• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

Powerbook 540c Resurrection

croissantking

Well-known member
I just made myself a ‘printer cable’ (crossover cable) with Mini-DIN8 plugs and 3m of nine-wire cable. I was delighted when it worked - my Powerbook G3 Wallstreet (9.2.1) and my Powerbook 100 (7.1) can now see each other, and read each other’s files!

I must admit, I was baffled by how I shared just one folder on each, yet the entire hard drive was available to browse on the other, and even any other connected drives. But that seems familiar, I think I remember similar ‘accidental total access’ across a school Phonenet network, about 30 years ago.
If you connect as a guest then it only makes available the folders you’ve shared.
 

pyranger

Active member
that is totally cool! nice job on the homemade crossover cable. I have been diving into rascsi - I have 2 of them: 1 connected to my 520 and another connected to a Classic II. In addition to emulating multiple scsi devices, the raspberry pi's also emulate a daynaport scsi2ethernet adapter....and wifi, for that matter, which provides network connectivity through the scsi port. And since the raspberry pi's are running linux, they can run netatalk which is an apple file sharing server for linux. This works really well, allowing the macs to share files through the pi's shared folders.
 

MacUp72

Well-known member
I bring this up again for some questions for those who did that RAm transplantation mod..
my 540c RAM board looks like this ( its only the basic 8 MB) :

ram.jpg

you can solder 16 chips on it, the actual installed now reads 444Y KM48C2100ALLT-7

I have two PB 3400c RAM spare that I dont need and can salvage for this, its 32 MB..of course the 3400 is IDE based and a bit newer, that chip reads KM48V2104CS-L6. I also noticed that board has some ICs on it, too ( under the connector)
I wonder if I can use those.

IMG_1119-1.jpg
 

MacUp72

Well-known member
I guess not, the dimensions of the old chips are 18mm x 10mm, height 1mm. The 3400 chips are about 20mm long
 

croissantking

Well-known member
The small difference in package size would not matter (you can see that the 540c RAM card has long pads to accommodate a narrower chip). However, the 3400c RAM card has 3.3V chips, but the 540c needs 5V chips. You can do what I did and find some old 5V desktop EDO/FPM RAM sticks on eBay and harvest the chips from those.

TLDR: It won’t work but you have other options.
 
Top