PPC Mac Clones

[LCGuy]

Either that, or depending on what gear you're in, you'll soon see a flashing set of red and blue lights in your rear vision mirror.

 

[Mars478]

I remember watching the video of Steve Jobs saying that they had to eliminate all the clones to get back to business.

But that hasn't stopped me :0

I Hackintoshed my MSI Wind.

 

[Osgeld]

Apple is semi unique in the fact that they do control their own market (in a royal pita 1980's way) but I often wonder about "the man" and his choices

Imagine a world in which apple released OSX on the pc back in 2000, they actually would have had a very good chance of toppling Microsoft and become much larger than they have ever been

But at least someone beat some smarts into him and he "blessed" the pc world with ipod (about the only thing really floating apple there for a while)

 

[Bolle]

Id go for a PowerWave Stargate with Nubus/PCI. }

just because nubus is teh win

 

[LCGuy]

And if this wasn't about PowerPCs, I'd mention the holy grail of clones - the Radius SkyLab :O

 

[trag]

Id go for a PowerWave Stargate with Nubus/PCI. }
just because nubus is teh win

According to a friend of mine who used to work in PCC support, the Stargate never worked right. It was their worst support call.

 

[trag]

My Mac clone days started with seven of the Outbound Laptop Model 125s which I found at CompuAdd's back dock sale. I fixed them up and sold four of them for enough money to cover my costs and allow me to keep one, give one to my girlfriend (now my partner, almost 20 years later) and sell one at half my regular price to my room mate at the time. I could write a whole article on how cool the Model 125 was...

My next clone was a Power Computing Power 120. I bought that on clearance or something for about $400 or was it $600? So many years... This was a PM8100 clone which ran at 120 MHz. I used that machine for years, until I switched to the...

SuperMac S900 which was being cleared out for $599, IIRC. In a way I'm still using the S900. I bought various parts and extra motherboards as the stock around the world was clearanced away. I have my original S900 mainly running an old Umax SCSI based scanner. My main machine is a large PC case with an S900 motherboard installed and a standard ATX power supply adapted to the S900. It has room for six optical drives...

But that case is versatile. For a couple of years I had a PCC PowerTower Pro motherboard in there instead.

I think the PowerTower Pro is a little better and more compatible because it has two Bandit chips instead of using a PCI-PCI Bridge to provide six PCI slots, but I think the S900 board is probably better constructed and more durable. I had to switch back to the S900 board because the PTP became flakey--I think from stress on the CPU socket. The case I'm using didn't provide support for the upper edge of the CPU card. This S900 board hasn't minded that for years.

I have a G4 MDD waitiing to become my main machine, but somehow I never make the time to switch. At this point my old S900 in frankentein case is like a coral reef. It's encrusted with all manner of growths which are going to be a pain to remove and sort out to a new machine...

Oh, and my current S900 motherboard has the PM9600 Kansas ROMs installed in place of the originals, which gives native support for speculative processing with G3 processors without any Open Firmware hacks.

 

[Bunsen]

The Vertegri ImediaEngine V7, based on the Tanzania architecture / 240 MHz PowerPC 604e / 64 MB / 2.1 GB / in a heavy, metal portable case. / the first line of portables to ever use the PowerPC 604e processor. The result was a fast portable that weighs about 12-15 pounds and didn't come with a battery.

 

[Temetka]

Gah!

That laptop is super ugly.

However the Skylab sounds like it truly was the Holy Grail.

"As far as Mac Prototypes go, one of the most glorious I ever saw was the Radius 'SkyLab.' That was the development name for the project we were working on. Radius at that time was an early Mac peripheral manufacturer. We had made a Mac II accelerator called the Radius Rocket.

"The SkyLab was a server with 14 NuBus slots and a power supply so huge you could do arc welding on the side with it. It also had fifteen 3-1/2" drive bays, and four 5-1/4" drive bays (for CD ROMs or optical drives).

"The idea was for it to be a dedicated Image RIPer for graphic houses. It never happened.

"I was a Radius employee from 1988 to 1997. The SkyLab box was just as I described: power supply, drive bays and slots. The processors were the Radius Rocket Accelerators. Each Radius Rocket contained its own 68040 Processor and six 72-pin SIMM sockets. The concept was that it would operate as a distributed processor. A render farm. Your computer would have a plug-in that would break down your tasks and divide it amongst the Rocket Processors.

"At the Time of development, we didn't have an agreement with Apple. Only after showing SkyLab to Apple did they have us sign a Licensing agreement. (This was before the PowerPC clones.) An interesting result of the licensing agreement allowed us to use the actual Mac ROMs, but we were forbidden to include a boot floppy. Which was fine, since the whole thing ran from a console application anyway. So we had a Mac SE/30 as the console, but it would run with almost any '020 Mac.

"Another stipulation of the agreement was that we could not actually come out and say we were using the Mac ROMs. This was because at the time DayStar Digital and a few others were working on accelerators, and Apple didn't want to look as if they were playing favorites.

"From what I remember it was possible to boot the whole shebang from a floppy, but for fear of God and Apple it was not pursued or ever mentioned ever again. Using the SE/30 or a Mac IIcx, the whole thing was run like a headless server. The ROM issue was handled by us loading the ROM image into RAM. I forget why we did that, but just another aspect of the goofiness."

-by Anonymous Former Radius Engineer

Holy Grail indeed. }

Get that, an AWS and a MaxxBoxx and you should be all set for Unobtaniun dual wide Macs.