[geeks] THE HORROR!

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 07:12:44PM -0500, Kurt Huhn wrote:
> "Andrew Weiss" <ajwdsp at cloud9.net> wrote:
> 
> > I still think we should start our own case-mod site... where we rip
> > the guts out of peecee's in cool cases or other useless computers and
> > hack-in some of the new Terrasoft PPC boards or other homeless
> > "real-computer" system boards.  Complete with language to the
> > effect... I bought this Compaq...yada(the cute blue O2 like trashcan
> > one)... and threw the nasty Cyrix/AMD/Intel guts in the trash... then
> > I pulled out my homeless (*insert real machine motherboard here*) and
> > got to work.
> > 
> 
> MB suggestions?  There's the AXe, what else would do that?  URLs
> welcomed and requested.

http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/boxer/
Terrasoft solutions PPC ATX board.  IBM G3 made for linux, probably
works with NetBSD.

http://makeashorterlink.com/?O10023FC2
AmigaOne G3 or G4 running 600 to 800mhz, runs linux, AmigaOS (with 68k
emulation), and MorphOS.

http://thendipo.alias.domicile.fr/us/pegasos.htm
Pegasos PPC ATX board, G3 to dual G4, runs linux or MorphOS.  Has
firewire and OpenFirmware.  Of PPC boards, this would be my first choice
based on MorphOS being cooler than Linux in many ways, even if it isn't
as good.

There are scores of other PPC ATX boards, but most seem targeted at
embeded developers and such, where as these have more of an end user
target, and are generally more interesting in my opinion.  Especially
the last one.

Moving on from PPC to StrongARM.

http://www.iyonix.com/
This is full PC, not mobo only.  There may be a mobo only option, but I
gave up finding it.  Anyway, this is an ATX Xscale (strongarm
compatible) motherboard with 64 and 32bit PCI, giga-E, and runs RISCOS.
Ie, the rebirth of the Acorn.  Definately a cool machine for such
projects. 

There are various StrongARM project boards out there, but they are
generally NetBSD/Linux/VXworks/QNX only, aand are not as fast. 

There are also a few other ATX acorn machines, but non as cool as the
above, so I'm not listing them.

There are various UltraSPARC boards, but since we all know about the
AXe, I won't bother mentioning others.

There are various MIPS boards.

http://www.momenco.com/products/jag-atx.html
RM9000x2.  This chip is the sucessor to the RM7000.  It appears to be
dual core.  I was actually searching for a RM7k board I once saw and
came across this.  PCI-X and HyperTransport support.  Runs Linux and
VxWorks.  Since the NetBSD supports the RM7k, it would probably be
trivial to support this.

There are also R10000 and presumably R12000 boards, but I'm giving up on
finding them again.  They aren't as interested since there are limited
choices for OS other than Linux.

Finally, there are various 68k based ATX boards.  There are of course
various project and evaluation boards, which I'm ignoring here.

http://amiga.emugaming.com/boxer.html
There is the BoXeR.  Unfortunately discontinued, so probably not
realistic for this project.  It was an ATX amiga with PCI support and a
68060. 

http://www.milan-computer.de/gb/products/milan01.html
Last, there is the Milan.  It is a 68040 or 68060 ATX mobo with FCI,
etc.  It runs TOS or MultiTOS.

Of all the above boards, for this project, I'd pick the Pegasos board,
the Iyonix board, or the Milan board, all because of unique and
interesting desktop OSs to go with the project.




-- 
Joshua D. Boyd