Classic Power Macs, BeOS, and AROS.

[XDelusion]

Ok, as everyone now knows, I am the proud owner of a low end Mac Performa 6200CD with a 6GB hard drive in it. Unfortunatly MacOS keeps it from performing as I would like, and drags it down like Jason at the end of Friday the 13th part 6.

 So I turn to BeOS with GREAT expectations, but low and behold, BeOS says it will ONLY support a Mac with PCI slots (what a crock), so I wonder is there a hack to get around this?

 If there is not a hack, then I really do pray to (enter you god of choice here) for an AROS port. I would assume since the classic Power Mac is now pretty much given away in this day and age that it would be prime target number 2 (second only to the commen house hold PC) since you would then be able to turn any 1 cent Power Mac into a low end Power Horse of an Amiga, in which case it should FLY even on a 75Mhz PPC! I wonder why MorphOS is not available for this hardware? So anyhow, I hope this happens, and I hope that the fact that it does not have PCI slots does not hold it back from a great OS.

[techiebk]

I hate to tell you this, but it is not the os that is slowing you down. The link at the bottom is to a lowendmac page documenting the shortcomings of the Performa 6200. AFAIK, the 6200 is a severely comprimised piece of hardware. I do not know if I would spend much time trying to tweak it. If you simply want a cheap Mac to play with, look for a 6400 or 6500. They can be had for very little, and are much better machines.

http://www.lowendmac.com/tech/x200.shtml

[techiebk]

One more thing XDelusion. That userpic really scares me.  It looks like some member of the British royals that they keep locked in the attic.

[that_punk_guy]

Maybe one of the open source BeOS clones might support it. But I don't know if any of them are ready for use yet...?

Running AROS on Apple hardware would be cool though, if only for the cool aesthetic ;-).  Shame it's so expensive to buy a modern mac, even second hand :-(

[Wolfe]

XDelusion

The 6200 is the worst mac made, probably ever!  Look for a 6360 Mobo.  Fits the same case & has PCI. And the 6360 can be upgraded to a G3.  Also, 5400 ?, 6400 and for crapy graphics upgrade (ATI Rage II) you can use - 5500 ?, or 6500.  However, the tower mobo have 2 PCI but in the desktop case you might not be able to use both.
6200 = 75mhz but no fpu and a 25mhz clogged bus.

[XDelusion]

I'll prolly update the mother board in time, that is if I can find one for the right price anyhow.

 I'm still quite curious to see AROS V.S. Mac OS on this computer, I'd still say AROS could DEFINATLY stomp Mac OS to the ground, and make the even the worst Mac ever look good.


 I wonder why my avatar scares everyone so much!?!?

[bloodline]

XDelusion wrote:
I'll prolly update the mother board in time, that is if I can find one for the right price anyhow.

 I'm still quite curious to see AROS V.S. Mac OS on this computer, I'd still say AROS could DEFINATLY stomp Mac OS to the ground, and make the even the worst Mac ever look good.


 I wonder why my avatar scares everyone so much!?!?

I know it's not like me to jump into a thread about AROS... but...

AROS is being ported to OpenFirm ware PPC  (Read Pegasos and newer mac) computers.
The biggest hurdle of any Port is the hardware technical documents.
Once the PPC port is running (and GCC and TCP/IP are functional), no doubt we shall see AROS supporting more exotic PPC hardware.

I recognise the your avitar but I don't remember where from.

[XDelusion]

Ok Macwise, what is to be considered Open Firmware Hardware?

[amigamad]

The 6200 is the worst mac made, probably ever!

i thought every apple machine was crap . :-D

[Ilwrath]

Ok Macwise, what is to be considered Open Firmware Hardware?

Not ours.
The OpenFirmware Macs are basically the same ones as are supported by OSX.  There might be a few extras in there, as well, but that's the general list of it.

Personally, I have a 7200 that for some strange reason I haven't deposited in a dumpster yet, and I'd vote IT worst Mac ever.  It DOES have PCI slots, yet they seem to be hardware flawed, and not actually usable under any OS.  From the dark days of Apple, for sure.

[DonnyEMU]

I have one 603 based Mac, and a 7200 (which actually uses the PowerPC 601 chip, which has very limited memory addressing compared to the 603 based models. Apple for the longest time said the 7200 couldn't even be upgraded to a faster cpu. A 3rd party accelerator company changed it. It is really not upgradeable very easily to 603 processors, and it wasn't an OS X candidate because of this..  

The 603 model I have has one PCI slot. I have installed BeOS 4.0 and 5.0 on this . Beos 4 is very supported, but I own a copy of BeOS Pro 5, and it's PowerPC support was buggy at best.. I think they spent very little time with the update to 5.0 for PPC users.  

Installing from the same CD to intel boxes you find a better supported OS with a lot more features. I hope whoever is doing openBeOS for the PPC is really revamping it, because I considered pro 5 to be lacking most of the features on the PPC version that were present with the intel version.

With 603 mac's also you have to still keep a mac OS partition on the machine even with BeOS installed and so the machine can boot. So the "open firmware" you talk about probably just mean's it can boot a non MacOS product.

[DonnyEMU]

I have one 603 based Mac, and a 7200 (which actually uses the PowerPC 601 chip, which has very limited memory addressing compared to the 603 based models. Apple for the longest time said the 7200 couldn't even be upgraded to a faster cpu. A 3rd party accelerator company changed it. It is really not upgradeable very easily to 603 processors, and it wasn't an OS X candidate because of this..  

The 603 model I have has one PCI slot. I have installed BeOS 4.0 and 5.0 on this . Beos 4 is very supported, but I own a copy of BeOS Pro 5, and it's PowerPC support was buggy at best.. I think they spent very little time with the update to 5.0 for PPC users.  

Installing from the same CD to intel boxes you find a better supported OS with a lot more features. I hope whoever is doing openBeOS for the PPC is really revamping it, because I considered pro 5 to be lacking most of the features on the PPC version that were present with the intel version.

With 603 mac's also you have to still keep a mac OS partition on the machine even with BeOS installed and so the machine can boot. So the "open firmware" you talk about probably just mean's it can boot a non MacOS product.

[dammy]

Wasn't AROS ported to PReP awhile ago by MSchulz?

Dammy

[bloodline]

dammy wrote:
Wasn't AROS ported to PReP awhile ago by MSchulz?

Dammy

He did, but I think that work got side tracked by the Pegasos (Open Firmware) port... since that is probably the more interesting of the two :-D

[mikeymike]

and drags it down like Jason at the end of Friday the 13th part 6.

And I thought I quoted some strange obscure films sometimes :-)