Hello and welcome to the Old Computer Challenge - 2025 Edition! This is the second year when I’m participating, and if you didn’t see my previous year’s entry, you can check the OCC24 - Party like it’s 2004 article, although it’s not mandatory.

Since last year, I was fairly active on the OCC channel on IRC, as I’ve found there some really nice people, some with really nice hobbies and very nice interesting websites!

The theme this year is “There is no challenge”, and while I love an open challenge, sometimes a small theme direction could have been useful. But as the main challenge says “there is no challenge. It is but a learning experience”, I hope to learn something during the time using this computer. The challenge starts on Sunday, July 13th, and ends on Saturday, July 19th, but it might prolong itself.

Because the last year’s article felt neat and tidy, I’m going to use most of the markdown and structure of last year, so if you see incomplete things, well, get used to it. :D

Day 0 Hardware & Setup^

So without further ado, here I present you the computer I’m going to use for this year’s OCC, the 12" Aluminium PowerBook G4, from 2004. I’ve written a bit about it when I got it, when it just wouldn’t turn on, but a few days ago, I just connected the charger on it, pressed the power button and it just started!

It’s got the 1.33GHz G4 processor, 1.25GB of RAM and a 100GB HDD (which reports to be 93GB), with about 40 gigs free. These are not hugely overpowered specs, but they should actually be more than enough for the things I have planned for the upcoming week. The graphics card is a sturdy 64MB GeForce FX Go5200 (weird to think that now we use 16-24GIGABYTES video cards), so many games from the mid-2000s should work without issues, especially since the screen’s resolution is 1024x768. More about this laptop can be found on the Apple site back in 2004 or you can look for the spec sheet of the entire line

While I’m writing these words, I’m also copying some music to the hard drive and it will be the only music I will listen to over this week. And since we’re talking music, I will pair this year’s OCC with a period-appropriate iPod, and while I could use an U2 4th generation iPod, I thought to keep it Aluminium for the sake of Jony Ive, and chose a First Generation iPod mini, released in 2004 too. Well, either that, or the Second Generation, because that pink looks nice.

Upsides and downsides

As far as I can tell, there are no obvious issues with the unit (now that it starts), except for the battery that is drained and impossible to find online. Maybe I’ll find someone good with the soldering iron, so I can change the cells inside the battery. The minor annoyances are the fact that the keyboard is not backlit, but I guess we’re just used to have this feature present on modern computers. Scrolling with two fingers on the trackpad seems to be very responsive, as it’s now at the minimum, and it still scrolls pretty fast in TextWrangler and the browser, but I’ll get used to it. I fixed the scrolling as it was weirdly configured in iScroll 2.

Another (minor) annoyance is the fact that this laptop is so compact, it’s horrible to service, and upgrading the HDD to an SSD would be a huge undertaking which I’m not sure if I can finish properly. I’m leaving a link towards a iFixit guide, to see how complicated it is.

On the plus side, the trackpad works fine, the speakers sound really well, wireless connects and while not super fast (connected at 54Mbps), it’s an internet connection and that’s more than enough. The keyboard is a bit on the soft side, but it’s very quiet and gives a great typing experience, I understand why some people are still using older computers as distraction-free writing environments, it’s because it’s super easy to do so. The screen is decent, 1024x768 was the standard resolution back then (desktops usually used 1280x1024), but having this resolution on a fairly small screen (12") results in a decent PPI, the screen looking awesome. The speakers are nothing to write home by modern standards, but still offer a good listening experience while doing something else (I’m listening the Need for Speed Underground sountrack as we speak, and it sounds like it did when the game came out). I/O is plenty, with a modem, LAN, Firewire 400, two USB, mini-DVI, line in and headphones out, while also having an optical drive (CD-RW only, not a DVD combo), so connecting devices should be a breeze.

Mac OSX and Software

The PowerBook is running Mac OSX Leopard and I was thinking that maybe I could make some software updates to this, but Max OSX 10.5.8 is the last version available and I already have that installed. Also the other software seems to be up to date, including Safari 5.0.6 and iTunes 10.6.3 (among others). For browsing the web, I’m going to use TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 32 (SPR 4) (a fork of Firefox) which allows me to browse the web with a lot of modern features, which is great for research and searching stuff during this week. For IRC I’ll use Colloquy which supports connections to libera.chat, and it has all the features I need.

EL PLAN

Circling back at the end of the prep day, what is the purpose of this? Well, since the challenge said no particular challenge, I’ll try to just tick some simple, but nice checkpoints along this week, while having fun using this great little computer:

Stay close and keep checking this article starting with Sunday evening!

Day 1 Connecting People^

Because the OCC is a community-driven experience, one of the most important components is connectivity. This is easily done over wireless, as the PowerBook has an AirPort Extreme (0x14E4, 0x4E) wi-fi card, running on the Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (4.170.25.8) firmware, which connects just fine to all the routers in my house over 2.4GHz, albeit at 54MBit/s. While this is not very fast and makes file transfers slow (especially when transferring large files), but for the casual browsing and communication I have to do, it’s more than decent. It’s nice that I can SSH and SFTP to the computers in my network, but I also can access my NAS through a SMB share, so that’s super!

Speaking of browsing, I am using TenFourFox 7504, which is pretty solid and supports quite a few modern features, enough for the limited internet usage I plan to do over this week (researching here and there for this article), webmail, and the casual Wikipedia and IMDb visits.

Another important part would be to keep track of the RSS feeds that I watch, and I went back to my favourite reader, NetNewsWire, but running version 2.1.1, which is the latest that is supported on Power PC. You can get it (or its newer versions) from the NetNewsWire Website. I also exported my RSS feed subscriptions from my main computer to OPML and successfully imported them into the old version. Don’t you love when stuff is just according to the standards and is backwards compatible? I know I am!

Speaking about backwards compatibility, of course the communication will be done over Slack, Microsoft Teams and Discord. JUST KIDDING!!! We are definitely going to chat a lot over the course of this OCC, and it will be done over good old IRC.

Email is not used as much for personal communications (at least by me), so I won’t spend too much setting up Thunderbird, or the Outlook that comes with Microsoft Office for Mac, because, while they support POP3 and IMAP, I can use the web interfaces of the mail services I use (Dreamhost hosts my site and my email and their custom web interface is lightweight and simply works). No need to overcomplicate this.

Day 2 Some Games^

I didn’t know it when I got this laptop, but this unit was given the love of someone passionate before, as it has a ton of installed games, which will make this challenge so much easier, as I don’t have to set up and debug games, which is usually the worst part in setting up these challenges. There are a lot of great games, and I’ll mention only a few: Age of Mythology, Call of Duty, Doom (1, 2, expansions), Dungeon Siege, Neverwinter Nights, Unreal Tournament 2004, The Sims, Homeworld, and many others. I won’t play them too much now, as I want to reserve only a couple of days for playing.

Puzzle Games

First and most of all, I was super happy to have a ton of small puzzle and arcade games, with the likes of Bejeweled 2, Big Kahuna Reed, Diner Dash, Zuma, that I played a lot in high-school. If you want to read more about them, you cand find more in the Puzzle Game Pack section of my last year’s OCC post, so I won’t insist too much on them, although they are great time wasters.

Played: TWO HOURS? WHEN DID TWO HOURS PASS? DANG THESE GAMES ARE ADDICTIVE

Warcraft III (and The Frozen Throne)

Another game that I have installed, but don’t plan to spend too much playing, unless I find someone this week to play with is Blizzard’s absolute masterpiece: Warcraft III (with The Frozen Throne expansion). Tested the first mission and it plays flawlessly, with no frame drops and it’s working just as expected. Have some free screenshots, because those are never enough. I do plan to finish one of the campaigns so I’ll update with how that goes.

Played: A couple of missions in Frozen Throne, because Illidan.

Halo

Without needing any introduction, it is one of the first shooters I played after finishing Half-Life, back in high-school, and boy oh boy, it was a treat to play it! It seems to work a bit slow on the laptop and had to turn down the settings a bit, and it’s playable. This was absolutely bonkers and I’ve played it on so many platforms over the years. That’s why I only escaped the Pillar of Autumn and went on to the next game.

Played: 30 minutes, although it could easily run into days

Quake 3 Arena

Another game that was pretty much unplayed back in the day was Quake 3. Living in the shadow of Counter-Strike, Half-Life and Unreal Tournament, this was the best shooter that flew under our radar back in the day. As far as I remember, I only played it properly a few couples of times, and Alexandra kicked my ass so bad at this, I dropped it for 20 years. So it’s time to give the game the time it deserves and message Alexandra, to ask her if she’s up for a rematch.

Played: About one hour in single player and did some skirmishes with some friends on their computers. Bonkers.

Day 3 More Games!^

If yesterday was dedicated to playing games I played before, today is the day where I try a couple of games that I’ve heard about or that I wanted to play, but never got the chance. The list is huge and it contains among others: the original Diablo (I played D2 quite a lot), Age of Empires 3, Fallout, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, and many more. The gaming of the 1995-2005 period were absolutely great, with some of the best titles of all time being launched in that ten-year-span.

Unreal Tournament 2004

The great sequel to the classic Unreal Tournament title, this game gives more weapons, more games, more mechanics, more enemies and more blood, ergo MORE FUN! I remember talking with friends about this game, but by the time it came out, my computer could barely keep up with it, and wouldn’t load. Now it loads and I’m about to give the bots a can of whoop-ass.

Played: made a fortune for the Liandri Corporation

Dungeon Siege

I’ve heard a lot about this title, and I was thinking about playing it at some point. It runs fairly well (a solid 18 FPS is actually playable for this genre), and while the story seems to be interesting, I kinda lost interest fairly fast.

Played: until I got lost into a forest and started to run into circles

Colin McRae Rally

Downloaded from Macintosh Garden, CMR for Mac is a game that I always wanted to play, but I never found myself to be any good at rallying, so it was an obvious choice. However, even with the graphic details at minimum and 640x480 resolution, the game is pretty unplayable, getting maybe 10-15FPS. Unlucky, as it’s a beautifully looking game.

Played: 30 seconds until I totaled my Subaru

Spider-Man 2

I recall this game being played in the Internet Cafes back in the day, but I was never too fond of it, mostly because my online time was divided between Counter-Strike and IRC. However, this is a funny little action game and jumping from a building to the other in pursuit of the bad guys is fun, but only up to a point.

Played: until I filled with spider jizz about half of the buildings in New York City

Day 4 New Games^

When I started this year’s Old Computer Challenge, I found it a bit annoying to search for games, because I was never a Mac gamer (because I didn’t own a Mac), and that the numbers of games written for the Mac was fairly low, either missing some big names of the turn of the millennium, either being played way too much on Windows computers. I did write a lot about games in the OCC 2024, as well as during my #MARCHintosh challenge, aside from the big gaming articles I’ve posted over time: Games that made me a gamer and Favorite Game Every Year Since You Were Born. So it’s time to write about something I’ve never heard about. Time to find some new games and see what’s the deal with them.

Ford Racing 2

Also downloaded from Macintosh Garden, I’ve never heard about this racing title, but OMG! this is absolutely bonkers! It has a ton of Fords spanning about many years of history, but unfortunately, as it runs on the same platform as the above mentioned Colin McRae, it’s pretty much unplayable, even at the lowest settings. This game needs a bigger boat. The music though is absolutely bonkers and I’ve literally copied it from the game folder to my iTunes.

Played: 10 minutes, hoping to make it work properly

Cro-Mag Rally

Just as any challenge makes you discover a gem that you didn’t know even existed, this was a lucky and surprising find. It’s a game I’ve never heard about before, but OMG this thing is so fun and funny! Resembling some sort of pre-historic Mario Kart, it’s super fun to play, and it even has multiplayer, although I don’t have anyone to play with.

Played: about 2 hours, lol this is so fun!

Day 5 Game of the Week^

Having a lot of games on this computer, I had a lot of options, but after thinking to play maybe Sims, Neverwinter Nights, or Age of Mythology, I eventually settled for a different one, a shooter I always wanted to play, as people would always talk in high regards about it: Max Payne.

What I initially thought it was a shoot’em up shooter turned out to be actually some sort of roguelike shooting thing where you have to slowly go into each room and slow-mo kill all the enemies before they kill you. Which isn’t very hard, because Max has about 5 hits worth of HP, meaning that two unlucky encounters will kill you. One if the guy with the shotgun is right behind you.

The story starts with the tragedy of Max’s family being brutally murdered by a group of bad guys, who are there because reasons, and you kill them and then suddenly it’s a few years later, still looking for revenge. Or something. The only thing bleaker than the story is the storytelling, although I liked the comic-book interludes which push very slowly the story forwards.

The atmosphere is interesting, the world design is not something to write home about, but the pacing is slow and trickles down. I don’t like (read “really hate”) the modern shooters like Overwatch and Fortnite, they feel waaay too fast, but this was slow. Adding up the fact that I tried to play in 800x600, to at least hope to see in slow motion the bullets being shot at me, the game is pretty much unplayable, with a lot of frame drops. I tried lowering the resolution to 640x480, but at this point, I have no chance of dodging any bullets, and my Mighy Mouse shows how bad it is at gaming. Compared to my modern Steelseries Aerox 9 daily driver, to which I’ve got used to, and even to my Logitech MX Master 2, the Mighty Mouse feels like a brick.

Playing the intro and the first chapter, I can understand where all the hype towards the game came from, the bullet-time feature was revolutionary at the time, but after using it about 10 times (with very slooooooow replenishing rates), the novelty worn off and it became annoying and a pace breaker. Also given the fact that you can’t go in a room guns blazing because of limited ammo and enemies killing you in 4 seconds, it seems a nice game, but too gimmick-focused and pretty dated.

After all this experience, I just returned to Unreal Tournament and killed some bots for a couple of hours, and it was way more fun. After that, I plan to watch a movie.

Gaming Conclusion

While some games seem to be struggling on the PowerBook, others seem to work just fine, I guess it’s up to their platform and what performance requirements they needed. I think the next step will be to look for some bonkers “Cheese Grater” G5 PowerMac (I’ve always wanted one of those), upgrade it to the max and then just go bonkers with games, graphics, and other things (of which I’ll talk about over the next couple of days).

Day 6 Entertainment and Multimedia^

Covering the music part of this year’s challenge is fairly easy, as I’m using iTunes to play them, and also adding songs to my iPod Mini, having settled with the First Generation, because it just looks like it’s made out of the same material as the PowerBook (it is!), I connected it to iTunes and started to sync the little music I have added here, copied from one of my old party CDs. It’s a bit annoying, as the storage is only 1GB, while the 2nd Gen were going up to 6GB, but it is what it is. It’s a red-code heatwave warning, so the weather is not really proper for long walks. Time to replace “God please ripen the plums” that was on the iPod since I bought it with some different music. For this, I’m actually going to use a firewire cable, because I never used on before with an iPod for data transfer, only for charging.

For the movie side, I actually wanted to see something old, that I haven’t seen in a while, and I’ve chosen some great titles. I’ve used a Samsung External DVD writer which I have around the home to use as a DVD reader for all computers, new and old, as I didn’t have any movies stored on CDs (or I think I don’t). In order to play them, I will use VLC 2.0.10 Twoflower (PowerPC 32bit), as it was always the player of choice since I discovered it, as it needed no codecs or no weird stuff. I know that now there might be better or more optimized players, but I’d rather use what I know already works. I have iDVD installed on this, but I don’t know where I’ve placed my old DVDs, and I don’t want to rely on the external drive for this part. I’ll just copy some “traditional” 700MB avi files to the hard drive, for convenience. Also, remember when pirated movies used to come on two CDs?

Another thing I had to rely on was, of course an external set of speakers. After I praised them yesterday for them being mid, the internal speakers of the PowerBook decided to crap themselves. I don’t know if there’s something wrong with my music (it shouldn’t), if I am cursed, or if the membrane of these speakers seems to fail after about some years. It happened on both of my 2013 retina MacBooks, the 2006 iMac, and now on this. I did listen to music and watched videos for about 3 hours in total before they crashed, the sound degrading in the span of 5 minutes from clear to rumbling and growling at even medium-low volume.

One of the checkboxes from the plan above was to burn a music CD so my niece can use it in her car. So without further ado, I connected to my NAS-mounted music library which has all my backed up music, something like 120GB and started to copy some tracks to iTunes. I then used it to burn the disc, at 8X, to be sure it’s written properly, as the CD-writer is pretty old.

Strangers on a Train is a movie that needs no introduction. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, it tells the story of two strangers who meet on a train, one of whom is a psychopath who suggests that they “exchange” murders so that neither will be caught. In a class of his own, Hitchcock delivers drama, tension, terror and intense moments while using new technologies back in the day, including double exposures and other things. This is not only a good movie, it’s one of the best that Hitchcock made and maybe of all time, and it was lovely to see this gem again after so many years.

Criss-cross!

Tales From the Crypt is the movie that put the basis for the nice horror stories TV series that I enjoy as a kid. The movie has its quirks and is seriously dated, but for a movie made in the 70s, it’s actually very nice

Tiiiime is on my siiiiide …

Fallen is a brilliant late-90s thrilles with a young Denzel Washington, starring next to John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, Elias Koteas and Embeth Davidtz. This is definitely a classic and should be watched. Six popcorns and goes into the Movie Vault. I have known about this movie for a lot of time, but never got to watching it until now, during OCC 2025 on my PowerBook G4.

Green Street Hooligans is one of my favourite movies of all time. It takes Frodo, puts him into a coming-of-age drama that’s (in my opinion) better (and definitely more realistic) than Lord of The Rings. It also stars Charlie Hunnam in one of his earliest and best roles ever. The pacing is great, the music is absolutely fantastic (Terence Jay’s One Blood is an all-time favourite). Strong, visceral, gut-wrenching, mixing the heartfelt moments with fistfights.

I also found some theatre clips recorded by the Romanian National TV Broadcaster in their studios, mostly for their New Year’s Eve shows during the communist regime, but also after the fall of it, pieces that were broadcast all the time on various culture-related shows and are part of Romanian culture. Featured some of the greatest actors in Romanian history, like Amza Pellea, Toma Caragiu, Horatiu Malaele, Marin Moraru, Puiu Calinescu and Stefan Banica, there are also a few clips after theater plays written by I.L. Caragiale, one of Romania’s greatest writers.

I’ve also found some three old episodes of “How It’s Made”, a show I really liked to watch back in the day and still like to watch even today. The episodes I watched were about Jackets, Animations, Mushrooms, Salad, Recycling, Padlocks, Pots and Oils. What a trip down memory lane! Wonder what happened to all this edutainment shows? I still wonder how the hell did we go from this to “rabbadrabbabrabba hundred rabbadrabbabrabba hundfifty rabbadrabbabrabba sold!” rednecks auctioning storage units?

There’s nothing better to do at the end of the day than just kick back and watch some nice cartoons. For this week I’ve prepared some classics, including Quick Draw McGraw, Captain Planet and the Planeteers, some Animaniacs and an assortment of episodes from Looney Tunes and Road Runner, Biker Mice from Mars, The Grim Adventures of Billy And Mandy, and others.

Last but not least, time to throw back a bit to the 90s and play a few episodes of The Outer Limits, the series that ran from 1995 until 2002. The screenshots below are from the episode 2 (Resurrection) and 11 (The Refuge) of Season 2, which are great episodes themselves, but the entire series is absolutely worth watching.

