| from you before releasing the package -- but that takes
| too long so they just leave an invoice. Except you can't
| just go online and pay it - there's no facility to do
| this on their website (you can find countless Reddit
| threads of people raging about this). I had to pay by
| phone, which is beyond ridiculous in this day and age.
| empressplay wrote:
| I have an eMac G4, can't beat that CRT!
| p_ing wrote:
| I picked up a G4 Cube for retro-gaming. It'll run what I'm
| interested in (Sim City, Sim Tower), is compact, and I've got the
| ADC monitor to go with it. Upgraded to 1.5GiB RAM and replaced
| the spinning rust with an SSD with an IDE bridge. I even have the
| working Apple USB speakers that it came with! Repaired the disc
| drive and it is good to go.
|
| Installed OS X 10.4 for kicks (will go back to 9.2) and wow, what
| a different OS that was from today's macOS. Brings back memories
| of my PB G4 Ti. What an awesome laptop that was.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 10.4 was where I started; it's what came on the first gen white
| polycarb MacBook that I got in 2006. And I used that as my main
| machine for like eight years and then had two different MBPs
| afterwards, so I saw quite a span of OS X versions, and I
| remember most of the changes feeling fairly iterative, at least
| when going just one to the next.
|
| What was it that stuck out out to you when making such a large
| jump back in time?
| p_ing wrote:
| OS X 10.1 - ~10.4 had a different root directory structure.
| Right click menu is unrecognizable. Dock behaves a bit
| different. The Directory Access utility (renamed to Directory
| Utility) contained Netinfo, the local directory, I believe
| sourced from NeXTStep. Lots of various other utilities were
| discontinued or changed into something unrecognizable.
|
| Early OS X felt like a proper UNIX distribution. Modern
| macOS, not so much.
| bsimpson wrote:
| As someone who grew up on Macs and missed out on games like
| Alice and Arkham Asylum that weren't released on Mac when they
| were popular on Windows, I'm kind of shocked to see such
| enthusiasm for the Mac as a retro gaming platform.
|
| I know a lot of them did eventually get Mac ports. I remember
| playing Braid on my iMac with a Wiimote in the early 10s.
| rollcat wrote:
| I have a 2002 TiBook[1]; it officially supports MacOS 9.2.2, but
| also every OS X release up to 10.5.8. I've been surprised to find
| that the retail copy of StarCraft that I bought in 2009 not only
| includes an OS X build, but also supports PowerPC!
|
| [1]: https://www.rollc.at/posts/2024-07-02-tibook/
|
| I'm not sure if it can be made to run m68k apps "natively", but
| on the other hand you can emulate just about any classic MacOS in
| a modern browser[2].
|
| [2]: https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/
| wslh wrote:
| There are other operating systems supported for the Mac Mini G4.
| For example, NetBSD and Linux.
| p_ing wrote:
| NetBSD yes, but 32-bit Linux distros are getting rare. Adelie
| Linux is one of the few that has current releases of software.
|
| https://www.adelielinux.org/download/
| bodyfour wrote:
| A few months ago I happened to install Debian/unstable on a
| G4 mini. ppc32 is no longer a supported architecture --
| purely "what you get is what you get".
|
| Still, the process was mostly painless. Everything I needed
| worked out of the box.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Why, though? If you just wanted a small form factor computer to
| run Linux on, there's no lack of modern hardware that'll do a
| much better job of that. Running old versions of Mac OS is what
| makes this hardware interesting.
| johnklos wrote:
| Not everyone wants to participate in the x86 monoculture and
| its myriad bugs. A PowerPC machine has many benefits,
| particularly if someone wants to test that x86 assumptions
| aren't in their code or infrastructure tools.
|
| Like running NetBSD on the Nintendo Wii, it also has a bit
| more personality ;)
| weare138 wrote:
| The 2002 Power Mac G4/1.25 Dual Processor (MDD) is a good option
| too. It has dual PowerPC 7455's w/ 2MB L3 cache, supports 2GB
| RAM, 4 PCI slots and a 4x APG slot that came with either a 64MB
| ATI Radeon 9000 Pro or a 128MB NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti. Plus there's a
| ton of after market upgrades for these.
