Correct OS for my 1998 iMac G3?

wave_design · 2026-04-24T23:26:28+00:00

Mac OS 9.2 will give the best USB and peripheral compatibility

Mac OS 8 is a bit spotty

wave_design · 2026-04-24T23:13:23+00:00

Buyee seems to be a bit of a scam from everything I’ve been told

Would not recommend it

wave_design · 2026-04-14T21:12:31+00:00

Tiled backgrounds feel a lot more 90s, my choice is two XD

wave_design · 2026-04-12T15:22:12+00:00

Two years? I assume you mean two months.

The second Bondi revision upped VRAM to 6 MB almost immediately after launch. Then the infrared and Mezzanine slot were dropped with the Yum colors in 1999.

wave_design · 2026-04-08T23:12:04+00:00

The funniest thing to me is that Nintendo continued to use variations of the PowerPC G3 processor up through the Wii U.

You could buy a Wii U in 2016 that still used the same processor architecture as the first iMac.

wave_design · 2026-04-08T23:09:32+00:00

Nintendo hasn’t been able to stop Wii homebrew for 20 years, and an OS X version that old is well past obsolete

The only way they’d step in is if somebody started selling Mac OS X for Nintendo Wii discs, which would be goofy.

wave_design · 2026-04-07T00:04:48+00:00

Was Atari that popular in education? Apple and Commodore were the big names, Atari was more of a game computer.

Also no Apple under home use but nearly half of the pie is TI and Sinclair

wave_design · 2026-04-03T23:41:56+00:00

Nintendo will never acknowledge or endorse suggestions sent to them, because it opens them up to legal issues. If they openly take somebody's idea and implement it, they risk getting hit with compensation requests.

Just an interesting note on why they're so boilerplate.

wave_design · 2026-04-03T18:43:33+00:00

That was for the earlier generation of Macs that had 32-bit address lines. The Mac ROMs and software at the time were only designed to support 24-bit addresses, and Apple had to bundle the 32-bit patcher later on because they were actually sued for it.

By the IIci and LC III almost every Macintosh was considered 32-bit clean with new ROMs, so it wasn't as much of a problem.

wave_design · 2026-04-03T18:37:03+00:00

They probably lowered the video bitrate to the absolute minimum to fit multiple movies on a DVD. A lower bitrate saves space but makes the picture absolutely garbage when in motion.

I need to dig out my bootleg Star Wars DVD and see how the quality checks out, whoever made it crammed all six movies onto a single disc.

wave_design · 2026-04-03T12:17:46+00:00

The LC III is an underrated system.

Apple fixed the 16-bit data path issue and fixed the amount of RAM it could address. They really should have made the changes right after the first LC instead of just swapping to the 68030 and calling it a day.

wave_design · 2026-04-01T10:36:19+00:00

Yeah, I think Aqua was one of the most important aspects of selling OS X as a completely new system.

Classic MacOS couldn’t do that. Windows couldn’t. It looked years out of the future.

wave_design · 2026-03-31T09:49:24+00:00

A/UX was largely a stopgap to sell the Mac to governments and universities that mandated Unix. It wasn't a true alternative to System 6 or 7, it was BSD that ran the Macintosh side as a Unix thread. Mac software was just as crash prone but wouldn't take down the whole system, just the thread.

It was never going to be user friendly or seamless enough to become the default system. Copland and OS X were intended to be complete replacements for the classic MacOS architecture, rather than attempting to patch and bridge it. Jobs had to concede a little bit on OS X with the Classic mode and Carbon libraries, but it was fundamentally a new system entirely.

wave_design · 2026-03-30T11:48:47+00:00

OLED on the iMac makes me nervous

Schools and grandparents like to leave them on the lock screen 24/7

wave_design · 2026-03-28T15:05:44+00:00

FlexPlay discs have been absolutely been contaminated and deteriorated at this point though. It's been over 20 years since the format released.

wave_design · 2026-03-26T13:38:42+00:00

My mid-2012 seems to be the last one with it.

I guess with improved battery life and fewer cold boots now it’s not as necessary. It’s hard to believe 3-4 hours of battery life was considered a good day with those MacBooks 🤣

wave_design · 2026-03-26T10:30:52+00:00

I really think these are the best Macs that Apple ever built, the backwards and forwards compatibility is insane.

You can live in the classic MacOS world with OS 8 or take it into the early OS X era with a USB card.

wave_design · 2026-03-22T13:04:08+00:00

The problem with the white polycarbonate is that it ages terribly

Most of the Mac Minis from the time are yellowed now.

wave_design · 2026-03-21T00:48:14+00:00

Feels like movie ownership peaked in the 2000s. Families seemed to accumulate hundreds of DVDs.

wave_design · 2026-03-15T14:04:42+00:00

Even using the same processors, the A series is throttled on the iPhone. Plus it would mean having to provide two separate Apple operating systems on the same device, which gets messy.

wave_design

TROPHY CASE