MskoDestny wrote:
Powermac G3s go for less than $100 on eBay. No need to look at an iMac. The Powermac has more expansion possibilities and will likely cost less to ship. No need to wait around either, there are plenty that are under $100 in auctions that are about to end within hours. Old iMacs might be hard to find on the cheap but old Powermacs are not.
Ah, right. Sorry, I was stuck in iMac mode. :-D Yes, the PowerMacs were a nice line and are pretty cheap. Those cases are also pretty classy. Apple always made nice looking stuff at least. I wasn't thinking about them because you can't exactly fit the motherboard into an A1200 shell... which was what I've been looking to do - stick SOMETHING in an A1200 shell that gave me an "updated" A1200. That's where the suggestion to use an iBook came from, to which I mentioned that would be nice, but was too expensive which led to all these posts on which Macs sell cheap on eBay. :lol:
As for the game machine part, certainly the Gamecube is a better games machine than the Mac, but I would argue that the Amiga was more readily equiped as a computer for it's time than the Gamecube. Not that I'm trying to dissuade you from doing the port. I like to see funky operating systems running on funky game consoles myself.
Yes, consoles usually require more to make them into general purpose computers. For example, I had to get the broadband adapter and a keyboard adapter to go with the GC. That adds to the cost. I think there are two ideas behind putting regular OSes on consoles: 1) as you said, seeing a funky OS on a funky console interests quite a few people; and 2) having an OS on the console makes it easier to do programs for the console. For example, look at what you can run on the PS2 in linux compared to what straight homebrew on the PS2 offers.
Mind you, I feel programming straight on the console is more fun, but a little beyond many folks. It's like comparing demo programmers who took over the Amiga to folks who wrote programs which didn't take over the Amiga. Putting some kind of Amiga-like OS on the GC would certainly make it easier to do certain games, like DOOM, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Descent, Abuse, etc... open source games which have already been ported to the Amiga. While there is a working linux for GC, AmigaOS is quite a bit more lean, so certain programs have the possiblity of running better.
