Before i buy Grim Fandango I need to know if ResidualVM and Grim will run on my iMac g3 400mhz , 1gig of ram, 8mb ati rage video, and os tiger 10.4/ os9.

If residualvm runs, then GF will run, albeit maybe too slow.

You could check by downloading the demo of GF here.
Speed-wise it will be pretty much the same as the full game.

Though you'll need a winpc to unpack it as the .exe cannot be processed by residualvm (read: you will need the data files)

The demo win executable is only a WinZip self-extracting package. I was able to extract its contents on my Linux machine with unzip.

Anyway, yours machine specifications are very close to the original requirements of GF, so I'm not really sure if ResidualVM is so optimized to match the performances of the official executable. It would be nice if you could share with us yours results with ResidualVM on this machine.

okay, so do I need a zip extractor to open .exe or something like virtualPC?

I think you can use a zip extractor, at least it's a quick try

okay, and do i need to compile mac version on ppc version or is the program all set up for use?

I don't know want you mean, but I think that you can use pre-compilated version of ResidualVm from here

I _know_ that it atleast starts and runs decently on a G4 1.67 Ghz with 1.5 MiB RAM (OS X 10.5., the binaries are compiled for 10.4 or later (both Intel and PPC), and should thus work for your machine too in theory.

I remember doing some testing on a G4 867 MHz machine, can't remember how slow that was, and you are talking about a machine with less than half of that power, so can't really say. I guess the bigger question is whether our code works fast enough on that ATI-card your iMac is equipped with.

I'd be interested to know how fast (or slow) it runs on your machine.