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[minasss]

if anyone is interested I've found a couple of other interesting dev tools:

GarageGames tools (TGB, TGAE etc...) http://www.garagegames.com
Love http://love2d.org/

[Hayden Scott-Baron]

I'm a big fan of unity, of course. It's not necessarily the best choice for 2D games though, you have to jump through some peculiar hoops to do 2D in Unity.

Other than that, cross platform stuff like Allegro, Pygame, etc all seem like good options.

Also, iPhone development requires XCode running in OSX 10.5 (Leopard) or newer. That also means a rough minimum of a 700MHz+ G4, but preferably an Intel setup. 

Actually iphone development requires Intel, it doesn't work on G4 at all.

[Kovan]

Also, iPhone development requires XCode running in OSX 10.5 (Leopard) or newer. That also means a rough minimum of a 700MHz+ G4, but preferably an Intel setup. 

If you buy an older, used mac (probably the cheapest route), and you plan to do iPhone development, either make sure it has 10.5 installed or figure that cost into your purchase.

This was a stumbling block when I was thinking about digging up a dirt cheap mac.

Just to be absolutely clear to anyone thinking of jumping into iPhone Dev, the iPhone SDK REQUIRES an intel mac.  So steer clear of the PPC machines!

As of iPhone SDK 2.2 you also need Mac OS X 10.5.5 or higher.  If you are using Hackintosh (which does work with iPhone development) make sure you get iDeneb 1.3 or equivalent.

I think the Mac Mini is probably the best solution for getting into mac/iphone development on the cheap.  It's about $600 (Canadian) and the specs are decent.

Note that you also need to pay $99 for the iPhone Developer Program if you want to put your software on a device (you can't possibly do all of your development with the simulator, there are some very real differences because of the architectures)

[mildmojo]

Just to be absolutely clear to anyone thinking of jumping into iPhone Dev, the iPhone SDK REQUIRES an intel mac.  So steer clear of the PPC machines!

As of iPhone SDK 2.2 you also need Mac OS X 10.5.5 or higher.  If you are using Hackintosh (which does work with iPhone development) make sure you get iDeneb 1.3 or equivalent.

Why do development tools that target years-old platforms require a shiny-new OS, anyway?

I apologize for the misinformation--a G4 running 10.5 is the minimum spec for XCode, which is as far as I got when I last investigated the platform.  The iPhone SDK readme clearly states that it requires an Intel processor.

[nunix]

if anyone is interested I've found a couple of other interesting dev tools:

GarageGames tools (TGB, TGAE etc...) http://www.garagegames.com
Love http://love2d.org/

Avoid garagegames like the plague. Terrible support, lots of bugs. </bitter>

Friend of mine came across love2d the other day and has started playing with it. It's got quite a few things going for it (opengl, open source, lua)  but we haven't delved deep enough yet to see how well it handles different sorts of games.

[Hayden Scott-Baron]

TGB was one of the most horrible experiences I've ever had with game development.
Even their simple tutorial wouldn't work, and I was adviced to 'purchase the source code' within one hour of using it.