Few questions about Mac OS 9

[ValiantVenality]

Hey there guys! I got a few Q's about Mac OS 9. Im getting a Power Mac G4 from Craigslist, but for some reason it doesn't have a hard drive. So I'm going to get a hard drive and install Mac OS 9. For some reason I don't like all the bells and whistles that OS X has. It's just a personal preference I guess. And since it doesn't take that much to run OS 9, it should run pretty well considering it has 1 gig of ram, and 800mhz processor. I think he said it was the "Quicksilver" model or something. I've never owned a mac in my life. My dad had an iBook, but I didn't like it all that much. It was too small. I like desktops much better. So finally, here are some of the questions I have.

1. I watched the unveiling of Mac OS 9 in 1999. I found it on Youtube. They heavily talked about the Sherlock 2 application. I watched a demonstration of it and it looks freaking awesome. My question is, will it still work? It might sound dumb, but I have no idea if it was a service or something.

2. If I got the latest version of Flash I could for it, could I still watch Youtube, and go on Facebook? Or would that not work? I hope it still does!

3. What are some fun games I could get for it? Kinda weird, but I'd like to play some games on it too. I think they have Sim City for it which was totally awesome.

Thanks it advance guys!

VV

[Black Six]

1. Sherlock wasn't really all that great. It had some uses but I think its been overshadowed by things like Google.
2. Facebook doesn't use Flash, but the bigger problem would be a browser that's compliant with more modern standards. iCab was the last browser to put out a new version that works in OS 9, so that's your best bet. Last I checked, even the last version of Netscape that came out for OS 9 has some issues today. As far as Youtube, I don't know offhand.
3. Any Blizzard game up to and including Diablo 2 will run fine. You should see if you can find old Bungie games like Marathon and Myth. Back in the day I played a lot of LucasArts games as well like TIE Fighter and Dark Forces. Plenty of other PC games had Mac versions too, but you can run those on a PC so I'm not sure what the big deal about running them on a Mac would be.

Good luck. I loved OS 9 and used it for a couple years even after OS X came out. I still find it the easiest operating system to find settings and optimize and troubleshoot, but maybe that's just because I used it for so many years.

[bicostp]

Right up my alley. <3 Mac OS Classic. (I cut my teeth on 6.0..8-7.6.1)

1. Black Six is right about Sherlock; it never was very good. It's basically beefed-up Find File for local stuff. I think the later versions were more integrated with Apple's early personal site hosting system... iWeb? iDisk? iForget.
2. You need a browser? Get Classilla. Basically, they took the latest version of Mozilla that ran on OS 9 and started backporting the changes made since. It requires at least OS 8.6 because it requires unicode. It's a good compliment to iCab. I ran iCab on my PM7600/132 (with Apple video capture card!), and it worked just fine, albiet a tad slow. (Your G4 will be loads faster than my 603e was, though).
3. There's tons of stuff out there. Get your hands on some of the CDs that came with MacAddict magazine (like these or these); they're full of games and apps.