# Any ways to run Windows games on PowerPC Mac?



## Dr. Durr (Mar 27, 2011)

I want play Half-Life Uplink on my iBook G4, but Darwine dosen't work, and Virtual PC is costly, and not powerful enough.

Do any of you know of any other ways?


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## Runefox (Mar 27, 2011)

No. I can't imagine there's any way aside from emulating a whole system. Since PowerPC has been phased out since forever ago now, there probably won't be a whole lot of support for it either way, and while Half-Life: Uplink isn't exactly a very demanding title, with an entire system being emulated on top of it, your G4 is probably not going to run it very well.


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## Xenke (Mar 27, 2011)

Well, assuming you want to keep the MacOS on the computer as well, the only thing I can suggest is to upgrade to a version of the OS that comes with Bootcamp and dual-boot into Windows XP.

Of course, before you do anything, back up all files.


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## AshleyAshes (Mar 27, 2011)

Xenke said:


> Well, assuming you want to keep the MacOS on the computer as well, the only thing I can suggest is to upgrade to a version of the OS that comes with Bootcamp and dual-boot into Windows XP.
> 
> Of course, before you do anything, back up all files.


 
Yeah, that's not gonna work on a PowerPC Mac, it only works on an x86 Mac.


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## Bobskunk (Mar 27, 2011)

If you want to run windows applications, that means you have to emulate an x86 architecture with PPC hardware.

That's..  not going to work, as said before.  The age of your computer because it's PPC-based coupled with the overhead associated with emulation (to emulate a different processor architecture of a given speed, you will need a beefier host processor to emulate it) means you're completely out of luck.


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## Xenke (Mar 27, 2011)

AshleyAshes said:


> Yeah, that's not gonna work on a PowerPC Mac, it only works on an x86 Mac.


 
Oh, derp, forgot about the processor.


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## CyberFoxx (Mar 28, 2011)

Well, Win95 runs pretty good in QEMU... But there's no way you'll be playing any advanced games.


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## Taralack (Mar 28, 2011)

Dump your mac :V


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## net-cat (Mar 28, 2011)

Not going to happen. There are a few things out there to run much older games, (DOSbox, QEMU, Virtual PC,) but those are slow and lack 3D acceleration.

And honestly, the Mac-PPC platform is out in a dumpster behind some building in California, along with Mac OS 9 and Mac-68K. Such is life in the Apple camp, and I'm sure you knew that when you signed on.


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## Runefox (Mar 28, 2011)

net-cat said:


> And honestly, the Mac-PPC platform is out in a dumpster behind some building in California, along with Mac OS 9 and Mac-68K. Such is life in the Apple camp, and I'm sure you knew that when you signed on.


 At least now the Intel Macs are capable of being resurrected with either Windows or whatever latest flavour of *NIX you might fancy. Correct me if I'm wrong, but PPC ports even in the *NIX world have fallen very far behind x86 by now, haven't they? Not that I have a PPC-based anything to check for myself (save my PS3, which courtesy of Sony's fanaticism, no longer supports OtherOS).


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## CyberFoxx (Mar 28, 2011)

Runefox said:


> Correct me if I'm wrong, but PPC ports even in the *NIX world have fallen very far behind x86 by now, haven't they?


 
Gentoo/PPC is still alive and well. And pretty much everything is on par with x86 version wise.


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## FF_CCSa1F (Mar 29, 2011)

I had a PPC Imac for a while last year.

With anything but the Apple OS, it was just another portal to weird-hardware-and-driver hell. _Nothing_ would work out of the box. PPC Macs need to disappear, permanently.


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## net-cat (Mar 29, 2011)

Actually, Debian/PPC is alright. (I have a friend who uses it on his G3 iBook.) Xorg was a bit of a pain to set up.


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## FF_CCSa1F (Mar 29, 2011)

Good for him. I bet that it works a lot better on a G3 Ibook than the newer G5 Imac I had.


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## CyberFoxx (Mar 29, 2011)

I didn't have many troubles getting Gentoo/PPC working on my G4 eMac. Then again, if one is running Gentoo, one normally knows what hardware, kernel options, tricks, etc one needs to get stuff working.
But yeah, ran Win95 in a QEMU session on it. (Just want to see if I could. Whole, "Climb the mountain because it's there", thing) It ran, but I wouldn't try anything other than using it for notepad, calc, etc.


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## net-cat (Mar 30, 2011)

FF_CCSa1F said:


> Good for him. I bet that it works a lot better on a G3 Ibook than the newer G5 Imac I had.


This wouldn't surprise me. On consumer gear, Linux generally has better support for older gear. And since the Mac-PPC platform is dead, there is probably not a lot of work going towards making it work on the last stuff. (Not as much work as is going into the i686 and x86-64 ports, anyway.)


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