Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.

[Jerry Kemp]

I went thru this exercise myself a couple of years back.  Even kicked off a 
thread on a Mac email list.

I don't/didn't have any experience or background with the Mac on the 68K, so 
that didn't come into my decision making.

I ultimately decided that I didn't need the fastest/biggest/most memory power 
house Mac that would run Classic.  I just needed to run my Mac OS apps and games 
that would never be ported to x86.

I purchased a G4 cube and have been happy with that decision.  I can boot up 
into Mac OS 9.x, and also boot into OS X 10.4 with Classic support.

This was what worked well for me.  I will be interested to see what you 
ultimately end up choosing.

Jerry


On 07/15/16 02:03 PM, Austin Pass wrote:
> I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although I'm
> having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the ultimate
> representation of the type is, so was looking for a little input from
> Classic CMP'ers.
>
> I'm aware that there's a clear divide between Motorola and PowerPC CPU'd
> variants, so I'm going to plump for a PowerPC based version so that I can
> get access to newer hardware and use it as a kind of bridge system between
> my current computers and the more historic versions.
>
> In terms of hardware I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm intending
> to use.  I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get
> 9.2.1 on it relatively easily.  Are there any add-in cards (PCI) I should
> be considering?  It has a built in Airport Card (possibly Airport Extreme?)
> although my home Wi-Fi is 802.11n or better with WPA2 so I'll just use
> Ethernet to connect it to my LAN.  Was a gigabit ethernet card ever
> released with Mac OS 9 drivers?  I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks that I
> can use with it, but has there ever been a SATA implementation that worked
> with classic Mac OS?
>
> Also, I have an Asanté ether bridge tucked away somewhere that I hope to be
> able to use to connect some of my older Mac OS boxen without Ethernet.
>
> In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I
> should look to get my hands on?  What's the state of the art in classic Mac
> OS browsing nowadays, Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained?
>
> -Austin.
>