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Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm. I wonder what the most beefed up OS 9 computer would be... I loved that OS so much.

Currently my "big" native 9.2.2 system is a MDD G4 with a Sonnet 1.8GHz dual 7447A upgrade, 2GB RAM (1.5GB useable in OS 9) and an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro. I'm sure there's a config more extreme than that out there. It is a pleasure to use even though it's one of the windtunnel systems.

I believe from Apple officially it would be the dual 1.25ghz MDD G4. I had one new, and still have it running today!

And, unofficially, MacOS9Lives can boot directly to OS 9 on FW800 PowerMacs, which have 1.42GHz processors with 2x the L3 cache. Officially, those machines only supported OS 9 via Classic.

I used it to install OS 9 on my G4 Mac mini, and, aside from an annoying bug where the USB mouse is completely unresponsive after booting 50% of the time, it works great.

My OS 9 battlestation is a G4 tower (Digital Audio) with a Sonnet dual 1.6GHz upgrade, 1.5GB RAM and a nvidia GeForce4 Ti which is one of the best OS 9 graphics cards available.

The fastest I could find is the G4 "MDD" tower: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/specs/powerma... ... Though the 800mhz iMac G4 is a nice alternative (which I happen to have): https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac_800_17_fp... Makes for a great Mac gaming machine since it is pretty fast, looks great, is a fully self-contained computer with display, and can run both OS 9 and OS X.

Looks like the most truly-OP upgrade you could do is a dual-1.8ghz G4 upgrade card which is kind of crazy to consider: https://www.sonnettech.com/publicfiles/pdfs/pdf_datasheets/d...

You can get a 1.67Ghz G4 Mac Mini on eBay with OS 9 preinstalled. It's wicked fast (especially with an IDE SSD adapter)

There's faster single thread accelerator cards that were made for a while by a guy on the 68kMLA forums, but that was many years ago. I think Action Retro on YouTube has one that broke 2Ghz

> You can get a 1.67Ghz G4 Mac Mini on eBay with OS 9 preinstalled. It's wicked fast (especially with an IDE SSD adapter)

The fastest Mac mini G4 topped out at 1.5 GHz, not 1.67. I'm the guy selling many of those Mac mini G4s upgraded with SSDs on eBay... just a hobby business. Also sell on my website at https://os9.shop where there's a FAQ where you can read more about it and why it's a good model/upgrade to buy or build yourself.

Huh. I thought it was 1.67 for some reason. My mistake!

I actually bought one a year or so ago from your eBay store though, looking at my records! Have recommended to retro friends in the Seattle area, too

Thanks, much appreciated.

Laptop wise: it's a PowerBook G4 1Ghz 15', Titanium model. Desktop: PowerMac G4 Tower, MDD version.

Officially? A single cpu G4 tower. Beyond that, I'm not sure.

Quite a lot. I remember my dad's SE(?) could be upgraded to 128mb ram or some ludicrous figure, compared to my 8mb 486.

>SE(?) could be upgraded to 128mb ram

Probably an SE/30; vastly different internally than the original 68000 SE, more like a MacⅡx wearing a classic Mac shell. Great machine <3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_SE/30

It's a shame so many of them killed themselves with leaking batteries, hard to find even a non-working SE/30 now for a reasonable price.

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