suggestions for baseline mac
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| im looking to purchase a used Mac for testing compatibility with my BMAX code. i know pretty much nothing about Mac machines and am wondering what i should look for for a baseline Mac. im not looking for performance and will pretty much only use it for compile and testing of Mac specific areas such as file i/o. as far as special needs i think the only thing i need that may not be standard is OpenGL compatibility. here are a couple i have been interested in: iMac G3 iBook G3 will either of these work or any other recommendations? thx. |
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| You can have my Mac mini for £250 notes. I recommend this as a good baseline system, and OpenGL is supported as standard on Macs running OSX from new. Generally, I would say this is not a good time to switch to a Mac as they're moving over to Intel processors in the near future, but if it's only for compile and testing... |
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| thx for the offer Falken :) since im really not going to use it for anything else im looking to go pretty cheap (around $100US w/shipping). as for the concept, if i understand you correctly an iMac G3 with OSX should do me just fine? one more quick Q... can you upgrade minor versions of OSX for free or is it a seperate purchase? |
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| I reckon that system should be ok - check what gfx card it comes with and be sure that's up to spec. Apparently the Mac mini is v similar to a G4 iMac and that's the only system I have any real knowledge of, but OGL is installed from scratch in OSX. Minor upgrades are free, but confirm this with whoever u buy it from as you will need their apple account details. Get a few more opinions - I'm far from being an expert. |
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| According to my own research (always questionable ;), under OS X, you need a graphic card with a minimum of 16MB for OpenGL to be supported. Many old G3 iMacs had 6MB and 8MB cards. Needless to say, my 1998 iMac and 1999 Powerbook are useless for BlitzMax because the software rendering is astonishingly slow... although they still work fine for OS X. |
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| my 1998 iMac and 1999 Powerbook are useless for BlitzMax because the software rendering is astonishingly slow Enter SDL. See if you can get SDL working on mac - see the thread in blitzmax programming. |
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| I should go for a G4 system. Mac OS X doesn't work that great on G3's. Also you need 16Mb of VRAM to make use of Quartz Extreme and OpenGL. Nicolas. |
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| don't worry about Intel, that's two years or so away.Get something half decent, a mac mini, you can use all your pc components with it and you have recent and decent hardware.Ignore the older g3s |
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