Looking for good software For PPC macs

[MrBill]

I picked up a weekend job at the scrapyard I frequent in the hopes that I could pick up some SGI or Dec gear before it gets ruined.

This past weekend i managed instead to find some mac stuff.Looks like a whole school cleared out all their computer gear. A bunch of PPC mac g4 laptops. I picked up two working ibook g4's for $30, they just needed battery's. I actually had a copy of maya that work on ppc mac, as well as a copy of final cut pro, is there any other useful or interesting software for PPC that i should keep an eye out for?

The crazy thing is it looks like the school had been using these things up until recently which is kinda scary due and slow they are. There were several there that looked to have been cannibalized to keep other machines running. Email seems to work fine, but once you try to load up a modern browser it grinds to a crawl on any modern website. Nekochan seems to load up quick enough though.

[robespierre]

iBook G4s can only run OSX. 10.4.11 (Tiger) would be the normal recommendation for a machine like that. There were thousands of software titles released for OSX PPC; what are you hoping to do with them?

[guardian452]

I The crazy thing is it looks like the school had been using these things up until recently which is kinda scary

When I was in the public school system we went from having dos-based 386 and 486 computers to having windows xp- based pentium 3’s and 4’s, complete with color monitors etc etc. This was my junior or senior year, we all turned out fine despite not having the latest and greatest.

Seems they are still on a 10 or 15 year cycle. At least in the USA.

[Trippynet]

My final year of secondary school in the UK was 1999. At this time, our main computer lab was still filled with Acorn Archimedes A3000/A3020s. There were half a dozen PCs in the library, plus a few 486s in the music room - that was it. Schools in the UK tended not to invest much in IT.

[uunix]

My final year of secondary school in the UK was 1999. At this time, our main computer lab was still filled with Acorn Archimedes A3000/A3020s. There were half a dozen PCs in the library, plus a few 486s in the music room - that was it. Schools in the UK tended not to invest much in IT.

You must be a bit younger than me Trippynet, we had BBC micros (the Thatcher years) and I think back if I recall correctly, they'd only been installed the previous year, yet for some reason we had a mix of model A & B and Colour, monochrome monitors, and there were two with floppy disk drives.. about 16 machines in all.

I do recall that I enjoyed the theory of computers much better than that the practical side for some reason, I suspect it was the quality of the teacher, who know.

[josehill]

is there any other useful or interesting software for PPC that i should keep an eye out for?

Adobe CS2 products work nicely on that hardware. Older versions of GraphicConverter also work well. For games, Bungie's Marathon series is a good fit. TextWrangler is a good choice for an editor, though other tools, like TexEdit, are good, too. There really was quite a lot of good software during the Tiger era; a lot depends on what you are interested in.

[ClassicHasClass]

The main thing you're going to run into is, even by Power Mac standards, the iBook G4 wasn't super zippy with the possible exception of the very last generation (I myself use a 1.33GHz 12", and I would consider it useable for most things, but not quick; its main advantages over my MacBook Air are many more ports, a built-in optical drive and Classic compatibility, but the MBA has the edge on weight, battery life and CPU). Maya would probably run on that with sufficient memory, but it really wants a G5.

You can run TenFourFox on it though.

[josehill]

The main thing you're going to run into is, even by Power Mac standards, the iBook G4 wasn't super zippy with the possible exception of the very last generation (I myself use a 1.33GHz 12", and I would consider it useable for most things, but not quick; its main advantages over my MacBook Air are many more ports, a built-in optical drive and Classic compatibility, but the MBA has the edge on weight, battery life and CPU)

It definitely helps the iBook G4s if you upgrade the RAM to 1 GB or more. Another thing that can make a noticeable difference is to upgrade the hard drive from the pokey 4800 rpm models they shipped with to, well, anything else. Unfortunately, while upgrading the RAM on these machines is not particularly difficult, replacing the hard drive requires a nearly complete disassembly of the machine, involving the removal and replacement of approximately sixty screws of varying sizes! I did that for my niece's iBook in 2008 or so when she decided she wanted to extend its life a little bit, but in 2017, it'd be hard to justify the effort needed for a drive upgrade.

[ClassicHasClass]

I know that pain. I had my first 1.2GHz iBook G4 cook its hard disk (the feetsies on the bottom don't provide nearly enough ventilation; I slap on bigger ones from the hardware store) and I managed to make a mess out of the bottom half. I never did get it replaced.

[HurricaneJames]

If you like games, Bungie made a Oni before they were acquired by Microsoft. It was a lot of fun to play back on my G3s and G4s.

[ClassicHasClass]

There's a (somewhat) native OS X build of Oni, too.

"... of ILLEGAL TECHNOLOGY!"

[MrBill]

Ill take a look into adobe cs2 products, thanks. I do have maya 6 for mac. It installed but is giving me licence issues, ill have to look into it more later.

I was unaware that the ram could be upgraded or that the hard drive that shipped with it is so slow. Memory can be upgraded easily enough, if i do go to upgrade the hard drive, i will take notes on how it came apart to make sure it goes back together right.

I will keep an eye out for Oni, thanks for the recommendation. I found a copy of myst at a thrift store, that runs well on the machine.

[josehill]

I was unaware that the ram could be upgraded or that the hard drive that shipped with it is so slow. Memory can be upgraded easily enough, if i do go to upgrade the hard drive, i will take notes on how it came apart to make sure it goes back together right.

It's definitely worth checking out the repair guides at iFixit - https://www.ifixit.com/Device/iBook_G4

[bifo]

http://www.morphos.de/

It's an AmigaOS clone which will only run on certain models of ppc mac, including ibook g4. It should be extremely snappy, there's a trial ISO on the site but it is a paid-license OS unfortunately. There's a sizeable amount of ported software and it will run any older amiga software.

[MrBill]

Now that is quite interesting software indeed. I will look into that for sure, thanks. I have an amiga 2000 i picked up quite a while back that i never got around to getting working. I was missing a boot disk, i picked up some software with it, maybe i can try it out on the mac then.