The G4 Mac Mini runs OS 9.2.2 and Windows 2000 under Virtual PC so fast that I have switched my arcade game development (as a hobby; not a job or business) over to the Mini completely, from my spare Macbook 4,1 running Windows XP. My Mini is an overclocked (1.25ghz to 1.42ghz) original G4 with 1gb of RAM and a 120gb mSATA SSD with adapter.
Why, you may ask? Well, I've always wanted to design and program a coin-operated arcade video game since I was 10 years old and living in the early 1980s heyday of the arcade. My previous, fairly-recent game development experience was porting over old DOS games and writing a couple of my own games for the Dreamcast console, using a scripting language called Fenix, which also ran within a Windows 2000 "VM" on my 667mhz VGA TiBook (although that required burning multisession CDs to test the code). I built the cabinet from scratch a few years ago (running XP on an old Pentium 4 3.06ghz Dell board) and it runs many MAME games, AND accepts quarters for game credits. I discovered an old Windows-based game development system called Multimedia Fusion 2 that requires no actual coding and went to work using the aforementioned Macbook. As an experiment, I installed it on the Windows 2000 "VM" on the Mini and discovered, to my pleasant surprise, that it not only works, but runs full speed when testing the game. I was able to network the "VM" to my cabinet using a static IP, and can do instantaneous transfers of each build as I work on the game as a test. Yes, the game has coin routines as well
Pretty cool, I think. Yet another great use of a "useless" Mini (many of us thought they were pretty worthless a few years ago, including me ?)
On top of that, the Mini makes for a good classic game and emulation machine as well.
EDIT: Found an old picture of my Dreamcast development environment (if you can call it that ?), circa 2012. Posted below the first, more recent picture...
Why, you may ask? Well, I've always wanted to design and program a coin-operated arcade video game since I was 10 years old and living in the early 1980s heyday of the arcade. My previous, fairly-recent game development experience was porting over old DOS games and writing a couple of my own games for the Dreamcast console, using a scripting language called Fenix, which also ran within a Windows 2000 "VM" on my 667mhz VGA TiBook (although that required burning multisession CDs to test the code). I built the cabinet from scratch a few years ago (running XP on an old Pentium 4 3.06ghz Dell board) and it runs many MAME games, AND accepts quarters for game credits. I discovered an old Windows-based game development system called Multimedia Fusion 2 that requires no actual coding and went to work using the aforementioned Macbook. As an experiment, I installed it on the Windows 2000 "VM" on the Mini and discovered, to my pleasant surprise, that it not only works, but runs full speed when testing the game. I was able to network the "VM" to my cabinet using a static IP, and can do instantaneous transfers of each build as I work on the game as a test. Yes, the game has coin routines as well
Pretty cool, I think. Yet another great use of a "useless" Mini (many of us thought they were pretty worthless a few years ago, including me ?)
On top of that, the Mini makes for a good classic game and emulation machine as well.
EDIT: Found an old picture of my Dreamcast development environment (if you can call it that ?), circa 2012. Posted below the first, more recent picture...
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