Short story long (for the purposes of retro nostalgia), a bloke I met online was feeling really generous, so gave me (literally) a boot-load of old Macs. I started off wanting the Mac Pros (and I use a 4.1 with a Vega 64 for semi-modern gaming) and figured I could fix/flip the spares as a bit of a side hustle.

What I didn't realise before the pickup was that he had quite a few G4 (Sawtooth) towers with brand new motherboards (he ran a design studio, so had a heap of Apple-issued spares lying around for emergencies).

All of them work perfectly (with some love), but the most interesting one is a Sawtooth that has a 1.6Ghz Sonnet upgrade in it. It took a bit of tinkering to get working (remembering, I have spares galore) and now I've got it cranking. It's running OS 9.1, has a 80GB HD and has 2GB RAM installed. GPU's only a Rage 128, but I THINK a few of the GPUs I have lying around are GeForce 2's (but with that ADC or whatever it's called). Hopefully in time I can test them (some have VGA & ADC, so I'll try them first once I find a VGA cable).

Anyhow... this is basically the dream computer I could never afford during high school (I had a Bondi iMac with a Voodoo 2 upgrade... then a G4 Cube with a GeForce II through uni).

Any thoughts on what games I should be throwing at this & more generally, which apps (that I may have forgotten about) will make my life easier? I have a whole box full of old CDs so will be running through it first. My immediate thoughts are:
- The old Pangea games (Weekend Warrior, Power Pete [NOT Might Max haha], Bugdom...etc)
- Dust
- Bloodbath
- Obsidian
- Bad Mojo
- Marathon
- Prime Target
- Kid-Pix
- Various Hypercard games (e.g. Trials of Achenar)
- Ray Dunakin's games
- Realmz
- Prince of Destruction

Gonna go through some old Mac Format/Addict CDs as well, to see what memories pop-up.

Kinda odd seeing this computer added to my list of 'retro gaming' machines, but I think it's an important part. Noting, I've got Mossy's book (what happened to my free lunch? ) so will also have a thumb through it

Zork games
Max Payne
Unreal Tournament
Vampire the masquerade
Escape Velocity
Red Faction
Deus Ex
Black and White
Warcraft 3

Power Pete = excellent choice

menace690 wrote:


Cheers... I remember Vampirr the masquerade was awesome! Same with Deus Ex.

Around about that time I was bummed that all my PC friends got Half-Life/Counterstrike. Having given both a go, I honestly have no idea what the hype about them was.

Side note, I removed 512MB RAM (rookie error - the 2GB was causing weird errors). Also, I found a Radeon 9000 Pro amongst all the spare parts. Took a bit of fiddling to get the software side working, but this is awesome.

Loving this rig as it boots into OS 9, but has the same amount of grunt as some of the later models that only handled OS9 via classic mode.

Adding to your respective lists:

The classic Tomb Raider games
Nightfall
The Last Express
Civ 2
Glider PRO
Descent
Ferazel's Wand
Harry the Handsome Executive
[all the other Ambrosia games, though for the later ones you'll need to install OS X]
Age of Empires
Oni
Spin Doctor/Clockwerx
The Settlers 2
SimCity 2000 and 3000
SimTower and Yoot Tower
F/A-18 Hornet 2.0 and 3.0
Snood
Enigma (the Freeverse one)
Burning Monkey Solitaire
Spaceward Ho!
Eric's Cascade
Eric's Ultimate Solitaire
Gridz
Boogaloopers

The thing about Half-Life (and to a lesser extent also Counter-Strike) is that it was a revolution in FPS design. No shooter before Half-Life had put all the pieces together — great level design, cool weapons, an intriguing story that you get to live in (as opposed to watching it unfold in cutscenes), scripted events, cinematic pacing, decent character development, etc. It's special more for what it did — what it represented and achieved — than for what it is.

Thanks Mossy - Spin Doctor, Yoot Tower, Sim City 2000, Descent and Glider are all games that I vividly remember.

Oni's also a classic (I just played through it again). It's still my dream that M$ hadn't taken over Bungie and scaled back Oni as I reckon it's just such a cool concept for a game (whereas in hindsight, Halo's just another gun game... one that seemingly normalised the idea of using a gamepad to navigate FPS'). Meh, that's my rant.

FWIW I've been working on a game in World Builder over the last week or two (see the demo I've posted at macintoshgarden.org/games/finding-d). I'm gradually getting a bit better with the graphics (have made lotsa new scenes since the demo), so will probably re-do the first few scenes which I drew while still learning the basics. Suffice to say, it's kinda fun drawing 1-bit pictures. My hope is that by the end of this, I'll have a pretty big, open world (at least 50-100 scenes) that's based on a Japanese town I used to live in. If anybody's got feedback, I'm all ears!

Some of my old games will run on that environment.

www.macintoshrepository.org/5359-space-debris

There's a modern version now too:

apps.apple.com/ie/app/space-diamonds/id1516292290

OMG Stuffit files.. Such a throwback!..