[tas]

I have a Rev. D Lime iMac, 333 MHz, 8 Meg video card. I tried playing one of my old games, Caesar III, on a Mini with 1 gig of memory, 1.5 GHz with 64 MBVRAM. The game played fine on the Lime 333, but on the much more powerful Mini, it lagged. I don't see how such a simple old game is too much for a Mini. Could it be because of switching to Classic mode?

[phillryu]

Yes, it is because of classic mode.

And afaik, the new Macs can't boot into OS 9 right? In which case, I would say you're out of luck in terms of perforamnce. (Caesar III doesn't have an OS X patch.)

[EnemyTerritoryish]

Um... hate to make you feel even worse, but that lime iMac probably had a SIX meg rage Pro videocard, unless you swapped your motherboard for a rev A or B with a mezzanine connector and have the microconversion 8 meg Voodoo2 Gamewizard installed.

[Chuckit]

Yes. Graphics don't work exactly the same in Classic as they do running natively in OS 9, so no matter how powerful the computer behind it is, certain things lag in Classic. Strange but true. The worst example I've seen so far is Quark 5, which is zippy in OS 9 on crap hardware, but will stop for huge swaths of time before redrawing in Classic on a G5.

[tas]

Thanks for the replies.
EnemyTerritoyish, I knew the VRAM in the 333 was pathetic - I had forgotten how pathetic.
The irony is that Caesar III for the Mac was much better than the PC version - the maps were much bigger, but so few people bought it, Sierra stopped making Mac games. The instruction manual for Pharoah had Mac instructions in it, but they never released it for Mac. This was what lead me to by a Windows machine (forgive me).

I'll just keep praying the Lime lasts - the ones at my school library are a year older and have been treated much more roughly. There is also always Ebay.

Another irony, I find OS X to be more alien to me than XP (forgive me again).

[bradoesch]

Since we're getting technical, the mini has 32 MB VRAM.

[tas]

After I read the post about the VRAM, I kept wondering where the number 64 came from. I took a wild guess about the iMac and was close. I usually use the web on a Windows machine I use for gaming (Iknow, I know). I just turned on the Mini, looked at the System Profiler and was surprised at two things.
1. I was one of the ones who ordered a 1.42 Ghz machine and got a 1.5 Ghz.
2. Under Graphics/Displays, it reads:
ATI Raedon 9200
64 mb (total)

The word "total" was actually in the Profiler next to the mb number. I don't know why it would be phrased like that, but that must be where I got the number 64 from my original post. Has anyone else seen something like this in their Graphics/Displays section?

[the_glassman]

Originally Posted by bradoesch

Since we're getting technical, the mini has 32 MB VRAM.

This is one of the 1.5 GHz, 64 MB VRAM surprise mini's.