Does the Mac make a good retrogaming/computing platform

[Emehr]

Since the thread title also mentions computing in addition to gaming, I should mention that the one beauty about programming for classic Mac OS is that it is frozen in time. If you take up developing for it, you would never have to worry about APIs becoming deprecated. What you have is what you get. Make the best of it.

 

In the OS X Panther days, I decided to transition from classic Mac OS development to Cocoa. However, it seemed like once I figured out a good way to accomplish something, a critical function was deprecated in the next iteration of OS X and I'd have to rethink something. I love Mac OS X but damn, the APIs are a constantly moving target. Maybe things have settled down since my last attempt sometime in the Tiger days, but that was not a fun experience, especially when I was still trying to wrap my head around Objective-C and the screen origin point (0,0) being in the lower-left corner of the screen.

 

The Quicksilver G4's are also nice machines, they can boot Classic OS or OS X.

 

Yeah, for a while I was teetering between a Dual 1.0GHz Quicksilver and a Dual 1.25GHz Mirror-Drive Door (FW400) since both are the last of each model to natively boot OS 9 . I opted for the Quicksilver since I heard horror stories about the reliability of the MDD power supplies. Not to mention the noise levels from the fan(s). As a dual-boot Tiger/OS 9 machine, the Quicksilver also makes a great bridge computer between newer Intel-based Macs and the older OS 9 machines. I believe Snow Leopard was the first version of OS X to stop being on speaking terms with classic Mac OS.

 

I have a graphite iMac (500MHz) that a friend gave to me that I'm saving for my son, provided the flyback transformer doesn't fizzle out by the time he's old enough to use it. Many old Macs take up so little space that it's just easier and cheap enough to get one than to deal with the Mac emulators.