TURN AN OLD MAC INTO A MINECRAFT MACHINE
Can you really play games on a 10-year-old MacBook? We show you how to set up a decent Minecraft Mac – purely for the children, you understand…
Assuming you’ve got younger children – say, from around the ages of 6 to 12 – or nieces, nephews, godchildren, or any combination of the above… well, chances are they’re into Minecraft. And by “into,” we mean “obsessed to the point of playing for hours or maybe days at a time.” That usually means a Mac or iPad being commandeered for the purposes of block-busting, usually at the most inconvenient times.
Now obviously, you’re not going to want to shell out on a new Mac just to indulge the little one’s whims, no matter how much you love them. But an entire Saturday frittered away on video games is every child’s birthright, and playing Minecraft might set them up for a lucrative future career of 3D modeling or tree punching.
The answer? Dig out an old MacBook, or source one cheaply, and turn it into a dedicated Minecraft machine, safe from the temptations of the wider web in general. So first, we need to find a suitable model.
Initially, we’d hoped to find a second-hand mid-2010 MacBook, with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB of memory. That’s still really capable and would run Minecraft very comfortably. Unfortunately, it also holds its price pretty well, and we couldn’t find one for less than $250 on eBay. So we started making optimistic bids on slightly older models. We were soon watching a dozen auctions and trying to remember when they all ended. Eventually, in a haze of deadlines, things got away from us somewhat – and so it was that we ended up with a 2006 MacBook for $75, including delivery.
This model is a big step down, though, being the first of the Intel MacBooks. It has a Core Duo processor, not a Core 2 Duo, which is 32-bit and so unable to run OS X Lion. Worse, this one came with a faulty memory slot, so it was stuck at just 1GB. On the plus side, it was updated to Snow Leopard, and the case had just enough scrapes and cracks that we could turn it over to a young kid with a clear conscience.
Making it safe
– The first step was to partially sanitize the desktop. We pulled everything off the Dock, except for Finder and Trash (which can’t be removed), and changed Finder’s preferences so the hard drive’s icon didn’t show up on the desktop. We set new Finder windows to open the Desktop folder by default, and then hid the sidebar and toolbar for good measure. This didn’t stop us from quickly getting to other
folders if we needed to for whatever reason, but it limits the amount of chaos that a child can do by randomly clicking and dragging on the desktop.
Next we needed to find an up-to-date web browser. The last version of Safari that will run on the Core Duo is 5.1.10, which dates back to September 2013. That’s three years of vulnerabilities and web technology advances that this browser doesn’t know about. If you try going to YouTube in Safari 5.1.10, for example, you’ll just get an error page. We don’t really want children accessing the web on this computer, but it’s still important to have an up-to-date browser installed, in case we need to troubleshoot a problem on it.
Chrome won’t run past version 38 (from 2014), so we ended up installing Firefox 47, which is the latest version and still has a 32-bit executable. We made a local Applications folder for the admin user account and moved Safari and Firefox from the main Applications folder to it. The soon-to-be owner’s account won’t be an admin, so anyone using it won’t be able to access this folder.
Blocky graphics
– Minecraft’s current version is also a 64-bit app, so we had to locate the 32-bit version, which is tucked away at launcher.mojang.com/download/
Minecraft_legacy.dmg. We installed it and put a shortcut to it in the Dock. We could have set the Dock to auto-hide itself and put a shortcut on the desktop, or even added the game to the kid’s login items
to start it automatically – but part of our reason for finding a cheap MacBook, rather than a cheap games console, was to subtly encourage computer literacy. Knowing how the Dock works and how to start an app is an important skill these days, like learning to tie your shoelaces.
When we fired up Minecraft for the first time, the results were underwhelming. In fullscreen mode at 1280x800 resolution, we were getting five frames per second. Not good enough. So we opened the game’s video settings and changed Graphics to “fast” instead of “fancy.” Just doing this roughly doubled the frame rate. Encouraged, we went through the other options and turned off anything that might require the CPU to do any thinking at all. Smooth lighting and clouds were disabled, we set particles to minimal, and dropped the rendering distance to “lower.” This brought the frames per second up to 12–14 – still not great, but just about playable for Minecraft.
Speed run
– Then, after some searching, we came across optifine.net. We had to disable cookie blocking in Safari’s preferences just to get this clanky webpage to load, then cancel the pop-up for the dreaded MacKeeper, and close the tab that opened without our asking. Then we had to spot the inconspicuous text link to “OptiFine_1.10_HD_U_B7.jar,” surrounded by ads for other games. Apart from that, downloading this optimization mod was straightforward.
OptiFine supposedly uses more efficient rendering and 3D calculations to improve Minecraft’s performance right out of the box. We didn’t notice a difference on this
Mac, but it’s possible the benefits are more pronounced on faster models, or need more memory to be effective.
Of more interest were the extra tweakable options that OptiFine adds to Minecraft’s settings menu. We were able to turn off shadows, fog, clouds, stars, and the sky texture, and use 2D drawing shortcuts for translucent blocks, weather and dropped items. Even better, we could change the game resolution, which is normally fixed at the native resolution of the computer. By dropping to 800x600 pixels, we bumped the frame rate to 22–25fps, which is quite usable. Minecraft’s graphics are deliberately blocky anyway, so a lower resolution is much less noticeable than in other games. (In fact, it’s good enough that we just wasted over an hour writing this last paragraph, while wandering around our world to “check the frame rate…”)
In the end, we set up a working Minecraft computer for less than $100 (plus $27 if you don’t own Minecraft already) – cheap enough to give to a little one without stressing that it might get damaged. Consider also that the LEGO Minecraft Nether Fortress set, for example, is about the same price as this laptop – and our machine will probably better prepare a young player for the world in which they’ll grow up and learn in the future.