My s/h PowerPC Mac rocks!

I bought a PPC Mac from ebay in order to compile my games on it to make a Universal Binary for Mac (I already have an Intel Mac).

It was like £130 inc VAT and delivery and is 800MHz, 80GB HD, 512MB RAM, 32MB ATI graphics with OSX 10.4 and it rocks! It loads super fast (like 10 seconds or less) and OSX runs really nicely on it.

I got BlitzMax working on it and compiled my AOTMG demo and it ran at the full VSync framerate of 60FPS, I was WELL impressed. A PC with those sort of specs would be horrible.

Oh and I manged to network it to my Macbook Pro really easily, much easier than Windows.

I'm continously impressed by Apple Macs and I'll be doing more development on my Macbook Pro on whilst sitting the sofa in 2008 :-)

One thing, I also ordered PCI wireless network card from ebay that said it worked on G4 Macs and would be detected as an Airport card - but it doesn't. I plugged it into one of the 64bit PCI slots even though it's a 32-bit card, but that should work right? (love the way the case folds open btw, why aren't PCs like this!?) Anyway the Mac doesn't pick it up or say anything (but I've never installed hardware on a Mac before, am I missing something). There's two lights on the back near the arial but neither light up. There's a driver disk with it but nothing Mac-like on it. I even plugged the Mac into my LAN and upgraded OSX via the Internet but it still didn't pick up my card. Can anyone advise further or have I been ebay-diddled? Thx.

Why do you keep comparing it to a PC? Ima just wondering, because if i got a new pc, i wouldnt feel the need to compare it to any macs.

Just because I've had PCs for years and I've seen plenty of similar spec PCs to the new Mac and naturally my brain makes a comparison in terms of performance and ease of use. Basically I like the new PPC, it's great. I'm a Mac noob. Is there anything wrong with that?

nothing wrong with a comparison from a developer's perspective - I quite like mint sauce in MTB myself.

No Nothing at all wrong with that. I was under the impression that you were one of those, no offence, stubborn mac users who have never even used a pc and dont like them. But as long as you have seen both sides, you're free to make any judgment call you like.
Just forget i said anything. :)

OK cool. I've build and programmed PCs since Doom came out, I started with a 486 DX4 100 with a 500Mb drive to put things in perspective. Only seen Macs for the last 9 months - like 'em though.

Maybe you can get some kind of open source or free driver for your card on the internet somewhere. I had to get an open source driver for my usb ethernet adaptor.

Hey grey

could give me link for PPC Mac as I would like look at that. I put PPC mac on ebay but it doesnt show PPC Mac laptop. :S

Didn't i tell you that the G4 is a nice CPU?! Beside of this Apple optimized their code for years to run fast on it due to a lack of faster CPUs like PCs had in the windows world.

@HotShot2005
If you know anybody in London who can do a pick up there's this
and including
this

hehe, I used a mac for the first time in years the other day, was absolutely STUNNED at how fast it ran for a 6 year old machine. I want one! :-)

you surely have no similar speced PC to a PPC mac, simply because there hasn't been any X86 processor since 486 DX that had an external math coprocessor like the PPC Apple have :)

?

UM, That's right, but unless i'm misunderstanding you...

The intel range+ processors have that co-processor *built in* to the core of the main processor. It's more efficient doing it that way!

Would have built it in.
But unlike the apple software, there are quite few apps on Windows that use the SSE and SSE2 or the SSE3 extensions (which would be comparable to the altivec coprocessor) and therefor they are not comparable.

Because the usage of the vector capabilities of it etc make a serious difference and thats the reason why 800Mhz G3 outperform a 1.2Ghz P4 that easily (beside its bloated oversized pipeline naturally)

You cant really compare an 800Mhz x86 to 800Mhz Motorola architecture as they are radically different. Clockspeed isnt a good guide to how fast a computer runs. For example, back "in the day", the amiga (also motorola 68x 7.1 Mhz) was generally outperforming PCs with the 386SX (intel x86 16-33mhz) on half or prehaps even as much as a quarter of the clockspeed.

B.O.T.
Im after an new and old mac too for compiling stuff on that platform :/

Thanks All. I got a driver for it in the end. It was just a bit lame that it was avertised as working on a G4 yet there were no drivers on the CD and no Mac installation instructions.

Hotshot: try searching for powerpc mac or g4 mac. I find laptops in those listings.

Unless I'm missing some joke here, which PowerPC chip had an off die FPU? And the 486 DX had a built-in FPU.

yeah it sounds lame unless it was clevered made...

I've been very pleased with my Mac Mini PPC. I love the way most things work. However keyboard differences cause me trouble when I'm going back and forth between the mac and the pc. I'm hoping to get a Mac Book Pro after January. I'm hoping they come out with new models then.

I've used PC's since the 8086 days and Macs on and off since the first ones.

Congrats on the new purchase. Here's hoping you release all your games on the Mac. Seems to be a very good market for selling games.

Yeah I get keyboard changeover hassle too! Even in BMax.

All the games in my sig will be converted to Mac. HB this weekend, and the other two at the start of Jan.