In February of 2020, in the before times, I was going to buy an early Intel Mac after trying and failing to watch YouTube acceptability on my Mac mini G4. Then I discovered TenFiveTube. Later, I discovered PPCMC 6 Final, last updated on January 18th of 2020 and something changed when I saw YouTube being streamed using QuickTime on Tiger flawlessly in stunning 360p. I think you all know the rest of this story, but until today I still had no real need for an Intel Mac.
I bought a MacBook mid 2010 7,1 with 4GB of RAM and a 250GB HDD not because PowerPC does not fit my needs anymore, but because I want to port my PowerPC software and ports of existing software to early Intel Mac OS X (targeting 10.6+ since this can’t run anything earlier). Some ideas I have:
IntelMediaCenter7 (or PPCMC 7 Intel Edition?) - FFplay could be very useful on snow leopard and with the extra horsepower I think 720p/1080p using different audio and video sources mixed together would actually work full speed.
Half-Life for 10.4+ - steam official release requires 10.6.3, but the only thing stopping me from finishing half life for PowerPC 10.4+ is big endian bugs (I’ve gotten into the intro cutscene and random levels, killed and shot at enemies, etc. on PowerPC Tiger but random crashes and wrong code for big endian prevents a playable game.) I would need people with older Intel macs to verify it works.
Finally able to test things in Rosetta. And can release software for 10.6+ so more people can use it.
Wayyyy faster compile times for cross compiling PowerPC software. The full build of PPCMC 7 for Panther and Tiger for example take multiple hours.
I can’t really see myself wanting to purchase a Mac newer then this by maybe a year or two, and I’m not really interested in the apple that exists in 2021.
I bought a MacBook mid 2010 7,1 with 4GB of RAM and a 250GB HDD not because PowerPC does not fit my needs anymore, but because I want to port my PowerPC software and ports of existing software to early Intel Mac OS X (targeting 10.6+ since this can’t run anything earlier). Some ideas I have:
IntelMediaCenter7 (or PPCMC 7 Intel Edition?) - FFplay could be very useful on snow leopard and with the extra horsepower I think 720p/1080p using different audio and video sources mixed together would actually work full speed.
Half-Life for 10.4+ - steam official release requires 10.6.3, but the only thing stopping me from finishing half life for PowerPC 10.4+ is big endian bugs (I’ve gotten into the intro cutscene and random levels, killed and shot at enemies, etc. on PowerPC Tiger but random crashes and wrong code for big endian prevents a playable game.) I would need people with older Intel macs to verify it works.
Finally able to test things in Rosetta. And can release software for 10.6+ so more people can use it.
Wayyyy faster compile times for cross compiling PowerPC software. The full build of PPCMC 7 for Panther and Tiger for example take multiple hours.
I can’t really see myself wanting to purchase a Mac newer then this by maybe a year or two, and I’m not really interested in the apple that exists in 2021.
Last edited: