A quick tip: be sure to reset the PRAM with command-alt-p-r holding down during restart until you hear 3 chimes. Then while the machine is booting hold down command-alt-o-f and type "reset-nvram" and then "set-defaults" and then "reset-all" (all of this is in open firmware) before installing Mac OS 9 to make sure firmware is in its original state.
I came across this idea of SSD upgrading and installing Mac OS 9 in April 2024 and bought three broken ones to build one for my son. [0] When the first one worked, I ended up figuring, why not just finish the other two and sell them on eBay?
That led me into a hobby business. I've now cleaned, upgraded with SSDs, and sold about 70 of them. The "business" basically breaks even, so it truly is a hobby. In fact I invested so much in inventory buying 90 of them in a lot at the end of 2024 that I am negative right now. I will probably turn a slight profit in 2025. But it's fun and if you want you can buy one from me at: https://os9.shop
Sorry for the self-promotion, but very relevant!
I nearly considered something like this a few years back but the domestic market was way too small to consider. Fair play for the labour of love.
https://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=7048.0
If you are concerned get a 1.25 or 1.42. The 32 MB of VRAM difference (the 1.5 has 64 MB of VRAM while the 1.42 has 32 MB) will not make a difference for almost any Mac OS 9 game. But yes, if you want the ultimate in terms of GHz and VRAM go for the 1.5. In some late '90s and early '00s FPS games it could be a benefit.
I ran 10.4 and Void (no longer maintained) so if there's a technical reason to stay on mSATA for Mac OS 9 please ignore. ;)
2 Pack M.2 NGFF SATA SSD to 2.5 inch IDE 44PIN Converter Adapter with Case Unit price $17.98
I did a Mac Mini and also a Powerbook G4. They work great in both.
That's where the hacked Mac OS 9 comes from and there are threads about Mac mini SSDs. There are also threads at https://68kmla.org
I would ask there.
https://github.com/elliotnunn/tbxi-patches/blob/master/macmi...
Lots of people (me included) use SD card or Compact Flash adapters in old machines without wearing them out and those have way worse endurance than SSDs.
I have a PowerBook that's been running 24/7 for the past year as an Apple Internet Router and AppleShare file server on GlobalTalk off an SD card in a SCSI2SD adapter with no issues.
It would be different if you used them them 24/7 to keep some old, but demanding peripheral alive (e.g. a large old printing machine) running. If you can schedule the downtime you could still, image the disk, erase it, and restore the disk every few months under the guise of preventive maintenance. Heck if you (net-)boot Linux or *BSD depending on the IDE<->SATA bridge used you may be able to send TRIM/UNMAP commands to the SSD without opening case. Of course each such backup/erase/restore cycle would be equivalent to a full drive write.
Some SSDs also support primitive garbage collection if sequences of 1s are written to the disk in unused spaces. I don’t know how to accomplish that on OS 9, but it might be possible with 10.4 or 10.5’s disk utility. If I remember correctly, there’s an “erase free space” function. Whether that writes 1s or 0s I’m not sure, though.
You used to hear all kinds of horror stories about people who threw a SSD into their PS3 and found their whole system grinding to a halt within a year.
"Enough" is a relative term and is up to you to decide. The alternative is significantly less performant coupled with unpredictable reliability (outside of expensive enterprise options), but a higher overall lifetime.
People don't tend to want to have to actively maintain their old tech any more than they absolutely have to.
Though I do think that if one is using old tech, they should be aware of the pitfalls. There was a good run of the capacitor plague, for example. I avoid this equipment in general as I don't have soldering skills (but man oh man, I would love to have a working SE/30! People trying to sell repaired SE/30s on eBay for $1400USD!) to repair them. I know the VRM on my G4 Cube can potentially have issues, as can the power brick. Fortunately there are small batch available replacements should I need them.
In practice, all SSDs have internal capacity greater than the nameplate capacity exposed to the OS, so all SSDs start with a reasonable amount of spare capacity; enabling TRIM merely increases the available spare capacity in proportion to the number of currently unused logical blocks vs. never written logical blocks — blocks outside all allocated partitions (unless written by something other than a filesystem [e.g., manually, or via a naïve disk imaging, diagnostic, or RAID rebuilding tool]) and blocks that allocated filesystems have never had the need to use (unlike SSD firmware, traditional filesystems don't practice "wear leveling" when allocating space, so, e.g., a 1TB filesystem that has never contained more than, say, 100GB worth of data at any point will probably contain a large number of LBAs that have never been written, independent of how much data has been deleted and overwritten).
https://www.ebay.com/usr/oaksnowconsultingllc
The downside is packages through eBay International Shipping tend to take like a month whereas UPS ships packages in less than a week pretty much anywhere. I sold one on os9.shop to Germany last month that got to Germany in 3 days and to the person's door in 5.
My prices on os9.shop are also lower to begin with because I don't have any eBay fees. The equivalent package on os9.shop to the eBay packages is the Average Condition bundles. US customers should definitely buy at https://os9.shop since it's the same stuff and the prices are lower and the shipping is the same.
My "favorite" thing about UPS is they like to leave a COD invoice, when they were _supposed_ to collect the fee from you before releasing the package -- but that takes too long so they just leave an invoice. Except you can't just go online and pay it - there's no facility to do this on their website (you can find countless Reddit threads of people raging about this). I had to pay by phone, which is beyond ridiculous in this day and age.
