MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: Well, that's done.

> > Too old is something with a PowerPC CPU.
>
> Remind me to hide the debit card the next time I drink at a BBQ. Got all "spendy"
> earlier today and ordered one of these. (Before I read your advice, d'oh!) Figured I
> could at least give it to my best friend's kid when he's old enough.

lol, I have two of those. My brother in law is slowly destroying the working one.

> Oh well, looking forward to seeing how much I can wring out of it.

Good:

It's virtually indestructible (google for funny stories, one survived being run over by a truck, one survived being left outside in the snow for days etc etc.
It can run OS9 aka "classic" alongside Tiger, which means you can play old 68K/Powermac games on it.
It's a great tool for manipulating/preparing disk images for use with Mac emulation in MESS.
It's a cutie. lol

Bad:

Adobe Flash runs like crap or not at all, PPC support is going...Patched versions of Flash are available but..meh.

No official PPC version of Firefox since 3.6.18. But there's this:
http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

Not enough RAM! Buy this:
http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Technology...d=10AUIJV26CAY7

Take care when using the the power brick, the cord and mac-side plug break easily. If you'd like to buy an extra PSU for it try to find one with a higher wattage than the stock one.

For maximum fun don't install Leopard on it, keep it on Tiger 10.4.11 so that you can run Classic. Unless you don't care about retro stuff the ability to run OS9 is definitely one of its best features.

MacOS Installation tip:

If you have access to another Mac with firewire port you can use Firewire Target Disk Mode: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661 and Apple Disk Utility to partition the hard drive on the MacBook.

Create two partitions, one for the main install and a ~5 GB partition at the end of the drive. Use Disk Utility's "restore" function to clone your Mac OS install DVD to that partition. This partition will be bootable just like the DVD, it's much faster to install from hard drive, and this way you always have a 'recovery environment' you can boot into if something goes wrong with your main installation. You can do a disk repair, work from the command line etc etc.

If you don't have access to another Mac, I *think* you might be able to do the same thing when booting from the install DVD itself. I haven't tried it.

S