Slashdot Mirror
Build Your Own PowerPC?
amokk asks: "Let's assume for a second that somebody would want to take the time and effort to build a Personal Computer but base it on a PowerPC architecture. Besides saying 'Buy a Mac' (I already have one) or 'Buy an IBM server', is there any way of acquirng the individual parts and slapping them together? Why you would want to do this isn't up for debate. Rather, this is one of those 'wouldn't it be neat if...' type of experiments."
You can buy refurb'ed Mac motherboards from Shreve Systems in Shreveport, LA. They are a really good source to start with.
The AmigaOne G3 SE is a fairly generic ATX motherboard with 133MHz DIMM sockets, IBM 750CXe PowerPC chip (600Mhz), 4xPCI, 1xAGP, etc, etc.
.. or is that a bit too easy? :-)
It runs AmigaOS 4 or PPC Linux quite happily. Plonk one of these in a standard case and you've got yourself a DIY PPC solution
Meep meep
Pegasos
Should be available now AFAIK.
There is also the Amiga One which right now is mostly vapor (E.g. not purchasable at the moment)
See, I mentioned both.
I found a fast warez site: http://warez.it.kth.se
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/15/ 1918233&mode=thread&tid=181
Just stating the obvious
Are you looking for something like this?
From the site:
The boards do appear to be available - anyone tried them?
This site has instructions on what you need, where to get it, and how to put it all together. Pretty useful if you want to build your own Mac and don't want to pay Apple's prices.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
If you really want to build a system from parts there are several places you can go. Motorola sells evaluation platforms that consisto of a motherboard (essentially a backplane) and CPU modules that plug into it. It's calld Sandpoint. You can get third party CPU modules for it from Tundra (who also sells whole kits with their own system board). Marvell/Galileo sells a platform that is well suited to building a PC style machine with PPC hardware, and you can get a variety of processor cards for it ranging from low end G3 style processors up to dual 7450 processors.
Some of the best PPC machines available right now can't be built from parts simply because they're on a single board. My current to y is the cyclades TS-100 it's only 1"x3"x3", has dual CPUs and can be had for under $200.
incripshin
Check out these guides for repackaging either a Beige G3 or Blue/White G3 in a standard ATX case. All that's needed that is "Apple offical" is the motherboard stuff; memory, video ( uses Mac PCI video cards ), HD, and CD-ROM are off the shelf PC items. They use ZIF CPUs which can be obtained from Apple, Sonnet, NewerTech, and many others.
Specs:
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
Motorola and IBM don't sell their CPUs to end users. You can order a G4 or even a G5 (PPC 8500 series) from one of Mot's suppliers like Arrow, but I believe they force you to order in high quantities (40+ at a time).
During the dot-bomb era, several companies like Eternal Computing and Silicon Fruit promised to offer affordable PowerPC motherboards to retail customers. Nothing ever came of it (insert Apple conspiracy theory here).
I think there's a market for retail PowerPC motherboards, or there will be once IBM's 970 hits the market. It's fun to mess with exotic hardware like the PPC, and its performance is very impressive considering its limited clock speed. IBM has published a spec for PowerPC logic boards that is available for free on its website (i'm sure someone else has posted the link by now).
Linux would run on these things in no time (maybe we could even build our own TiVOs with 'em). And Mac OS X would be easy to port, with or without Apple's help.
I don't think IBM would like this idea very much however, since it might undercut their huge margins on PPC-based servers. On the other hand, if they manufactured and sold the motherboard for cheap, they could bring PPC to a much larger audience.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Macopz.com "build a Mac" page
They have links to all the parts suppliers, the parts add up to $800
Breakfast served all day!
This is incorrect. The Apple ROMs you're referring to haven't been used in a long time, like more than 5 years. All modern Macs use Open Firmware. This is exactly why people are asking about do-it-yourself Macs so often. It's now possible.
Darwin is not open source.
/bin/sh, and adds python and ruby as scripting languages.
Here is a quote from the Darwin Website:
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Darwin 6.0.1, the Open Source core underlying Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar". The Darwin kernel features many enhancements from FreeBSD 4.4 and the KAME IPv6/IPsec code, and is one of the first Open Source operating system releases to be built using GCC 3.1. Darwin 6.0.1 features improved support for POSIX threads and adds several reentrant C library functions, as well as numerous new and updated libraries including ncurses, bzip, and SASL. Darwin now uses bash as the default
We are updating the Darwin Tools package enabling you to build Darwin components on top of Mac OS X itself. [Sep 23 2002]
GPL no, open source yes...
-Craig
Mac On Linux will let you run MacOS (including OS X) on any PowerPC system that runs Linux -- even if MacOS won't run natively on the hardware. Mac On Linux provides a MacOS-compatible virtual machine (but it doesn't emulate the processor, so it's nearly as fast as running native).
A FAQ is available.
I believe that there are a few components of MacOS X that Apple has licenced and cannot release the source to, so Darwin has replacements for those components, but it is supposed to be binary compatible with MacOS X.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
The common term is biodiesel or greasel for the mixture. When used with new diesel engines, they actually run cleaner than a natural gas engine. Some have made their own biodiesel for as little as $.50 USD/gallon, for quite a large savings. In NJ, the price of diesel just went up about $0.10 USD... The primary considerations are seals, older rubber seals will break down and fail, spewing all over the place. The solution? Use newer plastic seals, they last much longer anyway. There is a power loss of appr. 5%, but on new engines you don't feel all that much of a difference.
The main problem building a Mac PPC using a refurbished motherboard seemed to be the power supply, IIRC. Needs a 28v trickle feed.
Anyway, worth a read.
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
me a number based on the order in which I joined
One thing you can try to get parts is going to your local 'authorized mac repair specialist.' The local mac repair shop where I live is usually okay about it. Aparently the only problem with building MACs is the bus structure between all of the cards for NIC etc... You are going to have to make sure all of your hardware is MAC compatible because the bus addressing etc... is supposedly a little different from that of PC's.
Erutangis ym si siht.
OpenFirmware is a consortium (granted dominated by sun.) It is a non machine specific framework that provides a standard boot time interface. It may look nothing like a pc's bios, but still could be considered a bios, without some type of bios, your system doesn't boot. While it's true that apple now uses openfirmware, that was not the case prior to the powerpc. And even though it's an open standard, it still must be implemented at a level that is specific to the specific hardware. A simplistic anology would be OpenFirmware:bios Posix:Linux
Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script.