4 ms·

A slightly more modern equivalent of this is a 2009 Mac mini running Snow Leopard. You can find these machines for around $50 on eBay and they are very snappy.

A slightly more modern equivalent of this is a 2009 Mac mini running Snow Leopard. You can find these machines for around $50 on eBay and they are very snappy. I am waiting for someone to start a business turning old Mac mini's into dedicated retro gaming machines. This would be done by pre-installing OpenEMU and HaloMD on one partition, and Mac OS 9 on another partition to run old games like Lemmings, etc although emulation could also work for some of these. If anyone is interested in this project, please let me know. https://openemu.org/ https://openemu.org/ https://www.halomd.net/ https://www.halomd.net/

gnicholas 4y ago
I still run a 2008 iMac, booted off an SSD over Thunderbolt. Websites are slower to load than on my M2 MBA, but for most local tasks it is perfectly snappy.
- tinytoon 4y ago
  I also still have one of theese. I added more ram and ssd is comming. It's still a great device for Music, Photos, the Web. I did use it for video-conferencing, because the webcam can still hold up. And the little remote is still so great
insane_dreamer 4y ago
I still have one collecting dust in a drawer. Should pull it out and put it to some use.
goosedragons 4y ago
I don't think it makes much sense as a business. AliExpress is littered with retro devices that have as much emulation oof as a 2010ish Mac Mini. There are a lot of little emulation focused Android/Linux boxes as well as emulation focused Mini PCs out there these days.
- derefr 4y ago
  I would love to know if any of these have the oomph for running Dolphin with hi-res texture packs. That sort of "going beyond the original experience" is the main reason I'd bother to use "real hardware" for emulation over something like a Pi or a jailbroken Switch. (Or, for that matter, a MiSTer.) I know that the sweet spot for "enhanced emulation" of (N64|Gamecube|Wii, XBox|XBox360, PSX|PS2) is somewhere higher than "my M1 Macbook Air", but lower than "Ryzen 4 and an RTX4090" — but figuring out exactly where this sweet-spot is, seems to be left as an exercise for the player; with the assumption that anyone who wants to do this already has a beefy gaming computer laying around, and wants to play on a monitor, rather than on their TV. It'd be nice if there were prebuilt appliances for playing enhanced early-3D-era games, that had been tested and shown to achieve a smooth 60FPS playing them at 4K or 1440p.
  - OttoVonBizark 4y ago
    for emulation a midrange graphics card and a i7 or i9 intel chip with high single core speed from the last few years is best - you can get something second hand for very cheap that will perform emulation as well as the ryzen 4 4090
  - ricardobeat 4y ago
    An M1 macbook is actually extreme overkill for emulating those consoles, it is on par with a GTX 1660.
    - derefr 4y ago
      To be clear, I'm not asking about just "emulating these consoles", but rather emulating these consoles with injected 4K assets; three-pass RDMAed 8K stencil-buffering for emulation of GPU-unified-memory in compositing of shadows + reflections; 16x SSAA to smooth off all the jaggies; etc. Y'know, all those options that, when turned on, make a four-generations-old game into a game that looks like it came out yesterday. You still don't need a 4090 to do all that — but you need more than a 1660, I promise you. (For one thing, just for holding all those 4K assets, for a game that never unloads anything because it thinks it has rather small assets!)
mhd 4y ago
> A slightly more modern equivalent of this is a 2009 Mac mini running Snow Leopard. You can find these machines for around $50 on eBay and they are very snappy. I just did that, last Mini that still has a optical drive, the Core 2 Duo is fast enough for a lot of things. If the optical drive isn't important, I'd go for the 2012 mini. Last one that still was user-upgradeable.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dlivingston 4y ago
I assume it has a WiFi card? Snow Leopard was a great OS, and as long as this Mac Mini is ethernet-only, this sounds like exactly what I want (computing productivity without internet-age distractions).
- pazimzadeh 4y ago
  Yeah it has WiFi (802.11n draft) but you don’t have to use it. It has an Ethernet port up to 1 Gbps
800xl 4y ago
I had a 2011 i5 Mac mini sitting in the closet after it stopped getting OS updates. By 2018 I figured it was long in the tooth even though I'd added more RAM and swapped the hard drive for an SSD. I pulled it out one day not too long ago, wiped the drive, and installed elementary OS and was surprised at how well it ran. I almost regret buying a new daily driver since the speed difference is barely noticable.
- elendee 4y ago
  I think I have the same. the only thing that stops me using it more is I do a lot of threejs dev in the browser. I'm not sure if it's the GPU itself or the browser drivers which i can't update now, but it crawls. Favor - if you go to threejs.org are you able to run example sketches?
anigbrowl 4y ago
Early 2010s iMacs are extremely underpriced, given their high quality screens and generally good hardware - you can get 27" models for $300ish and ones with retina screens for maybe $400. I stumbled across a jealousy-inducing low price on a late model with very minor cosmetic issues recently and am still pinching myself. But with these machines so cheap, I have contemplated picking up a second lower powered one just to mess around with, install different Linux distros etc. I presume this is because so many Mac users are moving to the M-series CPUs and away from Intel, though I haven't done a detailed comparison with Macbook and older pro models. Mac minis still seem overpriced (to me, but after building computers for 30 years I feel entitled to be opinionated). Any it won't last forever so if you have ever wanted the nice Apple hardware but were put off by the steep prices now is your opportunity. I went for an iMac because I wanted a machine that looked nice and was nearly silent, though to my surprise I am enjoying MacOS much more than I expected.
drewzero1 4y ago
No mini could boot OS 9 natively, and only G4 minis running OSX 10.4 Tiger could run OS9 apps in classic mode (removed in 10.5 Leopard). There are some who have reported some success booting OS 9 using a custom ROM[0], but last I tried the process was finicky and missing some important features like USB mouse support. Of course this only works on G4 minis (2004-2005) which wouldn't be able to run OpenEMU, but there are other emulators that run fine on PowerPC macs. I've played a lot of Stella (Atari VCS) and KiGB (GameBoy) on G4 macs. The original Halo was PPC-native, and I spent a lot of time playing it on my Power Mac G5. I'm still kicking myself for getting rid of an iMac G4 that could boot OS 9. I kept the faster of my two not realizing I would be stuck with classic mode only, and lost that as well when I upgraded to Leopard. A 2009 mini has been my HTPC for years. That one does pretty well at retro gaming though I haven't tried Dolphin. It's barely playable on my 2011 mini (with integrated graphics). I might have a bit of a mini infestation... 0: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-os-9-on-macmini.2112087/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-os-9-on-macmini.211...
emptyparadise 4y ago
Snow Leopard really was the peak. Is there a list of all the Macs that can run it?

