Getting started: questions about iphone game dev

Do you have to have a mac/iphone to develop games for the iphone?

Is there some sort of windows/linux emulation that can be used instead?

If not, whats the cheapest bare min apple machine to do this with?

Do you have to have a mac/iphone to develop games for the iphone?

>> You can use the simulator... but the performance really doesn't represent the one that you'll have on the device.

Is there some sort of windows/linux emulation that can be used instead?

>> There's something experimental that I've build, but it is still in development and in any case you'll have to recompile on MacOS in order to push your app on the app store.

https://sio2interactive.forumotion.net/features-requests-f5/request-pc-or-mac-compilable-build-t710-15.htm

If not, whats the cheapest bare min apple machine to do this with?

>> The cheapest MAC that you can afford will do

I know that on the iphone dev network it says that you must have a Mac with an intel processor and the latest OS, so according to apple a PowerPC processor will not work. Has anyone tried developing on a Mac with a PowerPC processor? Is it just slower?

"The iPhone SDK and Xcode tools can be used on any Intel-based Macintosh computer running Mac OS X v10.5 or later" - from Apple's site. It would be interesting to hear from anyone who's tried to run it on earlier OS's and PowerPC's.

Anyway, if you want to buy a new mac, the cheapest are the Mac Mini's. I got mine for $449 with 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 1GB (2x512MB) RAM, 80 gig HD, etc., from www.bhphotovideo.com. They're a reputable outfit and still have the price if you wanted to buy new. I think you can get the same deal for $50, maybe $100, less from ebay, but it might not come with the OS, iLife '09 (very cool) and the warranty - read carefully.

Either way, welcome to the SIO2 forums, home of the greatest iphone game engine on earth!