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."

Comments

The other part of the question...

[Dark Paladin]

Is "do I want this to be Mac compatible, or Linux/someotherOS compatible".

The latter answer is the easier one - the former is harder, since you would have to find "official" Apple parts to make sure the OS talked nice to all the pieces.

Either way, the idea is an interesting one.

Build your own computer?

[silvaran]

Let's assume for a second that somebody would want to take the time and effort to build a Personal Computer

God forbid. Would you prefer to buy a stock machine with sub-standard parts? Sure, there are several places (Dell) where you can customize the computer before you buy it, but nothing can match the customizability found in building your own computer. I just purchased a new computer, by taking some parts out of my old one, giving them to the service desk at my local computer shop, and telling them how to fill in the blanks. It runs solidly, I know I'm using compatible hardware, furthermore I know exactly what's in it. It beats the heck out of buying a computer with just a "sound card", "hard drive" and "motherboard", and no other descriptive names to tell you exactly what you're getting. Besides which I would imagine many on Slashdot would be perfectly capable of building their own computers.

But yeah, PowerPC takes it a step farther.

compatible or not... good point!

[Sleepy]

The author should ask to ammend the question to include (or not) compatability with Mac PPC as a goal.

Can you buy Motorola motherboards and pop in a CPU? Sure.

That's it??

It would be more interesting to consider the "platform" as part of the question. Some would be exclusively interested in compliant hardware that runs MacOS. Others would just want something that runs Linux.

Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

The question actually is not "can you", but indeed "why" or "what for". Corporate america doesn't use pixy dust. With training, instructions, and patience (or just money), you can build almost anything that intel, cisco, or apple makes. You may need a good chunk of an electrical engineering education (or time to read the books on your own). An EE could do it in his/her sleep.

So "can you" is a simple yes.

The interesting question is "why?" and "what for?".

Re:why???

[demon]

I've no idea what you'd need to do to get this MacOS compatible. Do they still use dark matter (ROM) in those machines? But if you're not going for Mac compatibility I don't know why you want to roll your own.

No, the NewWorld machines (the PowerBook G3 "Lombard" and "Pismo", PowerBook G4, and all "candy-colored" Apples) use OpenFirmware, and use a ROM-in-RAM system, where the MacOS ROM image is an ELF binary with a Forth wrapper. The OF starts the Forth wrapper, which loads the image, jumps into it, then goes on like an OldWorld from there. The MacOS ROM is kinda picky about the hardware it's on from what I gather, so it probably wouldn't like a non-Apple PPC system. OS X might not care. But if you don't care about running MacOS, why wouldn't a commodity PowerPC system be the perfect answer?