The Retro PC Thread

[samsonlonghair]

Unlike ARM, which has the lower-power market all to itself, Power has only the very upper-end, which is a perpetually declining market. Arguably the mid-power market of consumer PCs is also slowly contracting.

I used to think that consoles and embedded systems were the future of PowerPC, but now consoles all seem to have turned to Intel, and ARM is eating up the market for embedded systems. Meanwhile, server admins are turning to virtualization and the cloud for their needs. It's hard to see a future for PowerPC architecture from where I'm sitting.

I still have a pile of G5s at work, stacked up with earlier Mac Pros that are no longer supported. It seems like a fairly narrow window of software that they could wind up being great for though.

This was my experience exactly. You can still use them for old versions of photoshop, illustrator, and final cut pro. After that the useful software available to G5s starts to run low.
Some G5s can load MorphOS if you're interested in running Amiga software. I thought about it myself just for fun, but MorphOS isn't free, and I have no particular need to run Amiga software at all.

OS X originally did include an emulator (essentially), known as the Classic environment, that would boot OS9 within OSX and let you run older Mac applications. Some retail versions of OS X actually included an OS9 CD for this, and system discs for PowerPC machines tend to include a disk image for OS9 to support it (it's an "optional install", and not usually on the main OS disc).

This continued to be supported on (offhand) all PowerPC machines, even if they could no longer dual boot the two OSes.

Of course, Apple being Apple...

The first Intel based machines were introduced while OS X 10.4 was current (so the retail release doesn't support them, but they included a version of it). Similar to when they swapped from the 68k architecture to PowerPC, support for older machines and applications was phased out.
On an Intel-based Mac, OS X 10.4 included a PowerPC binary translator called Rosetta, which allowed it to seamlessly run PowerPC native OS X apps, much like the older Mac OS was set up to run 68k applications on PowerPC.

For PowerPC machines, as it turned out, 10.4 was the final version of OS X to support the Classic environment (Intel machines didn't support it at all anyway). The next version, 10.5, was the final version to support PowerPC hardware.

In 10.6, Rosetta became an optional install, and it was entirely dropped from 10.7. There are a few Intel based Macs that top out at 10.6.8, and a fair number more that are no longer supported after 10.7. Most any that could run 10.8 have been good through 10.11, but 10.12 is cutting support for a lot of pre-2009 or 2010 models. Such is the way of the Macintosh.

This is a fairly good write-up of Apple's support cycle. Maybe one of these days we should put together an article on old Macs for the front page.

I'm one of the Intel guys who is basically stuck on Snow Leopard. I don't mind it much, because I get the benefits of Rosetta and Front Row - which for me is still an excellent Media Center user interface.

I can't use the latest version of Chrome on Snow Leopard, but Firefox still maintains Snow Leopard support.

The only rub is iTunes. The highest version of iTunes for Snow Leopard is 11.4 which is incompatible with iOS9. This means that if my iPhone goes beyond iOS 8.4.1 I will lose my ability to sync my iPhone with my mac. Like you said, "Apple being Apple."

[marurun]

I used to think that consoles and embedded systems were the future of PowerPC, but now consoles all seem to have turned to Intel, and ARM is eating up the market for embedded systems. Meanwhile, server admins are turning to virtualization and the cloud for their needs. It's hard to see a future for PowerPC architecture from where I'm sitting.

Not these days, no. But when pondering what could have been? Could have been a legit contender had things progressed a little differently. I'm still amazed Intel managed the incredible turnaround they did after the Pentium 4 fiasco. They committed to a failed architecture and managed to turn things completely around. No other chip-architecture-making company has the size or resources to pull that off.

[noiseredux]

Funny/Annoying story: So a little while back I impulse bidded on a C64 game called HKM (or, Human Killing Machine). First, a little about the game itself... so the C64 and Amiga ports of Street Fighter were developed by Tiertex, who then went on to make their own sequel which they eventually titled Human Killing Machine instead of Street Fighter II. Because it was marketed as an (unofficial) sequel to Street Fighter, I always found this fascinating. And not a lot of complete copies tend to be out there too often. So like I said, I just impulse bidded and won a copy. Which then meant I was gonna need a new C64 along with a cassette drive... and as I started going down that rabbit hole I was like "nope!" At the same time the seller told me he was on vacation for a month and wouldn't be able to ship until early Sept. So I said "y'know what? Would you mind if I backed out?" And he said no problem, he'd issue a refund when he got back from vacation in Sept. So guess what happened? He forgot and mailed me the game and never issued a refund.

I mention this here for two reasons: (1) go ahead, laugh at me; and (2) if any of you guys with the Retro PC's are rocking a C64 with cassette drive I will soon have a nice complete copy of HKM that I don't want/need.

[flylikeabird]

I don't really get why he can e-mail you on vacation but can't click a couple buttons to issue a refund on vacation.

[Fragems]

Refunds literally take under 30 seconds to perform . Maybe the guy figured he could get you out of the return window by waiting so long but I'm 99.9% sure that the window starts once you receive the item which should be pretty clear as long as he provided tracking.

[noiseredux]

I don't get it either, but he picked the right chump. Since he's in Italy, I'm wayyy too lazy to bother dealing with sending it back. Considering how few of these ever show up in the US, I'd guess I'd have decent luck flipping it.

[Fragems]

Picked up another old computer off the guy I got the Mac Classic off of. This time it's a IBM Thinkpad 380XD. Really wasn't considering getting a laptop for an older gaming computer but I liked some of the features like the USB port and the CD/Floppy Drive combo and it was only $20. Need to do a fresh OS install to clean off some of the now pointless software that's bogging it down but it seems to run pretty well aside from the on board mouse being a bit finicky in a few of the programs I opened up. It's currently rocking Windows 98, but I'm not sure if I want to stick with that or install Windows 95 instead. Are there any big improvements with windows 98 and/or any compatibility issues that it might have with older games?

[isiolia]

Are there any big improvements with windows 98 and/or any compatibility issues that it might have with older games?

Depends. Technically, Windows 95 did get some of the big additions, but only in later versions that didn't get retail release (things like USB support and FAT32). Those improvements (and more) are present in any version of 98, which might be simpler.

[CRTGAMER]

Are there any big improvements with windows 98 and/or any compatibility issues that it might have with older games?

Depends. Technically, Windows 95 did get some of the big additions, but only in later versions that didn't get retail release (things like USB support and FAT32). Those improvements (and more) are present in any version of 98, which might be simpler.

Why not go Windows XP? If not, then at least Windows 98 2nd edition for the latest USB drivers.

[Fragems]

Well I still have my old Dell from back in my Halo days with XP. So this will mostly be for older stuff that it doesn't handle very well.