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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

by p_ing 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - jamesy0ung 2y ago
    I agree, my first OS was 10.5 Leopard, and I absolutely loved its graphical design—something truly special. It also had a genuine Unix feel to it, which, as you mentioned, seems to have been lost in more recent releases.
bsimpson 2y ago
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.
- toast0 2y ago
  Classic MacOS has some interesting games and sometimes interesting versions of games that were on IBM PCs too. But that's mostly for games from the 80s and early to mid 90s. Late 90s and beyond there weren't that many Mac exclusives, and ports to Mac were usually late and without interesting features.

by p_ing 2y ago

mikepurvis 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
- jamesy0ung 2y ago
  I agree, my first OS was 10.5 Leopard, and I absolutely loved its graphical design—something truly special. It also had a genuine Unix feel to it, which, as you mentioned, seems to have been lost in more recent releases.

bsimpson 2y ago

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.

toast0 2y ago
Classic MacOS has some interesting games and sometimes interesting versions of games that were on IBM PCs too. But that's mostly for games from the 80s and early to mid 90s. Late 90s and beyond there weren't that many Mac exclusives, and ports to Mac were usually late and without interesting features.