cheesestraws
Well-known member
Might be worth seeing if you can get hold of a "powerbook edition" scuznet; that will do both ethernet and HD over SCSI for you...
I had this exact behavior on my 180, and believe I traced it to a finicky ribbon cable connection between the display board and the CPU card. Wiggling at the exact right angle got me a floppy disk and flashing question mark. Interesting how these computers can't boot "headless" i.e. with no display board connected.Alright so my parts board from eBay came and I was very excited to get a good connector for the battery. I figured first I’d just try the new board and see if it worked nope not that easy screen just shows garbage and I didn’t get any boot chime.
So I switched back to the original board and verified it still booted to the flashing folder. It did so first step is to remove the old broken connector.
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Then I grabbed the connector off the donor board.
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And soldered it onto my old board.
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Beautiful that’s how it should look!
Then decided to epoxy a few broken standoffs while I was in there.
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Buttoned it all back up and!!!
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Now I have no boot chime and garbage on the screen.![]()
For Ethernet on the PB180, you are limited to SCSI to Ethernet devices or to one of the LocalTalk to Ethernet adapters (“Etherwave” is one name that springs to mind: https://archive.org/details/farallon-etherwave-mac-powerbook-adapter-manual-guide-book/mode/2up ). Throughput of the former was comparable to Ethernet speeds of the day, and throughput of the latter was better than LocalTalk by a factor of 2x or 3x or some such, but slower than Ethernet. You could also opt for a software bridge running on a different machine as well.
If I were you with that machine, I’d let it run for an hour or so to see whether there is any screen tunnelling before spending much more money….
I had this exact behavior on my 180, and believe I traced it to a finicky ribbon cable connection between the display board and the CPU card. Wiggling at the exact right angle got me a floppy disk and flashing question mark. Interesting how these computers can't boot "headless" i.e. with no display board connected.