SQ/MDD or a humble Mac Mini

[Jacques]

Greetings,

I've only recently joined the forum and came with expectations of wanting to get into the guts of a QS/MDD machine. These have however shot up in price over the last year from having a handful at £10 in driving distance last year to very few on ebay for £90+.  I've been pondering whether I'd just not be best suited to pick up a Mac Mini G4 1.25Ghz+ machine first given I don't need expansion that much. Ultimately, my goal is to get ArchiCAD 6 and Photoshop running in OS9 (plus some old games...), possibly ArchiCAD 10, 11 or 13 in OSX 10.3/10.4....if I could find the install media for these versions of ArchiCAD. I have ArchiCAD 10 but it's Italian. 

I still want to pick up a good condition QS or MDD, but purely from the point of they are my favourite PowerMac machines and I consider them design icons...OK more so the QS than the MDD.

So a few questions

1) If I don't intend to run expansion cards (I'm into graphics, not audio), will a Mini with 32MB VRAM be sufficient for 1920x1200? (That's the smallest display size I have) I don't think I'll find a 1.5Ghz Mini with 64MB VRAM in the UK within my budget of £60-£75.

2) I assume (hopefully correctly), that a Mini will take an SSD / mSATA in a 2.5" enclosure? I still have an old Hitachi Travelstar 7200rpm 60GB drive from my Tibook lying around...

3) With 1GB as a limit for RAM, will this be insufficient for 10.3 / 10.4? Most versions of ArchiCAD of that era needed 512MB min, 1GB preferably. ArchiCAD 6 in OS9 ran fine with 256MB of ram.

4) Any issues with the later G4 mini's on OS9, apart from the sound only working through the headphone jack?

5) What vnc potential does OS 9 have client side? Could I vnc into my RasPi?

I ran my 1Ghz Tibook with 1GB of ram until 2008, so aware of OS X bloat and speed constraints. It got really painful toward the end, but mostly due to flash etc....I don't intend to even try and surf the web...Knowing full well how painful that is given my 400Mhz SGI Octane really, really struggles with anything GTK2+ or similar. If I could run Nikon Capture for my D50 in OSX then bonus....

Thank you in advance,

Jacques

[FBz]

A devout MDD & QS fan here - the G4 Mini with OS 9 deals them both a solid performance challenge in a much smaller package. Without a great deal of techno spec comparisons, I’d say you’d be very pleased with a Mini… especially if you’ve no need for expansion cards. (My background is primarily in graphics too.) AND even @1GB max RAM… the Mini is a definite graphics Workhorse.

SSD / mSATA?
See: http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,4435.msg31470.html#msg31470

Currently focused on Sawtooth and QS projects here at present, or I’d boot a Mini or two for more specific answers to your other questions. [I usually pair the Minis with 20” Apple (aluminum) DVI monitors.] VNC to RasPi? Don’t know, haven’t considered it. Nikon Capture? Have only done similar here with Olympus.

About a year ago we were buying the 1.5 GHz Minis (A 1103) here in the U.S. for equivalent of around £40. (Slightly higher now.) AND there are instructions ‘round here for simply converting the "lesser" Minis to 1.5 GHz.

Happy hunting.

[Jacques]

Picked up a 1.25ghz mini, should arrive next week. This should give me what I need in the meantime and also allow me to run some upgrades and possible overclocks.

[IIO]

1.) the mac mini G4 works great with 1920*1200. finder feels faster than a geforce 4 PCI, and in opposite to the core2duo mini the g4 mini makes a super sharp picture via VGA.

2.) m.2 SSD (white cases from china) do work fine - as long as the SSD itself is compatible with OS9.

3.) any G4 is "too slow" for OSX when you compare it against OS9. from pro audio over photohop to castle wolfenstein and programming languages - everything in OSX is slower on PPCs. this only my opinion about it, but i only boot into OSX to do OSX-only things. OSX fun begins with nehalem.

4.) cant directly dual boot from the internal HD. that should be all, no other issues known. prior mouse problem is fixed by now.

[Jacques]

Thank you, just need to pick up a cheap stick of DDR ram first as it comes standard with 256mb. But I'll give it a few weeks with 256 just for the experience.

Looking forward to it!

[Jacques]

Well my '1.25Ghz' G4 Mini arrived today...and I powered it on and I was greeted by System Profiler saying 1.42Ghz...Lucky! The guy didn't really know what he was selling. No airport card, but it's going on ethernet in any case. The unit has never been opened, and apart from a few age related marks is in great condition. I've cleaned it, taken it apart and done my usual of new thermal paste together with smoothing off the bottom of the heatsink for better CPU/heatsink contact. Applied some new thermal paste and reassembled.

I've ordered a stick of PC-2700 1Gb ram which will be here in 2 weeks (?!), in the meantime I'm going to pop my Hitachi 7200rpm 60GB drive in and have some fun...

What I can say is the machine is very nippy in OS X, it's a pity video and advertising killed the internet...I could probably use this machine quite comfortably as a daily driver if it wasn't for the 'new' web - it's quiet, uses little power and is small.

[Nymunariya]

congrats on the Mini!  I really love mine.  It's the form factor, combined with low power draw that makes it really great.  I love running old simple games on it connected to my 1920x1080 monitor.

I've stuck a Samsung 500GB 860 EVO mSATA in a generic IDE2mSATA adapter in mine, and everything runs without any problems.  I was considering getting a 1TB m.2, but I'm worried about the 80mm length being too long.

Depending on how brave(?) and skilled you are with desoldering, you could also overclock the mini if needed more power out of it.  It's just a matter of moving some resistors around.

As for the new web, I'd actually recommend setting up a VNC on a raspberry pi.  That way, you can access the "modern" web from the mini in all its glory!  And with netatalk on the raspberry pi, you can have it act as an AppleShare server, so you can easily access and files you download off the rpi!  That would also give your mini an extra level of protection.

Also: if you have a modern mac, the current Apple Remote Desktop still works with version 3.4 (Tiger), so you can easily shut down the mini or install programmes remotely.

[Jacques]

I've stuck a Samsung 500GB 860 EVO mSATA in a generic IDE2mSATA adapter in mine, and everything runs without any problems.  I was considering getting a 1TB m.2, but I'm worried about the 80mm length being too long.

I might look into this, thank you.

Depending on how brave(?) and skilled you are with desoldering, you could also overclock the mini if needed more power out of it.  It's just a matter of moving some resistors around.

I have to say I'm happy with 1.42Ghz, if I need more I'll take it to 1.5Ghz, but I can't see 80Mhz making a huge difference?

As for the new web, I'd actually recommend setting up a VNC on a raspberry pi.  That way, you can access the "modern" web from the mini in all its glory!  And with netatalk on the raspberry pi, you can have it act as an AppleShare server, so you can easily access and files you download off the rpi!  That would also give your mini an extra level of protection.

This is exactly what I've been planning to do My RasPi is also acting as a wifi and network bridge + dhcp server for my SGIs and for my Mac Mini.  This is how I browse the web on my old SGI machines...