Mac Mini G4 Resurrection & Future Plans

[robertdsc]

A co-worker and i stumbled upon a junk box at work that had several items of interest. I found two Mac Minis in the pile and was able to extract them. In doing so, I was able to find their power bricks and some other knick knacks.

I brought them both home and began to work on them. Booting them up gave no start screen, no information, no nothing. One Mini did not show anything on the screen, whereas the other Mini booted into yaboot and gave a screen dump of information.

I took them home and began to work on them. After extracting a FireWire cable from my own stash of items, I was able to get both Minis to show up on my G5's desktop via Target Disk Mode. I formatted their 80GB drives, then cloned my G5's Tiger operating system to them. Once cloning was done, I was able to test them both out and both Macs are G4 1.42 Ghz versions with 1 GB of RAM each.

As I am pleased to have restored these Macs to somewhat stable operating condition, my question now is what would I have them do? What would you do with such a device if you had one?

 

[Project Alice]

There could be many uses depending on what you want with it.
Do you enjoy retro gaming? That is a great use, I use my imac G3 for that.
Mac minis also make great HTPCs. I am using one as that, though it's an Intel one running high sierra. But a G4 would work too, the only issue I ran into when using my G5 as an HTPC was couldn't get h.265 playback due to software limitations. Hence why I got the mini. Plus G5s aren't what you'd call efficient.. Though there's a couple threads on here that help with the h.265 problem. They're also pretty capable machines with Linux installed and can be used for pretty much anything at that point.

 

[eyoungren]

As I am pleased to have restored these Macs to somewhat stable operating condition, my question now is what would I have them do? What would you do with such a device if you had one?

Server. Minis are perfect for this.

However, I seem to be stuck on that lately so take it as you will.