Can't believe I forgot to mention that I have an emac on my desk that still has a hard drive.... Though now that I think about it, might be a fun project to put a ssd in there. I know the interface will severely limit the speed but still gonna be faster than hdd. Only thing is.... I got that thing set up to dual boot os9 and os x 10.4 and it runs pretty well, and took a long time to set up all convenient like. And starting over is not easy cause while it does have a web browser that can do some basic things and download software, its so god damn slow its easier to just put on a usb stick and transfer that way.
These old OS' don't have a lot of the things modern ones do. So you need to download a lot of shit to really get up and running. I mean I need drivers just to get the right click on the mouse working. Then I need workarounds to get the disk drive to open cause there's supposed to be a eject button on the keyboard but I have an older mac keyboard without an eject button and I need to do that for both OS'. And thats only the beginning. Need software to decompress stuff and mount images and on and on. All this just to get to the point where a new windows installation starts... basically.
I could clone the drive I suppose. But connecting it to my modern pc will be needing some kind of new contraption.... Now its already starting to feel like more of a hassle, to not even fix a problem really. Its not good at web browsing obviously, but it runs period correct software well and thats what its for so I think I'll stick with the rust for now... if it dies then I'll try putting an ssd in.
Its 40GB. And I dunno how long its been running but I've had it for like 6 or 7 years now and a 40GB drive is what these shipped with.... Maybe its the original one still going, that would be 23 years. Not sure about the brand and too lazy to open it up to check. Not sure how to benchmark it on here either. But here's some pictures of the machine itself I already have.
Lunar on psx, probably my fav psx game but suikoden II and tales of phantasia with the english patch are up there too.
Chrono Trigger for snes
Shining Force II for Genesis
Also have beige g3 with a hard drive that works quite well but I don't use it. Also an old powerbook from like 95 that takes an hour to boot (f'd hdd most likely) and maybe an ibook g3, not sure if I still have that. There's a lot of boxes with really old computer stuff I haven't looked into for quite a while. Probably some more hdds in there.
But yeah emac is the only one I actually use. It is one of the latest machines able to boot os9 natively. Might sound insignificant since there's a compatibility layer. But the only psx emulator that works well on these old machines needs native os9 (cvgs). Meaning it can run nearly all psx games in os9 and also have access to newer osx only software/games/emulators and whatnot. And then the crt just makes it the perfect retro machine in my eyes. Might have been a bitch to set up but I've had hundreds and hundreds of hours of fun on this $20 machine. I switched to windows in the mid 00s but I grew up on 68k/ppc macs so they will always have a place in my heart so I'm definitely a little biased there.
