BeBox? where to buy?

Hi,

I would like to know where I can buy a BeBox, or from where I can order?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox

Ebay can be a place to get

Ok, anything like a ‘official store’ for BeBoxes?

Since Be Inc. (the company that made BeOS and the BeBox) shut down decades ago, there is no official store for BeBoxes - your best bet is to look on online stores such as eBay.

the bebox is no longer built. If this can still be found in the store somewhere, then it is used or antique.

1 Like

Without a time machine, no.

What are you looking for? To run a PowerPC machine, or specifically a BeBox.

For the former, you can probably pick up a used PowerMac quite cheaply (circa $50 - $100, depending on model) and getting a (edit) compatible PowerPC[1] build of BeOS on it is probably not too hard, but also not trivial. Depends on the CD-ROM drive you have. But the Mac might need some work as all old hardware suffers from capacitor rot.

For a BeBox, unless you can find a 133MHz model, I wouldn’t bother. The 66MHz version is very, very slow under R5.03.

[1] BeOS PowerPC ready list

So… far as I know the BeBox is a prehistoric machine; it’s really hard to find, most times I’ve looked on eBay for fun either the price is insane or they’re just not around. There was a thread a few months ago about someone who built a replica with his own 3D printed parts, boards, what not, but I think that was a personal project?

That’d prob be the way, to build a clone with 3D prints and modern parts then put Haiku in it, run BeOS in qemu (I’ve messed with all the images from archive.org; R4.5/Genki and later work in qemu; R3/4 always stop after the bootloader for whatever reason and needed a hack that took me several hours to get them to work; VMware on Mac will run them in black and white).

He basically made an Intel PC that runs BeOS in a BeBox replica case. It was not a BeBox really, as it was Intel based. If you want true BeOS on BeBox feel, you need to go all the way and get a PowerPC machine. It’s a lonely life as there is zero software and it is almost impossible to get anything modern to compile, but there are a few of us PowerPC hardcore hangouts still :wink:

Any compatible PowerMac with a 604 processor will be faster than a 66MHz BeBox. If you can find a PowerMac 9500 with the dual processor card (2 x 604e @ 180MHz) or the 9600 (2 x 604e @ 200 MHz, though you need the right version of the 9600) you will also have dual processors. For all the good it will do you, LOL.

From what you are saying, it looks like a Pentium III PC is better than other things, for BeOS.

Why do you want to buy a BeBox if you don’t even knew it is out of production over a quarter century and even the company is closed over 20 years? Probably you didn’t checked it’s specs, etc.

2 Likes

I didnt checked the specs, but on the archived website from the company that has been working up to 2009 (https://web.archive.org/web/20130415074143/http://www.bebox.nu/). There were dualcore cpu’s in 2004… for BeOS 5 I think 550MHz is perfect, so (Pentium III is that).

Thats a fan webpage, not a company website. Be.com went down in 2001.

Still unsure why do you want to buy a hw about you know basically nothing, and not even about the company which made it.

Btw it was a dual cpu machine, not a dual core one.

And even in 2001 the Be Box was long outdated. They stopped building it sometime around 1994 or 1995.

Would be great to see RISC-V HaikuBoxes available one day.

2 Likes

RIght. A Macintosh with 604e processor was a better platform to run BeOS, than a BeBox with two 133Mhz 603e processors. I had both (the Mac was my employer’s, a 7500 if I remember right that I upgraded to 604e.) The dual processor hardware was kind of a gimmick, without the ability to use cache memory that would have made it really useful. The exotic hardware ports were fun, but I never found any use for them.

Yes, and even dual 604e’s, which did SMP properly, wasn’t amazingly fast. My 9500, which I dusted off recently, is pretty slow now.

@bigbanana69 whilst you can run on a Pentium 3 (dual even), it is not really a BeBox. A BeBox had specific additional hardware. It is actually almost impossible to make a BeBox from a PC because of this. You can probably get 95% for the hardware, you might even get the processor lights working, but you will have a really hard time making the GeekPort. Without that, it is not really a BeBox. The GeekPort was probably the thing that differentiates the BeBox from regular hardware.

But then, did it get any practical use? And was it a lot better than using the parallel port and joystick port on a standard PC? That would also get you some generic digital and analogue I/O.

1 Like

I remember, there was one startup whose engineers were building something around this port. But then Be announced the end of BeBox (this was in Jan 1997), which forced the devs to discontinue the development.

It had a load of A/D and D/A converters in it. Yes, it was a lot more useful. The equivalent now would be hooking up a Arduino to the PC. But then that might now even gibe the same level of protection and there was extra hardware and fuses to protect the I/O.

The GeekPort was a really big differentiator and it was in all the marketing. It had its own set of classes too in the BeAPI.

Are there any headers in public access that have GeekPort API?

2 Likes