|
| https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/specs/powerma...
| johnklos wrote:
| The depth of this article is wonderful. The PowerPC line did have
| lots of good things going for it, and the Mac mini G4 is a good
| example of how much you can get done with modest space, power and
| heat.
|
| I'm still using Mac mini G4s in several places, both for Mac OS X
| (legacy Final Chop) and as small, low power servers running
| NetBSD.
|
| There are really only two drawbacks to the Mac mini G4, in my
| opinion:
|
| Gigabit ethernet would've been a dollar or two more? Being stuck
| with 100 Mbps, or around 300 Mbps if one uses a gigabit USB
| adapter, isn't fun.
|
| If the DIMM slot could take 2 gig DIMMs, this'd be a perfect
| machine. Other PowerPC Macs could take 2 gigs - heck, even the
| older PowerPC 604e Power Macs 9500 and 9600 could take 1.5 gigs -
| so being limited to 1 gig is a bit unfortunate, especially
| considering that 2 gig DDR DIMMs are a thing (later Xserve G5
| units could take 2 gig DDR DIMMs).
|
| Still, the Mac mini G4 is the only computer aside from SBCs that
| I've bought brand new, and I have always been very happy with my
| decision.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Does anyone remember how Steve Jobs kind of hated video games?
| Even though him and woz worked on 'breakout' which I thought was
| kind of funny. I guess John Carmack was a huge fan of NeXT,
| having developed Doom on that platform, which is wild because he
| wanted the branding of that OS right on the title screen and the
| request was denied (Would have been a tiny thing that could have
| changed the regard of that system alot) [1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825...
| wiredfool wrote:
| Huh. I sent one of these to ewaste in the last 6 months.
| amatecha wrote:
| Macs have amazing resale value - IMO never scrap one. People
| will buy ones that need repair, even. Post on CL or FB
| marketplace and someone will snag it for sure. Just don't list
| a machine in disrepair for $400 like some people like to do
| because they saw a ridiculous listing on ebay :)
| ajross wrote:
| PowerPC/USB/new-world-ROM macs are "classic" now?
| mbrubeck wrote:
| The Mac mini G4 turned 20 years old yesterday.
|
| It's about as old now as the original Mac 128k was during the
| G4 era.
| mrkpdl wrote:
| The word classic has a bevy of meanings in the Mac world.
| There's the "classic Mac" era, the "Macintosh Classic" which
| bears the name, and of course "Classic" mode in early OS X.
|
| But some things are just... classics. Like the g3 and g4 era,
| which saved the Mac from death.
| dangus wrote:
| Welcome to being old!
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I have 2 and I found them almost unusably slow since day 1. I'd
| hate to try running even a very old version of MAME.
| mrkpdl wrote:
| Which version of Mac OS are you running? Early versions of OS X
| were quite slow, but OS 9 should run like lightning on these.
| amatecha wrote:
| Swap the spinning rust for an SSD and you'll be blown away at
| the difference. the HDD is absolutely the bottleneck in these
| machines.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I did the same, but with my old 12" PowerBook G4 when it became
| obsolete. I replaced the PATA HDD with a PATA SSD for speed, and
| removed the problematic cells in the original battery (so it must
| run with the power supply attached). This made it incredibly
| lightweight (most likely lighter than the Mac Mini G4), and more
| portable (it doesn't need to be plugged into a screen, although
| it could be).
| GeekyBear wrote:
| There were some small indie shops that put out fun arcade games
| back then.
|
| Cassidy & Greene's Crystal Quest is excellent.
|
| Ambrosia Software had shareware versions of arcade classics as
| well as original concepts. Escape Velocity is still talked about
| today.
| amatecha wrote:
| One of my favorite machines for classic Mac gaming is the first
| iteration of the iMac G4 (700/800mhz) , which allows booting into
| OS 9. Not only is it an amazing form factor, it's got a great
| screen and the official speakers are really nice. It's the
| complete package for a great gaming experience. The machine is
| powerful enough to run any game prior to its release (and so many
| after, of course). It's also a great conversation piece when it's
| not actively in use! :)
| nemo wrote:
| [delayed]
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