Pegasos MotherBoards: Attack Of The Clones ???

xtreme

<a href="http://www.bplan-gmbh.de/gfx/pegasos/pegasos_art_e.html"; target="_blank">http://www.bplan-gmbh.de/gfx/pegasos/pegasos_art_e.html</a>;



does this mean we will soon have the (pc) luxury of building our own PPC systems and running OSX on them ???

outsider

The big question is just that; will they run OS X? if not, then why bother? you can probably get a dual Athlon system for much less.



Last time I checked, <a href="http://www.shrevesystems.com"; target="_blank">www.shrevesystems.com</a> had AGP G4 motherboards for $250.

masker

If you can find a good source for Mac ROM chips.



Good luck with that.



3p

powerbook

That's not that easy.



The BPlan people did their motherboard for the new AmigaOS and MorphOS projects. AmigaOS4.0 is designed both for the official AmigaOne (a G3, later G4 box) and for the BPlan-board. MorphOS ist a AmigaOS compatible system which will be bundled with the Pegasos-Board.

(Yellow Dog) Linux is also working good, but some people stated, OSX won't be running (for now).



Regards,

Powerbook



Some links:

<a href="http://www.ann.lu/search.cgi?string=bplan"; target="_blank">http://www.ann.lu/search.cgi?string=bplan</a>;

<a href="http://www.morphos.de/overview.php3"; target="_blank">http://www.morphos.de/overview.php3</a>;

<a href="http://os.amiga.com/"; target="_blank">http://os.amiga.com/</a>;



[ 06-07-2002: Message edited by: Powerbook ]</p>

xtreme

I heard somewhere that OSX doesnt need a ROM to boot up ... can someone confirm/deny this ?



also ... lets say it DID need a ROM



knowing some really skilled "hackers" will probably get their hands on this motherboard ...



how long before they can emulate (?) or force OSX to work on this hardware ...



because i also heard that people have gotten OSX to work on old clone machines ...



hey .. they cracked the XBOX ... im sure emulating a ROM in some way wouldnt be to hard

syn

the ROM is a non-issue. If someone can hack OpenFirmware to boot on this machine, then osx can be made to work on it too, via similar utilities as those that make it work on pre G3 Macs...

kupan787

[quote]Originally posted by SYN:

<strong>the ROM is a non-issue. If someone can hack OpenFirmware to boot on this machine, then osx can be made to work on it too, via similar utilities as those that make it work on pre G3 Macs...</strong><hr></blockquote>



Wouldn't it just be a matter of getting darwin compiling on it, and the you could use the compiled darwin kernel with OS X on this new board?



Also, is there any indication of price on these? And where could one buy a processor?



Thanks

mac the fork

Wouldn't cloners need other special Apple chips? Like onboard Firewire/USB/Ethernet controllers and interrupt controllers?

kupan787

[quote]Originally posted by Dead Member:

<strong>Wouldn't cloners need other special Apple chips? Like onboard Firewire/USB/Ethernet controllers and interrupt controllers?</strong><hr></blockquote>



Nope, we could buy PCI cards for that. And I don't see why a clone motherboard wouldn't have usb on board (since that is a universal standard).



didn't a couple years back IBM release the specs to the ppc motherboard (something called OpenPPC?). I think it has since died, but the specs are still available from there website.

xtreme

I couldn't help but notice that the more and more posts this thread gets ... the more and more realistic the possibility of building our own PPC systems and running OSX on them is.



hmmm...

very interesting i must say ...



anyone got any prices and places u can buy powerPC cpu's (individually) ?

there is no g5

THe old Apple Insider boards had a lot to say about this for a few months back in 2000. There was the openppc spec by ibm and a few companies offering up rsn vaporware for it.



Then it just sort of died.



<a href="http://www.openppc.org/"; target="_blank">http://www.openppc.org/</a>;



This is the best place to start looking if this idea interests you.



Jet is no G5

powerbook

At the moment Thendic has the exlusive distribution rights for the board. See their product-page here:

<a href="http://www.thendic-france.com/tech/US/Products/Pegasos/pegasos.htm"; target="_blank">http://www.thendic-france.com/tech/US/Products/Pegasos/pegasos.htm</a>;



Regards,

PB

barto

THERE IS NO BOOT ROM ON APPLE MOTHERBOARDS!!!



Well, at least not in the traditional sense.



There is a 1MB (Open Firmware?) Boot ROM capable of booting any operating system. Apple publishes the Darwin source code, and Linux is capable of booting using it.



