Well, the 68k PPC Challenge is over for another year, and we saw some great vintage Apple hardware doing some amazing things. This once again proves that the vintage hardware we all love can still prove useful and fun.
The great thing about these challenges is we all get to dust off machines that we wouldn’t ordinarily use on a daily basis, and use them for extended periods of time.
There’s something to be said for distraction-free computing. Our modern machines present us with a plethora of stuff. Notifications slide in for most every application in the top right hand corner, new emails trigger an alert, social media triggers dopamine receptors in the brain … most everything we use on modern machines are designed to engage us in real time.
Thank goodness vintage computing can be like a little holiday from all that.
We tried something new this year, given we have Discord, so there’s a great rolling commentary of everyone’s experiences with the Challenge there. Check out the 68k-ppc-challenge chat from January 7 through January 21st. There’s some fantastic work going on there by all of you.
Michael ‘dotexe’ Shipley
Michael sent us a link to a video he posted doing a Performance / Stress test on a PowerMac G5. ‘A testament to the PowerPC platform. A 15 year-old PowerMac G5 doing heavy multitasking, while playing two games at once, and even browsing the modern web, all in real time.
Julian ‘PapaCockroach’
For the Powerpc Challenge I used a Mac mini G4 1.25Ghz running MacOS 9.2.2 and an iMac G5 1.8Ghz with MacOS Leopard installed. The mac mini was used primary for gaming while the iMac was used for web browsing and a little Minecraft 1.2.5 on the Action Retro server.
For YouTube I made use of TenFiveTube for URL acquisition and PowerPC Media Center for video playback.
Played older games like Oni , Diablo 2 , Age of Empires 2 , Quake 3 arena on the mac mini at 60 Hertz and a resolution of 800×600 .
Also I tried to capture footage from an OG Xbox on the iMac G5 by using a clone EasyCap DC 60 usb capture card and succeeded but I have to get the sound capture working.
Anyway it was fun while it lasted. I can barely wait to participate in next year’s challenge. Also I must confess that I do not use computers for professional use such as programming, web dev etc. I mostly browse the web and play video games so the challenge was easier for me than for others. For video capture I used my Windows 7 PC which is equipped with an Avermedia DarkCrystall HD VGA pro capture card. (Dude, this is kind of against the rules but we’ll let you get away with it this time – Ed.)