Hello, We are a startup company which will develop casual games. We've developed our first game for Windows and Linux, and we've also ported our game to OSX. We've used Apple computers with Intel CPU but we want our game to work on PPC (Power PC apple computers). So we compiled our game as "universal binary" and we tried to run it on a Power PC Mac Mini. It did not work. So we ported our game to power PC using that Mac Mini. The problem was from big endian (which is PPC), intel is low endian. Our game works well on Apple OSX PPC, now comes the part where i need your help. Porting the game to a ppc required a powerfull PPC. We used mini and it took 2 days, most of the time we've waited for that mac mini to compile (cross compilation ppc and intel is not working). So we need a powerful Apple PPC for our future games. (Also I have to mention that binary compiled on mac mini ppc worked well on mac with intel cpus, and also binary is universal, so no emulator is running. At this point we are thinking to purchase a refurbished Apple G5 (pro) with dual 1,8 ghz cpus. My question to you is: is ok to purchase an apple computer with G5 CPU to build applications for Apple PPC computers (notebooks and desktops with cpu G3, G4 and G5)? I ask you that because I heard there is big difference between G4 and G5 (as architecture). Will my G5 programs run on G4 and G3s? (We will build for Leopard and Tiger, PPC, using that computer). You might say that there's no point in building ppc apps, and that with snow leopard ppc platform will not be supported but from what we've asked around there are still too many users with g3 and g4 hardware. (most of them with osx 10.4 tiger). Looking forward to your answer, by the way, you have a nice forum there, very informed and up to date. I wish you luck to all game developers. best regards mike

Don't waste your money buying a G5 Mac. Fix the code on your Intel Mac so it can deal with the endian differences between Intel and PowerPC processors. Take a look at Apple's Universal Programming Guidelines document. You can read it in Xcode or online at the following URL:

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/universal_binary/universal_binary_intro/universal_binary_intro.html

If you follow the guidelines and set the deployment target to 10.4 in Xcode, you will be able to build a universal binary on your Intel Mac that runs on both Tiger and Leopard.