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Re-learning Mac OS System 7

A project log for 68040 upgrade for Powerbook 520c

Unsoldering and resoldering a 180-pin QFP! Thrills! Excitement! A full 68040 in a Powerbook 520c!

hackadayhackaday 02/17/2016 at 04:275 Comments

I've got the floppy drive issues sorted out. The dust door was putting too much friction on the floppy, preventing the ejection spring from returning the disk carrier to the out position.

Still, floppies are a terrible way to transfer files. I want to get to beyond system 7.5, where enablers are no longer used and, in theory, I should get an OS which recognizes there's an FPU (assuming I don't have a fake 68040).

I've got an AAUI 10baseT transceiver, so I can get it on the network. Problem now became what can share an AFS volume that system 7.1.1 can read. Failing that, I turned to the PCMCIA slot in the powerbook. I happened to have a 1 GB IBM Microdrive CF card, plus a PCMCIA adapter, as well as a USB reader for the CF cards. However, none of my OSX machines seem to read an HFS filesystem, nor will system 7 read an HFS+ filesystem.

I ended up putting the 7.5.3 self-extracting floppy images on my web server, and then downloaded them to the microdrive. From there, there was plenty of space to un-stuff them and then run the first image to recombine the others into a 7.5.3 install.

So, next stop is to see if at 7.5.3 I can now see my AFS share running on my 10.5.6 eMac. If not, I'll have to find some way to run stuffit or zip the whole 8.0 install CD contents, put it on my webserver, then download it back to the powerbook.

Discussions

Galane wrote 02/25/2016 at 00:06 point

Have you tried iCab 2.9.9 for 68k? http://www.icab.de/dl.php

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hackaday wrote 02/25/2016 at 01:39 point

No but that sounds worth looking into. 8.0 does come with some sort of browser. Not sure if it is any better than Netscape Navigator 3.0, which is awful with any recent javascript-infested site.

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Eric Hertz wrote 02/17/2016 at 06:54 point

Wee! If any of your OSX machines are PPC, you might be able to load 8.0 on it ;) Oooh, and then... does 8.0 still allow for direct copying of the System Folder to make a drive bootable? Those were the days!

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hackaday wrote 02/19/2016 at 16:09 point

The eMac is a G4 and can probably take OS 9.x. Not sure about 8.x though. I'm reluctant to mess with it, though, as we use it as a game playing machine with MAME.

I've got the PB520c to 7.5.5 with OpenTransport 1.2, as I read that was required to get AFS working with OSX 10.5.6, but I've sort of upgraded myself into a corner, as now Netscape Navigator 3.0 doesn't have enough resources to run. I've got almost 15 MB RAM free out of 20 MB, but who knows, maybe it's not compatible with 7.5.5? I'll have to try taking out some extensions to see if I can get more RAM freed up. Otherwise I've lost my one working way to get files to the powerbook.

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Eric Hertz wrote 02/20/2016 at 05:55 point

guess if you can't transfer files, then RamDoubler isn't an option, yet ;)

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