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| Author | FYI: my powerbook 1400 exploits & info (Read 8571 times) | ||||||||||
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aletheianalex
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on: September 28, 2007, 00:48
Hey all! I am surfing right now on my powerbook w/ 7.6.1!! I thought I would put up a thread about my various expliots, fixes, experiences and hacks with the 1400 for posterity in case it helps anyone else. Feel free to ask about anything I post here. I will update the thread from time to time. The models that I base this on are a 117MHz/16Meg RAM and a 133MHz/32Meg RAM (and soon a 166MHz with 64Meg!!!) HARDWARE: PRAM: both my PRAM batteries are dead. The 'books will boot with a dead battery, which may be useful info since SOME macs won't boot at all with a dead PRAM...but the 1400 get funky from time to time. I will be rebuilding both the batteries eventually and will post about that when I do Battery pack: Both my battery packs are dead too. You can get the replacement NI-MH cells for about $50-60 total and rebuild your own pack if you are good with a soldering iron and don't destroy the onboard circuitry in the battery pack... I'll post part numbers when I get around to doing it. EXPANSION BAY: I found an adaptor that will let you hack a broken CD-ROM drive into an expansion bay hard drive. I'll post details when that project is finished HARD DRIVES: I put large hard drives in both. I didn't think that the machines would see the whole drive, but they seem to! I have 10Gig from an old PISMO in one and 30G from a dead iBook in the other. I DO have them partitioned for dual-booting though, so maybe that is why i can use the whole thing OVERCLOCKING: I rifled through Motorola/Freescale's old 603e documentation and decoded all the various externally-adjustaboe settings. I have successfully overclocked my 117Mhz unit to 133Mhz and it IS a little zippier, but the cache on my 133Mhz model makes it quicker though. It is a fairly simple modification if you are good with a soldering iron + tweezers and small surface mount resistors. I may detail this MOD since it is so simple... just one resistor that needs to be moved! The CPU is only rated for 117Mhz, but it will run at 133 OK... it gets a bit hot though, so I replaced the little heat-pad with a copper plate with heatsink compound to couple it to the internal 1400 heatsink plate. The jumper settings will not allow any higher setting than 1:4 ratio because of the 1400's firmware... and i could not manage to hack that BUT... you CAN go higher than 133... read below: The firmware won't let you ramp up the CPU clock-to-bus RATIO, but it does not have a limitation on the BUS speed, so I have also overclocked by replacing the logic-board oscilator chip to speed up the bus. I have gone as high as 42MHz, but it was buggy. I suppose that higher or lower settings will also work, but those are the chips that I got from Mouser. Digikey has them too and probably a bunch of other places. Anyway, the 166MHz 1400 has a 1:5 bus ratio as opposed to the 133Mhz's 1:4 ratio, so if you speed up the bus from 33.33MHz to 40MHz, you can clock a 133MHz machine up to 160MHz. The RAM is on the main bus with the CPU but the rest of the machine is on a seperate asyncronous bus with a seperate 25MHz controller, so you only have to worry about the speed of the ram, which is 70ns, so it should be good under 50MHz bus speed I would thing (based on the fact that many old macs had 50MHz bus with 70ns ram!) I just bought a 166MHz board and procesor, and I have heard that Apple used the 183MHz 603e's in the 166MHz machines... so if that is the case, I'll see about overclocking the bus on that board to get a 180MHz 1400 or higher and see when it craps out. I assume that the ROM limits the 166MHZ bus to a 1:5 ratio, but we'll see... WIRELESS: WaveLan silver card works fine under the v6 drivers. I can connect just fine and get downlooas speeds over 50k/s. I can even connect fine to my OSX.4.10 Mac Mini intel to share the ethernet connection through it's airport card. File sharing is a bit sketchy with the OSX machine, but I have it set up as an FTP server, so the powerbook can transfer files that way. I can also connect just fine to a peer-to-peer connection set up from my MINI, but file transfers are buggy. POINTER DEVICES: The APLS glidepoint works fine under 7.6.1 with the OS8 control pannel!! I cannot, however, get my ADB Kensington Orbit trackball to work though... I think it needs too much juice. OTHER OS'es: Various versions of Linux