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Mac OS X on a PowerBook 1400CS?

M

Mac

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Jul 29, 2012
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I have a PowerBook 1400CS/133 with a NuPowr PowerPC G3 accelerator card from newertech. Since early OS X releases did support some G3 systems, I was wondering if there was any way to hack this thing to run any version of OS X? Purely as a curiosity of course. I don't expect it to be very fast at all.
The G3 (750) accelerator is running at 250MHz and I have 32MB of RAM installed. It is currently running Mac OS 8.6.

I think the RAM amount is definitely a deal breaker at least, I would have to find out what the max amount is for this setup.

If anyone has any ideas on how to go about this or even if it's at all possible, let me know. Could be a fun project!
 
Short of completely writing your own comprehensive set of kernel drivers from scratch (which I suppose is a remote possibility since early versions of OS X had the kernel code mostly publicly available through Darwin project) there's no possibility whatsoever. The PowerBook 1400 is based on an ancient pre-PCI architecture that relies on the classic Macintosh toolbox ROM to bandaid it all together, it lacks both the hardware and firmware (OpenFirmware, specifically) support needed to even start bootstrapping OS X.
 
Absolutely not. The 1400 is essentially NuBus internally; OS X can't run on a non-PCI machine.

The maximum physical RAM for the 1400 is 64MB. My 1400 has a 466MHz G3 and 64MB; I use RAM Doubler to allow Classilla and Photoshop to run.
 
Okay. In terms of getting something unix-y on here, apparently Linux *can* be installed on it according to this.

Totally forgot about the NuBus thing, I was concentrating on the chip itself and RAM.
Thanks for the feedback!
 
I just found XPostFacto, which sounds like exactly what I'm looking for. It provides support for unofficial configs, and (hopefully) kernel modules for my hardware.

It's still a bit uncertain, given my unofficial hardware with even more unofficial CPU upgrade card, but I have to try!
 
XPostFacto isn't going to do it. The 1400's architecture is the laptop equivalent of the desktop machines in pink on the compatibility matrix. As you noted, they're "NuBus" machines ("NuBus" is in quotes because Apple made a lot of machines that don't literally have NuBus slots in them, but they nonetheless present their hardware according to the addressing schema defined by the Mac II-era "Slot Manager" framework) and OS X relies on OpenFirmware and PCI for almost everything. Again, strictly speaking it might not be *impossible* to make a kernel that works but it's a much larger job than XPostFacto tackles.
 
NuBus has historically been very badly supported by Un*xy things. NetBSD/macppc doesn't run on NuBus machines, and most Linux distros (certainly any of recent vintage) don't have NuBus support either. NuBus is still in the kernel tree ( https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/nubus/nubus.c ) but I have no idea if anything even uses it anymore.

Probably the best bet is an older kernel. MkLinux probably can work on the 1400, but see https://www.jonh.net/lppcfom-serve/cache/350.html and http://www.jonh.net/lppcfom-serve/cache/593.html . nubus-pmac was mentioned and Debian sarge has also been reported as working, see https://lowendmac.com/mail/0807mb/0710.html

My 9150 runs MkLinux: http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ans/9150/

Another option might be MachTen, which because of its unusual architecture doesn't have particular hardware dependencies since MacOS underlies it.
 
I don't recall MkLinux ever running on a 1400. For Nubus machines, we had it working pretty well on 6100, 7100, 8100. I think I once saw it running (unofficially) on a Powerbook 5300. It was tough to keep up with all the models back then, and we had a difficult time getting specimens of current hardware internally.

Gilbert
(formerly of the Apple MkLinux team)
 
See discussion here

and this from LowEndMac.

and this.

Almost doesn't look worth bothering about. Sort of like my 6200, moldering away on the bottom of my pile. Useful for handling 400K and 800K floppies, but not much more than that.
 
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