Day 7 Creativity and Productivity^

App Store

First of all, I want to talk a bit about Apple’s Mac App Store. Released in 2011, as part of the Mac OS X 10.6.6 update for Snow Leopard, it brought to Mac computers the features that the App Store brought to iPhones, iPads and iPod touches 3 years before that: a one-stop shop for all apps for your device. Unfortunately, as it was released on Snow Leopard, all other versions up to 1.6.5 (including), were left without an official app store. Additionally, all apps that were published on the App Store were prohibited from using discontinued technologies, like Rosetta-enabled PowerPC code.

To take care of this situation, I discovered a nifty program, PPCAppStore, that is a software distribution platform, for PowerPC macs, compatible with MacOS 10.4 Tiger, MacOS 10.5 Leopard and MacOS 10.6 SnowLeopard OS. The PPCAppStore is a project developed by Adrian Oprea, a computer enthusiast and is freely distributed on a non-profit basis. It allows users to download essential applications to keep their PowerPC macs alive. The purpose of the store is to keep a copy of the applications, because lately the platform PowerPC is no longer supported and developers not provide anymore the version for PowerPC macs.

I did install quite a few programs using this, and I have to say it’s very useful for the old computers out there and I’m sure to use it as well on my G3 iBook the next time I take it for a spin.

Photography

Another almost artistic thing I decided to do earlier this year was to spend more time with my dSLR camera, a Canon EOS 400D (known as Digital Rebel XTi in North America and EOS Kiss Digital X in Japan), which is also the camera I use for this year’s photographic project, 25 for 2025, especially with the use of the Canon 50mm F1.8 STM lens, which seems to have become my favourite. This is fairly easy as I just connect the camera to the PowerBook, I open Image Capture and copy the CR2 files (Canon Raw 2 format) and then process and edit them using Adobe Photoshop CS3. I won’t bother you too much with details about this, I’ll leave you with a few screenshots and a few processed photos.

Although I wanted to shoot more this week, I wasn’t sure that I can find good photo opportunities between all the tasks I’ve set for myself for this OCC, so I decided to also use a few photos I took over the last few weeks, just to have some content for this section. The opening and saving is a bit slow, especially since the photos are 3888 by 2592 (10 Megapixels), and the storage is on a spinning hard drive. I took the images after saving and double checked them on my modern MacBook Pro, because while it was top of the line 21 years ago, the LCD display on the Powerbook is not as bright and doesn’t have a wide range as the more modern IPS/OLED displays. Speaking about compatibility, I could just transfer the CR2 files along with their XMP counterparts to the new computer and just continue with the colour correction from where I left off, but the results of editing on the PowerBook look actually great, so there’s no more editing needed!

Coding

I wanted to code something modern this week, but I didn’t have too much time on hand, so I decided to tick this box the easy way with a piece of CSS that overrides all other CSS instructions, regardless of which theme is used, to make this page look a bit more “Mac OSX-ish”. I’ve decided to do this, because the themes I usually do (and can be seen in the sidebar), are getting pretty tedious to maintain over time, and I’d rather spend my time doing something else. The coding was done in Coda 1.6, while the article was written using TextWrangler, while the colours were picked using Adobe Photoshop CS3 from this image, found online.

FYI, I’m using TextWrangler 2.1.3, which seems to work just fine on PowerPC, while Coda is version 1.6 registered with a pirated .plist which can be found here and there on the internet, as it cannot be activated anymore. I won’t explain on how to do it, but all info can be easily found online if you know where to look.

Podcast? Mixtape? Something!

And now for the grand finale, there was a creative surprise in plan, but since the challenge was limited to one week, I wasn’t sure if there was enough time. Since I promised headcrash that I’ll send him some music for his awesome snr.dance Radio, the number-one place for non-stop eurodance and dance music from the 90s and early 2000s, I fired up GarageBand (since it was already installed), and added together some tracks, and now, without further ado, I give you the first episode of the “andrei.xyz Music Hour*”, dedicated to the OCC 2025 Party!
* it’s not really one hour

For this episode, I decided to take a quick tour through some old electronic music, and as you can see in the bottom corner of the third image in the gallery below, there are mostly house and trance songs.

