Hello Ladies and Gentlemen and welcome to my new blog, This Old Mac now in the past I have written a column called This Old Mac on my various other blogs where I have worked with such machines as a Powerbook 1400, a G3, a G4 and a G5 all of which I have used and abused to varying degrees including trying to try and install Linux on the G3 I was going to document but it was so problematic I gave up.
Anyway for the first time ever I now have an actual Intel Mac something I have never been able to previously afford. Now the Mac in question is a Mac Pro 1,1 (2x 2.66 GHz Dual Core Intel Xeon) which has 32GB of RAM onboard. The current setup has a Nvidia 7300GT graphics card and is running Snow Leopard OS X 10.6.8. The system has 4 hard drives in it. The main system is sitting on a 500GB Western Digital hard drive (Parsnip). However there is 3 more drives which I am yet to use (Onion, Carrot and Cabbage).
The respective Drives are Onion is a 250GB Hitachi Hard Drive, Cabbage is a 300GB Maxtor Hard Drive and Carrot is a 250GB Maxtor Hard Drive. Now I could fill them up with various emulators and stuff as I have in every other blog I have and report any bugger ups it has..
However I am throwing the ball at you people to offer suggestions on what I should do after all I admit I am not a Mac expert.
So far on the machine I have Office 2008, Photoshop, Indesign and Illustrator (CS2 versions), Mac Journal, Quark 8.0 Passport edition, Writeroom 2, Daz Studio 4.12, Audacity, iWork 08, final Cut Studio 2 and Logic Pro 9 and Milky Tracker.
Emulators include Fuse(Spectrum emulator), Vice(C64), Atari800X(Atari 800 emulator strangely enough), Magic Engine (PC Engine), Snes9X (Super Nintendo), X68000EM (Sharp X68000), DOSBox(MS-DOS).
Then I have Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, Diablo II (including the Lords of Destruction Expansion pack) and I have Gdash (Windows version) running using the Wineskin Winery wrapper basically WINE.
Obviously there is a few other apps such Firefox 48.0.2, Jing a video capture tool and a few others which I probably failing to list or are not hugely important.
However they say the Mac Pro 1,1 can run up to High Sierra if you change the graphics card and install it using the boot.efi file from Piker Alpha. However if I do that I may lose the ability to use the Snow Leopard partition as the card will not be supported by SL.
Not that it's vital but SL has got Rosetta and can run several PPC things as well as intel stuff so hence why several of the games work.
Also given that this is an Intel Mac. I can probably run Windows or Linux or god only knows. So this is my quandry...
What do I do which this machine and this blog. Do I just continue my formula of running the machine and typing and informing you of the weird quirks it does.
Or do I open this blog to suggestions where as I said I'm no Mac expert put my machine in control of yourselves my audience and let you decide what I do with the machine.
Its not an easy decision and I really would like to see the strange and wonderful side of Mac which I have never really played with. Inform me of the weird and wonderful I am missing out on which I can't get on Windows or Linux.
It is a world of adventure here I have very rarely stepped into so I open to adventure...
Let me know your thoughts by following this blog and offering your opinions.
Ok I think that is enough for this episode so until next time I look forward to your suggestions and ...take care.