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Joined: 2011 Jul 14
The best (and IMHO the only) way to play these great old games....

Instead of noodling around with the various Mac emulators and virtual machines out there, why not take some time to pick up an old G3 iMac? They can be found easily if you look/ask around and are usually VERY cheap, or some people would probably give it to you.

I scored an indigo G3 (500mhz) for $15 and ratted around for an OS 9 install to play the classic games.

This old girl runs like a stuck pig and STILL does most everything a 'modern' machine can do, minus of course video and internet (does some limited).

The emulators never seem to run right, not to mention if you're in a Windoze environment, a lot of the files here on macintoshgarden are either difficult or impossible to open or get to work.

Having the original hardware (USB era) means you can transfer the files from your main Mac/PC to a USB flash drive or USB HDD and effortlessly transfer the stuff from macintoshgarden.

Check craigslist. They're out there. And, they're fun to tinker with.

My indigo is loaded with 10.3.9 and Classic, 512mb RAM and 40gb HDD. All for under $20.

It's a blast to be using programs like Aldus Pagemaker and playing all of these games that are now freely available. Much more fun on the original hardware.

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Ilovetheoldones's picture
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Joined: 2012 Jun 3

Totally agree. I picked mine up at a flea market for $5 with the keyboard and mouse. Think its the 400 MHz Graphite edition. The DVD drive still works, so I use it for a dvd player. It has 640 MB of ram too, so a great old machine.

themacmeister's picture
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Joined: 2009 Oct 26

Good point, I was always looking for the Graphite 400MHz as well, rare as hen's teeth.

Picking up a Power Mac G5 Dual 1.8GHz this weekend for $50, comes with 4GB RAM, and a GeForce FX 5200 Ultra and 160GB HDD. I have had great success running almost all games under Classic Mode (which is all this G5 will support), but it is such a sweet computer, I couldn't pass it up.

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Joined: 2011 Jul 14

If anyone is looking for a clean G3/G4/G5 Mac at a real steal and you live in Milwaukee or don't mind a drive to Milwaukee, message me. I know a guy with a veritable goldmine of this stuff and he's very cheap (as in affordable). He's looking to clean out his 3 locations, each practically filled floor to ceiling with 68k/PPC Macs. He's starting to disassemble and recycle and it makes me wince. I just don't have the room to save 'em all. Even has a few dalmations and flower powers.

MikeTomTom's picture
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Joined: 2009 Dec 7

...Milwaukee... Even has a few dalmations and flower powers.

Damn this tyranny of distance! Sad

Dimitris1980's picture
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Joined: 2009 Apr 21

I prefer real macs than emulators. You can check this topic http://macintoshgarden.org/forum/old-macs-vs-emulators for more opinions. I have also an Imac g3 at 500 mhz with 1 gb ram, 40gb hard drive and Mac os 9.2 & 10.4. It is great machine and most games play perfectly but until now my favourite Mac is my Performa 6116. The only problem is that i cannot find an apple audiovision display. I have read that this monitor has great quality.

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Joined: 2010 Nov 19

Well, you sure have a point, nothing can beat the original.
On the other hand, if you use the emulators for what they were made for, they are awesome.
How would you run e.g. Mac+ software and take it along with your notebook?
Always remember the runtime environments try to simulate Mac+, MacII, Quadra and early PPC-PCI machines equipped with an Intel 604.
Sure there is nothing emulating a G3 or G4, so games made for those are off limits.
By year 2000, nobody could imagine todays stock cpus, so the MMU and other features were not implemented with SheepShaver, otherwise the app would have been dead slow. Therefore some other apps needing the MMU are off limits too.
Still emulation is the way to go for me. Old hardware fails one after the other and my MiniVMac, BasiliskII or SheeShaver volumes are portable to different host OSs running on different hardware.
My Eee1001HA runs my old games, when I´m waiting at the dentist´s for example. Host sytem is OSX 10.6.6 BTW. Smile