This is a great comprehensive article on the "why" and there are good YouTube videos on the "how." What the article is missing that makes it even better is putting an SSD in which makes it even faster of course. You can get an untested Mac mini G4 for about $60 on eBay and the rest of the parts (SSD, PATA-mSATA adapter, RAM if less than 1 GB, power adapter, any missing screws, clock battery, etc.) will run you another $60 to make the ultimate Mac OS 9 machine. If you're comfortable taking things apart and putting them back together it's not too bad.
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
You little beauty, someone based on this side of the pond for once! I'll be in touch in the next few weeks to try and get the best example you have over to Dublin for a dedicated Ambrosia Shareware / Legacy Audio Software machine.
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.
I am actually based in USA, but Shopify automatically localizes the site for visitors in other countries, so maybe you saw localized currency. Sounds like a cool project and yes a lot of people getting this to use old audio software or play Escape Velocity.
How hard is it to get those hacks working for the higher resolutions on the 64mb video card (1.5ghz version)? Is the extra 32mb video ram noticeable in games, or does it not even matter in OS9?
It can be a challenge under DVI->HDMI. People have had more luck under DVI->VGA. It also can vary from monitor to monitor. There is a long thread on the macos9lives.com forums about this issue:
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 did the same with a G4 Mac Mini. One suggestion for your hobby/business-- I went with a PATA->m.2 SATA adapter instead of PATA->mSATA. It works like a charm and when I built mine a couple years ago it was actually much cheaper. Obviously it completely saturates the PATA interface.
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. ;)
Can you link me to the specific adapter you're using? The thing is after doing so many, I know the adapter I use is compatible and has no issues. I buy now direct in bulk over AliExpress but here is the equivalent Amazon listing:
https://amzn.to/40fohWR
I am yet to hear about 1 dying from a customer. But I can't give you a scientific answer to that and I've only been doing this since April. There's a whole community of people doing these upgrades. You can find them at https://macos9lives.com
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
Old OSes like MacOS 9 barely touch your disk with writes at all, they typically don't have any log files they're writing to, they barely use any virtual memory. These things are never going to see the terabytes of writes they're rated for.
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.
You also have to account for the expected writes. Modern SSDs may perform better (over time) with TRIM, but if you just create (or leave) an erased partition to bump the effective over-provisioning even cheap consumer SSDs should outlast the expected usage for a cute little retro computing system.
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.
Given the tiny filesizes of the games involved, if durability is a worry I’d just overprovision space. SATA SSDs are dirt cheap these days and it’d take ages for an OS 9 install to write to all the cells in a 256GB drive (assuming adequate RAM + disabled virtual memory), let alone with 500GB+ drives.
There exist (very cheap) SSDs without TRIM support at all currently for sale. I own one. It won’t die, but writes will suck if you’re writing more than the overprovisioned space all at once. For this use case, that’ll probably never happen (and it’ll probably still be faster than the original HDD both in throughput and random I/O).
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.
I do ship to Canada, but unfortunately the (auto-calculated by Shopify/UPS/DHL/USPS) international shipping prices are quite high (I've seen about $30 to Canada and $50 to Germany in the past). Plus in some countries the purchaser ends up having to pay duties, so check your local laws. A way somewhat around this is to buy from me on eBay since they take care of the shipping and duties, and have lower shipping costs:
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.
Some configurations have built-in 56K modems, but not all. I have never tested it under the hacked Mac OS 9. I would search the forums on macos9lives.com where the hack originates.
The depth of this article is wonderful. The PowerPC line did have lots of good things going for it, and the Mac mini G4 is a good example of how much you can get done with modest space, power and heat.
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.
I have a 2002 TiBook[1]; it officially supports MacOS 9.2.2, but also every OS X release up to 10.5.8. I've been surprised to find that the retail copy of StarCraft that I bought in 2009 not only includes an OS X build, but also supports PowerPC!
Warcraft III (I don't know about I and II) was also for PPC (PowerPC / POWER). Why? Well, MacOS / Mac OS X was at some point PPC only. Apple did the conversion from m68k to PPC. Actually, for a while, it was quite tough to get these games working well on Mac Intel machines. Why? Well, the installer would only work on PPC. They didn't make it into a universal binary.
There's a similar problem with some older Windows games - the games are correct 32 bit applications and will run on modern Windows versions - but the installers are WIN16 and fail to load on Win64. Various tricks exist to get them installed and then migrated to run.
While the Mac mini is nice due to its size, personally, if you're choosing a hardware over emulation, I'd rather have an iMac G4 simply because of the aesthetics. It's amazing how well that design holds up even today.
Sitting on my desk constantly reminding me what timeless compute (it can still receive software updates for OSX Tiger it runs) and timeless design (need I say more) is.
I picked up a G4 Cube for retro-gaming. It'll run what I'm interested in (Sim City, Sim Tower), is compact, and I've got the ADC monitor to go with it. Upgraded to 1.5GiB RAM and replaced the spinning rust with an SSD with an IDE bridge. I even have the working Apple USB speakers that it came with! Repaired the disc drive and it is good to go.
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.
As someone who grew up on Macs and missed out on games like Alice and Arkham Asylum that weren't released on Mac when they were popular on Windows, I'm kind of shocked to see such enthusiasm for the Mac as a retro gaming platform.
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.
Classic MacOS has some interesting games and sometimes interesting versions of games that were on IBM PCs too. But that's mostly for games from the 80s and early to mid 90s. Late 90s and beyond there weren't that many Mac exclusives, and ports to Mac were usually late and without interesting features.
10.4 was where I started; it’s what came on the first gen white polycarb MacBook that I got in 2006. And I used that as my main machine for like eight years and then had two different MBPs afterwards, so I saw quite a span of OS X versions, and I remember most of the changes feeling fairly iterative, at least when going just one to the next.
What was it that stuck out out to you when making such a large jump back in time?
OS X 10.1 - ~10.4 had a different root directory structure. Right click menu is unrecognizable. Dock behaves a bit different. The Directory Access utility (renamed to Directory Utility) contained Netinfo, the local directory, I believe sourced from NeXTStep. Lots of various other utilities were discontinued or changed into something unrecognizable.
Early OS X felt like a proper UNIX distribution. Modern macOS, not so much.
Does anyone remember how Steve Jobs kind of hated video games? Even though him and woz worked on 'breakout' which I thought was kind of funny. I guess John Carmack was a huge fan of NeXT, having developed Doom on that platform, which is wild because he wanted the branding of that OS right on the title screen and the request was denied (Would have been a tiny thing that could have changed the regard of that system alot) [1]
The 2002 Power Mac G4/1.25 Dual Processor (MDD) is a good option too. It has dual PowerPC 7455's w/ 2MB L3 cache, supports 2GB RAM, 4 PCI slots and a 4x APG slot that came with either a 64MB ATI Radeon 9000 Pro or a 128MB NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti. Plus there's a ton of after market upgrades for these.
Readit News
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!
0: https://x.com/davekopec/status/1795872492386398683
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. ;)
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.
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.
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.
nit: On a mac the key is called "option".
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].
[2]: https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/
// 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...