Mac Mini G4 – The best « classic » Macintosh for retro-gaming?
xtof.info129 points by freediver 8 hours ago
129 points by freediver 8 hours ago
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!
Wait looks like you ship to Canada! I'll take a closer look now.
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.
Can you do like a LAN party thing with two of them and play some classic games in co-op that way? Can you legally get these old games somewhere or is it all abandonware?
They all have Ethernet ports. So, yes you can hook them up to a wired router and play co-op. The vast majority of games are either going to be abandonware or buying old jewel cases on eBay.
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.
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.
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.
How fast do modern SSDs die in older systems without TRIM?
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.
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...
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.
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.
Most good/modern SSD's should have built in capabilities for at least the bare minimum of garbage cleanup
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.
While internally managed garbage collection is less efficient than TRIM managed, it's significantly better than unmanaged.
"Enough" is a relative term and is up to you to decide. The alternative is significantly less performant coupled with unpredictable reliability (outside of expensive enterprise options), but a higher overall lifetime.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
How can the SSD controller do any garbage collection if it isn't told which blocks are no longer in use?
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 naïve 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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].
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.
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.
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.
Counter point - mine still holding strong after 20 years.
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).
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! :)
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).
I have an iMac G4/800 that can run 9.2 as well as OS X. It's not as fast as the later G4s, but it's performant enough, the flat-panel is nice, and the all-in-one design makes thing really delightful to work with. Replacing the HDD with an SSD isn't fun since iMacs are unpleasant to work on, but is crucial. It's great for old games.
Huh. I sent one of these to ewaste in the last 6 months.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I have an eMac G4, can't beat that CRT!
PowerPC/USB/new-world-ROM macs are "classic" now?
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.
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.
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...
There are other operating systems supported for the Mac Mini G4. For example, NetBSD and Linux.
NetBSD yes, but 32-bit Linux distros are getting rare. Adélie Linux is one of the few that has current releases of software.
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.
This is the exact same transition process 68k went through for most platforms it was on. Just left it in the build process and as packages were unable to be built for the arch they just delisted them from the builder until core packages no longer functioned; at which point total support was removed:
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.
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 ;)