What amatecha said about brokerage fees is true, but only if you use international ground (UPS Standard, and its FedEx equivalent). Any "UPS Worldwide" service is by air, and avoids brokerage fees.
eBay International Shipping is, as you said, the best option for buyer and seller as long as the buyer is willing to wait and use eBay to buy.
Another option is Pirate Ship's Simple Export Rate. Also slow, but significantly cheaper than UPS and even USPS.
Also...what kind of programming language stuff is pre-loaded? I'm not familiar with Macs, but I'm guessing if it's based on BSD than there is a C compiler, Bash, Awk...that kind of stuff? Is Objective C or some kind of scripting language easy to get to?
Worst case scenario you use an FTP client, but it might be possible to build some other ancient filesharing software like Netatalk - https://netatalk.io
You of course want to make sure your OS 9 box isn't directly on the Internet, but it's quite capable of communication if what it's talking to drops down.
No, Mac OS 9 is not based on BSD. Only Mac OS X+ is. No development tools come with it out of the box (unless you consider AppleScript). Programming for the classic Mac OS is totally different from Mac OS X+. There is the classic Toolbox with Pascal or C, Hypercard, RAD tools like RealBASIC, the slightly refined Carbon APIs, many scripting languages available, etc. But nothing out of the box that's not a separate install. Sorry, it's a big subject and don't want to get more into it here.
I'm still using Mac mini G4s in several places, both for Mac OS X (legacy Final Chop) and as small, low power servers running NetBSD.
There are really only two drawbacks to the Mac mini G4, in my opinion:
Gigabit ethernet would've been a dollar or two more? Being stuck with 100 Mbps, or around 300 Mbps if one uses a gigabit USB adapter, isn't fun.
If the DIMM slot could take 2 gig DIMMs, this'd be a perfect machine. Other PowerPC Macs could take 2 gigs - heck, even the older PowerPC 604e Power Macs 9500 and 9600 could take 1.5 gigs - so being limited to 1 gig is a bit unfortunate, especially considering that 2 gig DDR DIMMs are a thing (later Xserve G5 units could take 2 gig DDR DIMMs).
Still, the Mac mini G4 is the only computer aside from SBCs that I've bought brand new, and I have always been very happy with my decision.
[1]: https://www.rollc.at/posts/2024-07-02-tibook/
I'm not sure if it can be made to run m68k apps "natively", but on the other hand you can emulate just about any classic MacOS in a modern browser[2].
// But now turned off and reboxed along with an Apple //c, SE/30, the cube, the first Intel cheese grater, etc. Someday...
Installed OS X 10.4 for kicks (will go back to 9.2) and wow, what a different OS that was from today's macOS. Brings back memories of my PB G4 Ti. What an awesome laptop that was.
I know a lot of them did eventually get Mac ports. I remember playing Braid on my iMac with a Wiimote in the early 10s.
What was it that stuck out out to you when making such a large jump back in time?
Early OS X felt like a proper UNIX distribution. Modern macOS, not so much.
Cassidy & Greene's Crystal Quest is excellent.
Ambrosia Software had shareware versions of arcade classics as well as original concepts. Escape Velocity is still talked about today.
Really thankful for that game.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825...
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/specs/powerma...
Something in colour, on a PowerPC chip, running Mac OS X, just seems too modern.
My mom still has my old Core 2 Duo Mac Mini. It’s running Windows 7 now. But I could put an old version of OS X that still runs PPac apps.
All that being said, I can run old Mac apps on new Macs via emulation. Why would I want an old Mac
Thus I think if your retro-gaming dream includes lots of 68K Mac games (especially black and white ones) then you’ll probably want to pick up a 68K Mac as well. Not to mention how cool it looks to have a B&W compact Mac on your desk, such as the Mac SE/30 (one of the best computers Apple ever made).
I remember toying with the idea of doing a soldering hack that was floating around in order to overclock the system. I imagine it was moving some resistors around or something. Never did it though.
The G4 PPC series were great, such an upgrade from G3 and really solid performance at the time.
1. Command and Conquer
2. Rainbow Six
3. Total Annihilation
4. Unreal Tournament
Marathon ended up being one of my favorite games from that era. The Windows kids had games like Doom and Quake, but we had Marathon.
Mac marketshare was so small at the time that there was an implicit craftsmanship that came from anyone targeting Mac - you expected higher quality, because they cared enough to use Macs in the first place. (Some of that mentality lives on to this day.) Of course id made great games too, some of which did eventually come to the Mac.
Marathon is a first person shooter, set in space. It has a compelling storyline, as well as fun art and weapons.
My dad's office had an AppleTalk network, which was kind of like Ethernet but strung together with regular phone cables. I used to bribe my little brother to commandeer the network with me and play Marathon.
There were ultimately 3 Marathon games, that were eventually open sourced and ported everywhere. You can find them online and on Steam as Aleph One.
Fun fact: the game that launched the Xbox was originally made for the Mac. Bungie, the creators of Marathon, showed off their new game Halo at the Macworld conference. The hype train went through the ceiling, and Microsoft bought it as a launch title for their new gaming project.
Since then, Sony bought the rest of Bungie and is preparing to launch a new game in the Marathon universe.
I will have to give it another go.
This is the second time today I’ve seen someone mention Endless Sky. It looks really interesting to me. Have you started playing it yet? I think what makes or breaks these games is the quality of writing and the effort and detail that goes into the different planets, factions, missions, and story.
Still, the process was mostly painless. Everything I needed worked out of the box.
Like running NetBSD on the Nintendo Wii, it also has a bit more personality ;)
But some things are just… classics. Like the g3 and g4 era, which saved the Mac from death.