Well since She who must be feared and obeyed tends to hog the Intel iMac, I bought a (very) cheap g4 800 from 2002 for my photo retouching and to learn how to build missions (I was allowed a $NZ300 budget )
I thought it wouldn't run SF1918 since the minimum spec on many sites had said 'g4 1gig' ; but it runs just fine! Mind you I have bumped the ram to 1.25 but it's still got the crappy 32mb video card - it gets a bit jerky on missions with lots of moving elements (same with SF1945) but still playable.
I bought an apple 17" lcd (also dead cheap) at the same time with the old powered adc connector so I'll have to hunt a bit for a replacement 64/128 video card - ah well, next year.
Total cost; pMac $NZ100
display $NZ 100
mouse and kboard $NZ30
extra ram $NZ20

Total $NZ250 about $US170 (including freight costs)

Old tech sure,but they're easy to work on,still run plenty of software and look great (Apple's best design period imho).
Anyway just thought I'd share; and if you're looking for a spare mac they're a great choice.

Cheers!
R.

These are good machines. I bought a several off craiglist for $50 each here for use at my work (a highschool). They were being discarded by a community college. With 10.4.11 they work great still. Sometimes there are complaints about poor youtube performance, but the teachers shouldn't be on there at work anyway

Yeah, I'm the caretaker at a primary school and I'm always nagging the Principal et al to get a few old Macs to replace the continually dying pile of crappy old (and new!) PCs that clutter the classrooms. 'Look' I say ' I can get you perfectly good eMacs for a tenth of the price of that new HP that's just shat itself for the third time and they'll look great when the parents check the rooms out and take up half the space' But does she listen?
The more I use the powerMac the more I like the old girl, particularly when I remember how I could never have afforded one when they were new; it makes me feel rich . Same thing for my main hobby, Photography; older dSLRs (and hell, film bodies) are great bargains now.
Cheers!
R.

be careful with those emacs. We purchased 6 used ones from a reseller and 3 of them arrived with major problems. They would crash and were very unstable. We ended up sending two of them back ($75 dollar shipping charge!) and had one repaired by apple for $200 (logic board replacement) . Apparently around the time these emacs were made (they are 1.25ghz g4s) there were a bunch of bad capacitors being used by computer manufactures which would fail catastrophically. After going through this experience I don't want anything to do with emacs! We purchased some 17" intel imacs for $650 each and they are much better computers.

Ah, good to know that; I recall there were capacitor problems with early g5 iMacs as well and some of the mirror-door model pMacs have psu issues.
Still our old g4 imac is still going strong at my nephew's and it must be around 7 years old now. I too like the intel machines and the one we've got is great but I couldn't afford a second one (maybe in 5 years time )!
Cheers and happy Xmas!
R.