gnicholas 4y ago

I still run a 2008 iMac, booted off an SSD over Thunderbolt. Websites are slower to load than on my M2 MBA, but for most local tasks it is perfectly snappy.

tinytoon 4y ago
I also still have one of theese. I added more ram and ssd is comming. It's still a great device for Music, Photos, the Web. I did use it for video-conferencing, because the webcam can still hold up. And the little remote is still so great

insane_dreamer 4y ago

I still have one collecting dust in a drawer. Should pull it out and put it to some use.

goosedragons 4y ago

I don't think it makes much sense as a business. AliExpress is littered with retro devices that have as much emulation oof as a 2010ish Mac Mini. There are a lot of little emulation focused Android/Linux boxes as well as emulation focused Mini PCs out there these days.

derefr 4y ago
I would love to know if any of these have the oomph for running Dolphin with hi-res texture packs. That sort of "going beyond the original experience" is the main reason I'd bother to use "real hardware" for emulation over something like a Pi or a jailbroken Switch. (Or, for that matter, a MiSTer.) I know that the sweet spot for "enhanced emulation" of (N64|Gamecube|Wii, XBox|XBox360, PSX|PS2) is somewhere higher than "my M1 Macbook Air", but lower than "Ryzen 4 and an RTX4090" — but figuring out exactly where this sweet-spot is, seems to be left as an exercise for the player; with the assumption that anyone who wants to do this already has a beefy gaming computer laying around, and wants to play on a monitor, rather than on their TV. It'd be nice if there were prebuilt appliances for playing enhanced early-3D-era games, that had been tested and shown to achieve a smooth 60FPS playing them at 4K or 1440p.
- OttoVonBizark 4y ago
  for emulation a midrange graphics card and a i7 or i9 intel chip with high single core speed from the last few years is best - you can get something second hand for very cheap that will perform emulation as well as the ryzen 4 4090
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  An M1 macbook is actually extreme overkill for emulating those consoles, it is on par with a GTX 1660.
  - derefr 4y ago
    To be clear, I'm not asking about just "emulating these consoles", but rather emulating these consoles with injected 4K assets; three-pass RDMAed 8K stencil-buffering for emulation of GPU-unified-memory in compositing of shadows + reflections; 16x SSAA to smooth off all the jaggies; etc. Y'know, all those options that, when turned on, make a four-generations-old game into a game that looks like it came out yesterday. You still don't need a 4090 to do all that — but you need more than a 1660, I promise you. (For one thing, just for holding all those 4K assets, for a game that never unloads anything because it thinks it has rather small assets!)

