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Author Topic: Okay, so what about an eMac G4?  (Read 861 times)

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Offline mingleTopic starter

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Okay, so what about an eMac G4?
« on: February 01, 2008, 04:49:59 AM »
Hi again,

Maybe I should be bugging a Mac newsgroup about this? :-)

I'm also looking at an eMac G4 (1GHz, 512MB). I suppose this would be a better option for more heavy-duty use?

The price of 2nd hand macs seems to be even lower than old (similar vintage) wintel boxes - why is that?

Will it run UAE at a useful speed?

Are there any other OSs I could run on one of these boxes?

Cheers,

Mike.
 

Offline amiga_3k

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Re: Okay, so what about an eMac G4?
« Reply #1 on: February 01, 2008, 05:09:33 AM »
Price drop is not that surprising, really, as PowerPC is a dead-end in Apple-country. Combine that with the less than sexy looks of the eMac and the reasons are complete.

The good thing is that it should run eUAE rather usefull, I've run it on a 333 MHz G3 with 512 MB RAM iMac and it was not too bad (for classic games).

As far as OS-es go, PPC OSX should be installable and useable. Consult the Low End Mac forums on the net about which is the latest version you can run. Also, some Linux-flavours should run on it, but Google.

The last OSX version I tried on the iMac was rather stable and usable. I kind of liked it.

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Offline downix

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Re: Okay, so what about an eMac G4?
« Reply #2 on: February 01, 2008, 05:12:49 AM »
I run UAE on my 1Ghz eMac (almost identical build) at a respectible clip.
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Offline Aus1200

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Re: Okay, so what about an eMac G4?
« Reply #3 on: February 01, 2008, 05:19:39 AM »
eMacs are alright, but weight a ton and can be a bugger to move, due to the weight and how slippery the casing is on them.
 

Offline Wolfe

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Re: Okay, so what about an eMac G4?
« Reply #4 on: February 01, 2008, 06:09:42 AM »
Emac's are dirt cheap now.  It should run UAE at decent speeds.  You can also run several flavors of Linux - YellowDog, Ubuntu, etc. . .
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Offline Floid

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Re: Okay, so what about an eMac G4?
« Reply #5 on: February 01, 2008, 07:04:53 AM »
Quote

amiga_3k wrote:
Price drop is not that surprising, really, as PowerPC is a dead-end in Apple-country. Combine that with the less than sexy looks of the eMac and the reasons are complete.


Exactly; YMMV also regarding the desirability of the internal CRT.

As someone continuing to support a relative with a 1.4GHz Mini, OS X should really be pretty happy, especially if the GPU is supported by the various accellerations.  The question is whether the CPU has the grunt for the applications you desire; for instance, AFAIK even the PPC Mini does not quite have the grunt to work with HD video.

The main thing, in this era of cheap RAM, will be to try to get it up beyond 1GB if possible.  The PPC Mini has an inexplicable hardware limit; I seem to remember the eMac might be more expandable.  OS X is only a 'modest' memory pig on par with Gnome/KDE and XP, but almost anything worth doing on the Mac involves large graphics and large Adobe software.

2GB should leave tons of headroom, and I believe is an under-$100 proposition these days.  Remember, systems like the original Amiga and QNX6 feel so responsive because they just run out of memory without paging -- either you can fit your working set or you can't.  Swapping to disk (in all modern systems) lets you exceed that limit until you're cursing that things have ground to a halt.  (Photoshop plus Acrobat plus an excess of browser tabs -- or both Safari and Firefox running at once -- is certainly enough to get the 1GB Mini turning to disk, though it's still quite usable enough.)