work just fine, byt ARE TRICKY TO BOOT. Apple's MKlinux booter works as well as SOME versions of BootX, but some of them crash. Apple's MKLinux DR3 fully supports the 1400!! There are also customized kernels for the 1400 floating around on Sourceforge that will let the PCMCIA and media bay work under other forms of Linux... PPC/gnu and Debian, but only versions that will function with the 2.4 kernel. Since Ubuntu is based on Debian, I am currently trying to get any old version of it to install... so far no dice, but I have gotten it to BOOT, so I think it can be done. I am going to tinker with Apple's old UNIX installs as well, but they are all 68k code, so I am doubtful. Emulators: Virtual PC 3 works fine, and earlier versions at least boot up. I have only run DOS under it, but that finctions OK. Bochs also runs on it. I found a pre-compiled binary in a repository that works 100%, BUT IT IS A LOT SLOWER THAN VIRTUAL PC. I am not sure about Virtual PC 4 since I don't have it, and don't have enough RAM to run it regardless. I have not tried the other popular emulators of the day since I don't have them, but if they pop up somewhere, I'll let you know. CLIENTS: Hotline client works fine... even the latest version. This is good since there are a lot of servers still up with old 68k and pre-carbon apps and Apple updates that I could not find anywhere else. Shareway IP seems to not function very well, but I have not used it very much in OS7. BROWSERS: iCab works OK most of the time, but it crashes regularly... I enjoy the tabbed browsing when it works though. ALL the test-only browsers I have tried worked. Internet Explorer 5 seems to render pages the best, and won't crash if it sees new JAVA. Navagator and Communicator seem to freak out with script-heavy pages, and often stall and time-out for some reason. CONNECTIX: both RAM and SPEED doubler work fine in their newest versions even though the computer is not officially supported with OS7...I think... MAC OS: OK, other versions besides 7.6.1 work. I have gone as low as 7.3.x and as high as 9.2.2 with the help of Xpost and resedit. I like 7.6.1 best, but I have this machine dual-booting into 8.6 in case i need it, and the other machine dual-boots into 9.1... which i had to install by dragging files (finder, system, fonts and a few extensions, etc) off the installer disk and resediting a few things, as well as having the powerbook 1400 enebler in the sys folder for some reason and blessing the system manually. I have the wireless card working in all versions, and I can actually network best with an OSX machine in 9.1, but I have the system too stripped down to do much else. Hope that helps someone. |
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dpaanlka
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1024 MB  Posts: 1646 
Reply #1 on: September 28, 2007, 02:58
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I have a 1400c/133. I replaced most of the case plastics and the keyboard with brand new ones two years ago. Upgraded to 64mb of memory, my 1400c has an 800mb solid state hard drive - an actual 2.5" IDE one, not a CF card in some kind of adapter. I also bought a brand new battery and a Orinoco WaveLAN gold card to support it. At one point, it also had a 466mhz Sonnet G3 upgrade. The combination of this card, Mac OS 7.6.1, and all the stuff on this site, the computer was really damn fast. Unfortunately, it developed two problems that made me stop using it. First, the mouse clicker became overly sensitive somehow, registering clicks when I simply touched the palmrest in a certain way. Secondly, the LCD screen began showing vertical lines. I sold the 466mhz G3 and stopped using the 1400, although it still contains the rest of the upgrades I had done to it. Last time I checked (a few weeks ago), the 1400 no longer boots. Sad day 
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wall
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256 MB Posts: 343
Reply #2 on: October 21, 2007, 19:44
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Quote from: "aletheianalex" BROWSERS: iCab works OK most of the time, but it crashes regularly.... Thank you for your post! It is allways nice to learn how others are doing with The PB. ICab's preference for ram when starting for the 1st time, is only 8K making it to crash all the time. Please give it 20mb ram and it will stop crashing. I have not tested what would be the actual working minimum, so it could run fine also with ram preference somewhere between those two.
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