Macintosh server possibilities?

[Grehg]

This is a cry for help. My situation is, at least somewhat, unique. I am stationed on a submarine in the US Navy. Several of my friends an I are interested in a LAN EQEMU server, which I have agreed to host.

I have read the guides and downloaded all of the key ingredients that I believe I need, however... The only computer that is available to be a dedicated server for us is my iBook G4.

So my question, indeed my plea, is if anyone has successfully run a server from a macintosh platform? It seems as if it should be possible to run the server, as long as I do not attempt to play on the server machine itself. All of the clients will be windows-based.

If anyone has any idea on how to make this work, or if it has been disproved as a viable option, I would greatly appreciate a point in the right direction. I am willing to wipe my iBook and load Linux onto it, but that is another ball of wax altogether.

To complicate matters, I do not have very many days in which to get this working before I ship out, once again, and am separated from the internet by tons of seawater.

Many thanks, in advance,
-A desperate, salty sailor

[Derision]

This subject comes up every now and again. I believe the problem is that the PowerPC based Macs stored things in memory in a different byte order to Intel processors, and that is the major problem in porting EQEmu to PowerPC based machines.

[cubber]

What about running a linux or windows install under vmware or a similar solution on the mac, then running the server from there? I would think you would be able to pull that off.

[cavedude]

Yeah, as Derision said PowerPC CPUs are significantly different from x86 CPUs. EQEmu would need to be completely written in order to get it to work. You can emulate or use virtual machines until you are blue in the face, it isn't going to change the fact that at the machine level, the CPU is processing bytes in a different order than EQEmu requires. There is software to get around endian issues, but honestly it's difficult for even a knowledgeable user to use, and you'd be lucky if you got 10% of the normal speed. EQEmu would be unusable in this situation.

Sorry to tell you this, but there is no easy solution. Software emulation or otherwise can't help in this situation. :(

[gottasummer]

I don't know if this is a possibility... but...

I've seen older computers on ebay, that are inexpensive.

I've also seen on Tiger Direct, some systems without an OS, that are very reasonable.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3945897&CatId=119

It probably isn't the answer you're looking for... but if I had to do this, I'd end up buying an off-lease computer and using it as a serverl