All someone needs to do is write a driver and bootloader for these motherboards, and Mac OS X will run.



It won't be legal (APSL and Apple Software License both state that you may use 1 copy of this software on an APPLE machine).



Barto

mac the fork

[quote]Nope, we could buy PCI cards for that. And I don't see why a clone motherboard wouldn't have usb on board (since that is a universal standard).<hr></blockquote>



You can't put the interrupt controller on a PCI card. Plus, they'd probably need the same interrupt controller that Apple uses. As for the controllers, I think they would need the specific Apple ones for Mac OS X to work. You can't just throw Mac OS X at any G3/G4 PowerPC motherboard and have it work; you need to either modify Mac OS X to work with that specific hardware, or make your hardware emulate existing stuff. At least if everything I stand for isn't completely wrong.

kupan787

[quote]Originally posted by Dead Member:

<strong>



You can't put the interrupt controller on a PCI card. Plus, they'd probably need the same interrupt controller that Apple uses. As for the controllers, I think they would need the specific Apple ones for Mac OS X to work. You can't just throw Mac OS X at any G3/G4 PowerPC motherboard and have it work; you need to either modify Mac OS X to work with that specific hardware, or make your hardware emulate existing stuff. At least if everything I stand for isn't completely wrong. </strong><hr></blockquote>



Maybe you are talking about somethign else, but on my beige G3 desktop, it has no usb or firewire. So I bought a USB, and a USB/Firewire combo card and installed them in my pci slots. No drivers were required for OS X, they just work.



So why wouldn't it be the same on a "clone" motherboard? I could go out and buy this pci card, install it, and OS X (assuming you could modify darwin to boot on this board) would use the pci card. And then if this is the case, why wouldn't a cloner put usb on the mother board?



Ben

mac the fork

[quote]So why wouldn't it be the same on a "clone" motherboard? I could go out and buy this pci card, install it, and OS X (assuming you could modify darwin to boot on this board) would use the pci card. And then if this is the case, why wouldn't a cloner put usb on the mother board?<hr></blockquote>



If Apple hardware is anything like PC stuff, USB/FireWire/ATA/PCI/etc. are not connected directly to the processor. The operating system instructs the processor to send and recieve information to and from controllers for these various devices (plus some other things, like timers). Mac OS X is hard-wired to communicate with the specific chipsets that Apple uses. If any controller or other motherboard device differs from Apple's design, either in where it's connected or what its functions are, then Mac OS X won't be able to use it.



An x86 assembly example, hopefully relevant -- the in and out commands allow the processor to communicate with other chips on the motherboard:



in al,0x64



64 (hexadecimal) is the 'address' of the keyboard controller in PCs. This particular code takes in whatever data is coming from 64 and puts it into a register (al). If a nonstandard keyboard controller were connected to 64, you might not get the data you expected. If an ATA controller were there, you would definitely not get what you expected.



out 0x64,al



This code takes whatever is in the al register and sends it out to 64 (the keyboard controller). Let's say the standard keyboard controller needs to be sent the number 234 to turn on the Caps Lock light. Put a keyboard controller where 234 means 'turn on the scroll lock light' at 64 and your program does the wrong thing. Put a FireWire controller at 64, and your program is totally screwed.



If these boards are functionally identical to Apple ones, giving OS X everything it expects, then everything will work fine. Otherwise, OS X will either go screwy on them or not work at all.



[ 06-12-2002: Message edited by: Dead Member ]</p>

fotns

It would be relatively simple to get OS X working on these boards. All the motherboard manufacturer (or an interested 3rd party) would have to do is provide some kernel extensions for the specific chipsets and components on the board, such as the ps2 and parallel ports. The USB and Firewire controllers should work without any extra support because nearly all comply with the set standards. They could make an application similar to Ryan Rempel?s XPostFacto , which installs a package of kernel extensions for unsupported Macs.

mac the fork

Hmm. Silly me then.

anonymous karma

[quote]Originally posted by Barto:

<strong>

It won't be legal (APSL and Apple Software License both state that you may use 1 copy of this software on an APPLE machine).

</strong><hr></blockquote>



Then how is Apple's own Darwin/x86 legal?



If there was a *seperate* port of Darwin to this PPC architecture (with seperate subdirs for drivers and everything), ordinary Darwin/ppc binaries would still run unmodified, just like a Linux/ppc binary can run unmodified on Linux/Power, Linux/MacPPC, and Linux/NubusPPC. Thus a simple kernel replacement would be all that is required.