Help with iMac G3 and external hard drive

Hi. Ok so I need to know how to play games and movies from an external hard drive to a Mac. I know nothing about Mac's as I had never had one. I had a PC that I downloaded some games and movies onto for my kids (yes it was legal and not cheap to do so). I put the games and movies onto an external hard drive. I now have a iMac G3 (yes I know it's old and only has 8 GB on it). Since the Mac doesn't have a lot of space I want to keep everything external. Anyway, now when I plug in the external hard drive it wants to format it on the Mac. Of course I don't want to format it because I need the stuff on it. What do I need to do to get the games and movies to play on the Mac. I don't want to transfer them off of the hard drive I just want to play them. Do I need to download something to the Mac? I heard of something called FAT32. Would that work? Thank you!!

You've presented us with quite a challenge. The hard drive is likely formatted either FAT32 or (more likely) NTFS, but the fact that the Mac wants to format it tells me it's not reading your drive correctly, which suggests that you might be running OS 9 or some really, really OLD version of OS X. That you have an 8GB drive (I'm pretty sure you didn't mean RAM there) tells me this much be a REALLY old Mac.

If you can give us any more details on what model you have (you'll find a lot of this information in "About this Mac" under the Apple menu, we can probably advise you further. I'll tell you up front that I'm VERY doubtful that the games are going to work, since they are PC games, and that if the movies are Windows Media format, you're not going to be able to play those either.

Yes I'm sure it is pretty old. It's one of the old iMac G3 all-in-one desktops. I got it just so my young kids can have a very cheap computer to play games and movies only on but that doesn't seem to be working well lol. It has Quicktime with a bunch of channels on it like youtube as options and it has iMovie on it but that's it. I guess I just assumed if the games were Mac compatible they would work and I guess I assumed all movies would work on PC or Mac. Thanks for the help =D

The OS is either an 8.1 or 8.5 by the way. I haven't checked this morning yet but I doubt it is a 9.0. And yes I meant the hard drive was 8 GB sorry.

It might be an 8.6 at the most though. I'm thinking about upgrading it with a 1998 iMaxPower iMac Upgrade Chip, going up to 1 GB RAM, etc. I don't know how big of a hard drive it will take though (have to research some more). I don't even know if the 1998 iMaxPower iMac Upgrade Chip will be worth it or not though. I don't know what OS is the max it will support but I think it is OS X 10.3.1 maybe?

While the iMac was a revolutionary computer in its day, that day (from what you describe) was at least 14 years ago, or three aeons in computer terms.

I would not spend a penny to upgrade that machine any more than I would spend a penny to upgrade a 14-year-old PC. What you need to make this plan work is something a LOT newer, something made this century. It doesn't have to be either expensive or recent, but it needs to be a LOT more recent than what you've got there.