[calhoun] has been scratch building some great mac based MAME cabinets. His first one was a cocktail (pictured above) built from a Powerbook and using an I-PAC to interface with the arcade controls. The motherboard and hard drive are mounted to a fold down plexiglass tray. The speakers come from the Apple “globe” speakers. This is just the first model, he’s built several bar-top cabinets and is constantly trying to improve the design.
Yes there’s still a how-to this week, even though we pretty much how-to’ed a hack-cake yesterday for our HADA01 celebration. Here’s the low down on today’s how-to up on engadget:
I bought an older graphite 400 mhz G4 tower from ebay.de (germany is a great place to buy tech here in europe) a while back. The motherboard and the manufacturing of the AGP G4 series, codenamed “Sawtooth”, are really good (i.e. there weren’t huge amounts of AGP G4’s that failed in weird ways over time). After doing some preliminary reading I learned that doing a processor upgrade for a G4 can sometimes require messy heat sink paste. Some other mac proc upgrades use the same heat sink provided with your original proc. I decided on a choice that does not require thermal paste and has a larger new heat sink and fan included: the PowerLogix PowerForce47 G4/2.0GHz with 512K 1:1 L2 Cache Per Processor. (note: I was not payed by Powerlogix nor did I receive free merchandise for this how-to nor is this article a review of comparable mac proc upgrades). After having a really hard time getting this proc upgrad to work, I just wanted to put this information out there to help who it may as clearly as possible, after all I never enjoy seeing macs in the trash (unless I get to take them home and adopt them!)
Click to read “How-To: Upgrade the processor on an older macintosh G4” on engadget
Continue reading “How-To: Upgrade The Processor On An Older Macintosh G4”
The author purchased a box of 8 Apple //e main boards at auction for a dollar each. He then assembled this simple crate for them to live in. He wanted to use the burn-in connectors to supply power but they weren’t consistent. Power is delivered to the buses through a threaded rod along the bottom. Each board is net-booted by a more equipped Apple //e. It is a unique project, but I can’t think of what you would do with it.
[thanks exparrot]
Our friends over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog decided reinforce their name by trying out the OSX86. After some bumbling they got it installed (I don’t think they’re going to be Linux converts anytime soon). Conclusion? They were thoroughly impressed that it worked and how incredibly slow it was, deciding that it needed some more tweaking. I’m just happy someone else did this before I had to bite the bullet and sacrifice my only running laptop in the name of hacking.
It looks like old Pentium boxes aren’t the only systems being relegated to web server duties. This is a supposedly easy install of Debian ‘woody’. The Linux distro can not be booted directly and needs to be started from OS 7.5.3. The guide gives some handy tips on what security upgrades need to be installed. I’m guessing most highschools finally threw these out last year, but you may still luck out.
[thanks MarkDavid]
Reader EPooch needed a USB attached display for a future project. From initial research it seemed that most available solutions involved using a “usb to serial” adapter followed by a “serial to parallel” adapter and finally connecting that to the parallel interface on the lcd; Far from elegant. Eric decided to try using a USB to parallel cable intended for use with a printer. His first cable didn’t work out to well because of poor documentation. He ended up finding an adapter from Belkin that would work. Oddly, it works even though the cable was supposed to be Windows only and the Mac version of it isn’t made for OSX. Keep up the good work Eric and we hope to see more from you soon.
Yes we are back again with MORE cubeness. This is yet another Japanese doing. It’s crazy that someone even thought of this, it’s like saying “Hey! Know what would rock? A Sun SparcStation2 inside a cube!” Well maybe not that bad, but it’s a NeXT cube. The failed one from the ’80s. Still Jobs, just not Apple. They gutted an Apple G4 Cube machine and made a sleek, well, next cube out of it. Even a pretty Next logo is there to complete it. Seems like cube hacks and mods are the new fad