mhd 4y ago

> A slightly more modern equivalent of this is a 2009 Mac mini running Snow Leopard. You can find these machines for around $50 on eBay and they are very snappy. I just did that, last Mini that still has a optical drive, the Core 2 Duo is fast enough for a lot of things. If the optical drive isn't important, I'd go for the 2012 mini. Last one that still was user-upgradeable.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dlivingston 4y ago

I assume it has a WiFi card? Snow Leopard was a great OS, and as long as this Mac Mini is ethernet-only, this sounds like exactly what I want (computing productivity without internet-age distractions).

pazimzadeh 4y ago
Yeah it has WiFi (802.11n draft) but you don’t have to use it. It has an Ethernet port up to 1 Gbps

800xl 4y ago

I had a 2011 i5 Mac mini sitting in the closet after it stopped getting OS updates. By 2018 I figured it was long in the tooth even though I'd added more RAM and swapped the hard drive for an SSD. I pulled it out one day not too long ago, wiped the drive, and installed elementary OS and was surprised at how well it ran. I almost regret buying a new daily driver since the speed difference is barely noticable.

elendee 4y ago
I think I have the same. the only thing that stops me using it more is I do a lot of threejs dev in the browser. I'm not sure if it's the GPU itself or the browser drivers which i can't update now, but it crawls. Favor - if you go to threejs.org are you able to run example sketches?

anigbrowl 4y ago

Early 2010s iMacs are extremely underpriced, given their high quality screens and generally good hardware - you can get 27" models for $300ish and ones with retina screens for maybe $400. I stumbled across a jealousy-inducing low price on a late model with very minor cosmetic issues recently and am still pinching myself. But with these machines so cheap, I have contemplated picking up a second lower powered one just to mess around with, install different Linux distros etc. I presume this is because so many Mac users are moving to the M-series CPUs and away from Intel, though I haven't done a detailed comparison with Macbook and older pro models. Mac minis still seem overpriced (to me, but after building computers for 30 years I feel entitled to be opinionated). Any it won't last forever so if you have ever wanted the nice Apple hardware but were put off by the steep prices now is your opportunity. I went for an iMac because I wanted a machine that looked nice and was nearly silent, though to my surprise I am enjoying MacOS much more than I expected.

drewzero1 4y ago

No mini could boot OS 9 natively, and only G4 minis running OSX 10.4 Tiger could run OS9 apps in classic mode (removed in 10.5 Leopard). There are some who have reported some success booting OS 9 using a custom ROM[0], but last I tried the process was finicky and missing some important features like USB mouse support. Of course this only works on G4 minis (2004-2005) which wouldn't be able to run OpenEMU, but there are other emulators that run fine on PowerPC macs. I've played a lot of Stella (Atari VCS) and KiGB (GameBoy) on G4 macs. The original Halo was PPC-native, and I spent a lot of time playing it on my Power Mac G5. I'm still kicking myself for getting rid of an iMac G4 that could boot OS 9. I kept the faster of my two not realizing I would be stuck with classic mode only, and lost that as well when I upgraded to Leopard. A 2009 mini has been my HTPC for years. That one does pretty well at retro gaming though I haven't tried Dolphin. It's barely playable on my 2011 mini (with integrated graphics). I might have a bit of a mini infestation... 0: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-os-9-on-macmini.2112087/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-os-9-on-macmini.211...

emptyparadise 4y ago

Snow Leopard really was the peak. Is there a list of all the Macs that can run it?