Purchasing my first mac

[bloodlocust]

Hi there!

I'm looking for a second hand mac on ebay uk, and am thinking that an ibook G3 of some kind between 600 to 800mhz is suitable for programming and 3D gaming?

The reason I'm interested is basically a space thing - they're nice and small. I want to use airport or bluetooth to share files with the pc if I can as well.

Currently prices are between £250 and £350 for that spec - is that a good price?

There is also a G4 iMac I am interested in but thats TFT with a football blob under it (please don't murder me for my lack of mac knowledge!) which is a similar price.

How much better is G4 over an ibook G3 - they are both 800mhz?

I'm confused and probably quite lost!

Regards,
Rob

 

[hardon]

you made it then!

welcome to the forums

 

[bloodlocust]

Yeah thanks to you

What were you selling again? I've lost track of it all...

 

[hardon]

im selling a 1ghz G4 mdd, great for gaming but probably not a good entry machine, maybe an imac or emac might suit you better, it depends on wether or not you want to upgrade in the future?

upgrade's on the emac and imac are limited to ram and hard drives, im not in the know when it comes to laptops.

3d gaming demands good hardware, 1ghz is the minimum now im afraid, depends on how much you want to play.

im sure more help will be forthcoming.

good luck.

 

[netytan]

Macs aren't the best computers around when it comes to gaming, so before anyone else sugests it id probably look onto a games console aswell.. for which i recoment an XBox since PS2 is really ****ty but then thats a matter of opinion.

Anyway, if you don't 'need' the portability get the G4 IMac, the reason for this is that the G4 is already pretty old tech and the G3 is very much out of the door now . For the price your talking here you cant really go too far wrong, even if they are old models (pre-1Ghz).

If you can afford to go a little higher you might wana grap yourself a new G4 IBook since this is a truly great machine and very cheep for the specs! Aswell as coming with a few games already.

For programming you probably wont need the best specs in the world depending on what tech your using i.e. running .NET on any platform requires a high spec than running a C/C++ program. Either way, OSX is what you should be looking at as a programmer, and its doutful that this would run very well on a G3!

Take care,

Mark.

 

[bloodlocust]

Well I've got an athlon64 3200, 1gig DDR 400, Radeon 9800 Pro pc, so I'm sorted for games in general - I should have explained more:

What I want to do though, is actually develop games on the Mac! Cross platform is the way. The games will be developed using openGL so as long as it can run a smooth game of Quake3 at refresh rate, then I'm pretty sorted...

Ideally the Ibook has captured my attention a LOT because I could also use it in the bedroom and generally muck about. I think I've bid for a G4 imac though and this might be a mistake! as I didn't really know what I was bidding for. However if it's £300 ish then a G4 1ghz is not bad is it? I'm sure someone will outbid me though...

So you guys are saying pretty much any G3 ibook is crap for games? I'll have to save up and get something more impressive!

I just want to support Mac gaming. I believe there's a market for good quality Mac games that don't cost much at all, and can be downloaded immediately after purchase.

 

[netytan]

Theres always a market for good quality games, among Mac gamers probably more so since there isnt a massive selection available right now. As for the cross platform thing then you should look into Java or Python (check out pygame.org). C/C++ isn't really what you would call cross platform . But if your only targeting Mac then it shouldn't be a problem.

Also, .Net is probably the way to go for a true cross platform app right now since you can compile once on Mac and run it anywhere Mono/MS.NET is installed .

The G3 i think is a no go, if your working on anything that will be used by other people you should at least be using a G4 since this is the most common processor right now - and £300 is amazing for a 1Ghz IMac providing its in good condition!

Mark.

 

[bloodlocust]

Hiya!

I plan on using BlitzMax, which is going to be rocking the mac programming world. Code on mac, linux or pc, and the same code will work on any of the other platforms without changes! Pretty cool stuff!

Mac owners are actually getting this FIRST!

PC owners have to WAIT!

You can email info@blitzbasic.com about it and say "Rob" (thats me) sent ya for info if you like... I think it's LONG overdue and macs have played second fiddle for too long. The way I see it is, if you don't like it, do something about it

Still if you think that £300 to £350 is good for an imac then I might as well cough up if my bid remains.