--- On Fri, 1/22/10, JDW <[email protected]> wrote:
<clip>
> Of course, a potentially better approach would be to design
> it from
> the ground up using more modern technology. But that
> would require a
> team of people and is beyond my own capabilities.
What could be done is an all new board design, built to present an identical
appearing hardware environment to the firmware used on the original board.
In other words emulating the original hardware with hardware.
Such projects have been done for other old computers to replace original
peripherals with ones that operate identically (some with additional
enhancements too) but built with modern components to be more reliable, smaller
and use less power. One 'hotbed' for this sort of thing is MSX computers. The
Amiga has also had several such projects.
Even the TI-99/4A has a tiny little board with 32K, a parallel port and a
compact flash port that acts like several floppy drives on one card. Most of
the software works transparently with it.
But for some reason the old Macintosh has seen few such projects. An IDE/USB
NuBus card would be a great thing for the NuBus PowerMacs, with the possibility
of just IDE support for 68K. (The 'ease' of USB for NuBus PPC depends on how
closely the OS 9 USB 1.1 driver code is tied to the PCI bus architecture.)
For many systems there's new hardware being built for peripherals that didn't
exist when the computer was new. Some years back there was an IDE interface
board for Z-80 computers which plugged in between the CPU and mainboard.
But when it comes to Macintosh, there's little enthusiasm for hardware hacking,
beyond overclocking. The original iMac was a high point for hacking, with
adding the floppy and ADB ports and the various boards for the Mezzanine slot,
until Apple pulled the rug out from under by changing the hardware to make
adding such things impossible.
Same goes in a way for software. I tried for a long time to get someone
interested in writing USB 2.0 drivers for OS9, while Apple was still shipping 9
with OS X, but nobody gave a damn. There was a decent sized potential market
there, but it was allowed to slip away.
--
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