Mac G3 - is it good enough to make Mac games?

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anawiki(Posted 2007) [#1]
Hi
I develop my games on PC and do own Mac Mini for doing Mac Intel ports. I need PowerPC processor to make universal builds and found this config:

APPLE MACINTOSH G3 350 MHz /1M CACHE, RAM: 384 mgb SD, 6 GB IDE, DVD-ROM, GFX: ATI RAGE 128

Will it be good enough to port and test my games on it?

It's quite cheap - $100-$150.

best
Roman


LarsG(Posted 2007) [#2]
Personally, I would go for something with a G4 as a minimum..
But my experience with older macs are non-existent, so it might be that the system you're mentioning is good enough..


SebHoll(Posted 2007) [#3]
I have an old G3 that some one gave me that matches that spec exactly, and trust me, you can't do any serious BlitzMax coding on it.

It takes ages to compile, debugging is a no-no - just too slow, and entering code isn't very fast neither. But it's adequete if you code your app on Windows, simply loading up and hitting Compile on the Mac, and *if* it works first time.


ImaginaryHuman(Posted 2007) [#4]
I would say no way. There's a reason why it's so cheap. It's practically obsolete.

I have an iBook which is a 300Mhz G3 with almost the same graphics card. BlitzMax is not fast enough for any really useful purpose on that machine. The main issue is doing graphics. The OpenGL output really does need hardware acceleration. I severely doubt that the card it comes with (or any that that machine supports) has enough graphics ram for you to use hardware acceleration, and I severely doubt that the OpenGL driver is anything other than a software driver. That means the CPU does all the graphics rendering and computation. You can basically read that to mean it is going to be very slow for any graphics you want to do, certainly you won't be able to do anything at more than a few frames per second, even for the really simply stuff.

I do use it for BlitzMax development when I don't have access to our faster 1GHz G4 which has an NVidea GeForce4 graphics card with hardware-accelerated OpenGL (which is like 100 times faster than in some operations than the G3 machine). I can use it to write code in the IDE and compile it and test stuff but I don't expect it to run at any kind of interactive speed. It also takes quite a bit longer to compile. I would probably try to aim for *at least* a 700 or so MHz G4 CPU, and a much better graphics card - say .7 to 1 billion texels/second is pretty reasonable like a GeForce 2/3/4 or better. Make sure the graphics card has at least 16 megs video ram, preferably 32 or 64, otherwise the os will not support hardware accelerated OpenGL and may not even support full-screen OpenGL displays (ie windowed only). On my G3 I cannot do any OpenGL graphics in full-screen, the driver does not support it and there is not enough video ram for the buffers.

Go with a G4 and much better graphics card and you'll be set for a pretty comfortable development/test/play paltform. Those Mac Mini's I think have like a 1GHz G4 with a good mid-range graphics card, that would be much more suitable for decent BlitzMax performance. Not that Max is slow, but the graphics does need some ooph.


Brucey(Posted 2007) [#5]
Compared to my Linux box, it takes ages to compile on my G4 Powerbook (867mhz)...

That said, the Powerbook is more than capable of handling the graphics stuff I've thrown at it.

The closer you can get to a Ghz, the better, I would say.


ima747(Posted 2007) [#6]
IMO it's down to the graphics card. The processor is very much going to affect compile speeds etc etc. but the older macs (iMac g3s for example) have virtualy no graphics acceleration. as in sometimes using hardware rendering is slower (even on a system that slow) than using software rendering...

Compiling doesn't have to happen in real time though, that can take forever as long as your patient... so is it just for compiling (in which case it's a $100 compiling system and as long as you get blitz running you're fine, I'd say wipe the HD and start clean) or do you plan to do anything (any testing etc) with it... in which case you need something newer.

I haven't done extensive testing between intel and PPC macs with blitz but with all my debuging in various languages I think you're not going to notice any differences so you can just mac debug on the mini then PPC compile on the iMac. Unless you write some intel specific stuff obviously. I think you'll notice Mac vs. PC problems and never really notice a PPC vs Intel problem.

Just my 2bits


skidracer(Posted 2007) [#7]
I would say yes although the price is not that cheap and you need to consider shipping costs.

BlitzMax no longer runs on 10.2 so you will need 10.3 or higher OS.

The original harddisks in those machines are slow and loud, I replaced mine with a laptop HD and was very happy with the resulting speed up and very low operating noise of the entire system.


anawiki(Posted 2007) [#8]
I ended up with G4 400Mhz OSX 10.4.9. It is damm slow in debug mode, though it's fast enough to run my latest game - Runes of Avalon. I was very surprised that it runs so smooth on so old machine with gfx card that has only 16MB ram (ATIRAGE 128) and only 128 RAM.

I paid for it $110 with shipping. Even if that's not that cheap, I needed this quickly to finish Runes for Mac.

best
Roman


anawiki(Posted 2007) [#9]
@ima747: Actually I have spent 2 days debugging the game on PPC because we used BBCruncher and it operated on lowlevel memory operations, so I had to play a lot with endianess.

cheers
Roman


ima747(Posted 2007) [#10]
Ah, I wrap all my read commands with endian controls and avoid low level memory stuff even when I'm designing for 1 platform because A). I'll screw it up BAD if I don't and B). it's nice to have it mostly portable even if you never want to port it for that off chance that you change your mind later. (wtf was I thinking?! moments are annoying)

Hope you managed to squash those bugs!


anawiki(Posted 2007) [#11]
Sure I did :) Great thing is that is common piece of code that we had to port just once and then we can reuse it without trouble. Every other piece of code was easy to port (just hit build&run).


*(Posted 2007) [#12]
Is a IBook G3 any good? just wondering as I want to develop for Macs and wondered before I go ahead and get OS X Tiger 10.4


ImaginaryHuman(Posted 2007) [#13]
An ibook G3 will not be sufficient for running osx tiger. You need at least a g4 if not g5 or intel.

A G3 is also going to be too slow to do any useful blitz development. Compiling takes a long time and apps will not run very fast.


*(Posted 2007) [#14]
According to Apple's website it works on a G3, G4, G5


ImaginaryHuman(Posted 2007) [#15]
Yes technically it does, but the performance will not be particularly friendly for blitzmax apps. I was working on a 300Mhz G3 for some while and found that the OpenGL was about no faster than 1-2 fps and it wasn't very quick at compiling and it was only really useful to test out small experimental ideas.


ImaginaryHuman(Posted 2007) [#16]
Also G3 is VERY old technology now, since there's already been G4's, G5's, and Intel Dual Core CPU's. I mean, my G3 was from at least 10 years ago.

It's good enough to make mac games, to answer your overall question, but i would not say it is good enough to RUN them at a decent speed.


*(Posted 2007) [#17]
I just wanted something to do Mac compiles of Blitzmax apps on for releasing


ImaginaryHuman(Posted 2007) [#18]
Well then there you go, it'll do that. But I wouldn't rely on testing the software on that platform, for example OpenGL may behave differently than more modern systems.


appleide(Posted 2007) [#19]
You know... there ARE 800 -900 mhz G3 iBooks running around still. I wouldn't think they are That slow.....


Yukio(Posted 2009) [#20]
"Compared to my Linux box, it takes ages to compile on my G4 Powerbook (867mhz)...

That said, the Powerbook is more than capable of handling the graphics stuff I've thrown at it.

The closer you can get to a Ghz, the better, I would say."



"I ended up with G4 400Mhz OSX 10.4.9. It is damm slow in debug mode, though it's fast enough to run my latest game - Runes of Avalon. I was very surprised that it runs so smooth on so old machine with gfx card that has only 16MB ram (ATIRAGE 128) and only 128 RAM.

I paid for it $110 with shipping. Even if that's not that cheap, I needed this quickly to finish Runes for Mac."

best
Roman


Your game is on the "42 of the Best Commercial Linux Games" list.
Runes of Avalon is considered one of the best (commercial) Puzzle games for Linux.
It is nice that there is a version for Mac OS X!


therevills(Posted 2009) [#21]
When I ported my games to the Mac I did use a G3 iMac (running 10.3.9, 400Mhz, 128MB) and it was so slow to compile!

But once it compiled, the games ran ok (not great.. just ok!), but it was painful creating the dmg file, icons etc on it, so we bought a G4 Mac Mini (1.25Ghz , 1GB) from eBay for around $300 AU and its soooo much better!

If you can create your game on a decent Windows box, then copy and recompile on the Mac it "should" be ok.

Last week we have bought one of the new Mac Minis - its great!