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666 - Paradoxx
Dj Aligator - Black Celebration
Azzido Da Bass & Timo Mass - Doom's Night
IIO - Rapture
Dj's @ Work - Someday
Binary Finary - 1999
Blank & Jones - The Nightfly
Sash - Ecuador
Mauro Picotto - Komodo
Gigi D'agostino - Bla Bla Bla
DJ Schwede - Boom Boom
Fatboy Slim - Slash Dot Dash
Narcotic Thrust - I Like It
Bomfunk Mc's Feat Jessica Simpson - Something Going On
Music Instructor - Superfly
Scooter - The First Time

The entire fiddling took me about two hours, as I already knew pretty much which songs I wanted to add, do a bit of (bad) mixing with absolute zero beat matching and going on vibe mostly. GarageBand was solid as platinum, not crashing even once, and although the 1024x768 display doesn’t offer a lot of real estate, it’s more than enough for what I need. The mixdown creation took about 20 minutes for a file of 54 minutes in length, so that’s not too bad. However, the m4a conversion took about 45 minutes, the CPU sitting at a comfortable 99% load and 63.5ºC, with the rear fan blasting at 6250rpm. WHIZZZZZ I did convert it to MP3, as pretty much any computer can play these files without any additional codecs. The resulting audio file has 108.6 MB and 54 minutes, and is available for listening in the player below.

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andrei.xyz - Music Hour*

Episode 01: OCC 2025 Party

A trip around electronic music, featuring songs by 666, DJ Alligator, IIO, Sash!, Mauro Picotto, Bomfunk MCs, and many others!

final Wrap-up^

This week was an interesting one, with mixed feelings. I spent quite a while on the PowerBook, as I loved to type on its soft and mushy keyboard, but I can see the difference when moving back and forth to my main desktop. First of all, we’re looking at retro stuff with very rose tinted glasses. The games look blocky at least, the processing power and speed of productivity apps are atrocious and god-forbid you want to transcode a video, you’ll just have to leave the computer running for two days straight. The hardware is usually clunky and on the brink of failure, my Mighty Mouse weighs like half a kilo, the laptop battery holds about 120MAh, which is enough for about 6 minutes of idle operation, the display is not very bright, the hard drive is slow and runs hot, the wireless network is slow as well, and the speakers tore after about 3 hours of music. While using this for a week as an almost primary computer, I did have tons of fun, but I can also see how fast shit would hit the fan if tried to daily drive this. The same can be said about the iPod Mini, which is still working, but is in dire need of a battery, as the current one works only for about 20 minutes before running out of juice.

Software was king back then, all the programs and games you bought (or pirated) were yours to own and use as you pleased, with no bullshit DLCs, in-app purchases, or subscriptions to be paid. The world was simpler back then, diversity was present in the games because it was a part of the plot, not because some diversity checkboxes had to be ticked, the stories were great and shows how things can withstand the passing of time. I still think I did the right call in choosing this PowerPC PowerBook for the Old Computer Challenge of 2025, and I’m extremely happy I’ve decided to do both productive things and also have fun, because this system is still a pretty powerful beast.

Before finishing, some thanks are in order:

• Macintosh Repository — For keeping a ton of software available for download for Macs spanning all platforms. Donate to them!
• Macintosh Garden — When corporations stop giving a shit about their old products, the community comes to the rescue to bring them back to the surface. Here you can find a ton of guides, forums, games and apps downloads.

So my final conclusion is that playing from time to time with some old computers and remember how life was simpler and better is a good thing to do, but I also think we always have to return back to the present with the lessons that we used to know and apply them to modern world.

• Buy, don’t subscribe.
• All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
• Keep It Simple, Stupid.
• And as a last minute addendum: Please keep idiotic politics away from computing.

Thank you for your time and don’t forget to stay retro!

PS: If you enjoyed this article, take a look at last year’s OCC2024. I’ve also participated with some computers in #MARCHintosh and as well the RC2024 with my Pumpkin Spiced Nokia Booklet 3G. Take a look at those, maybe you’ll like them!