[Wanted] BeBox Dual 133MHz System

Hi, I’m looking for a BeBox Dual 133MHz system preferable rev6 with the software that came with it.

Send me a PM, thanks.

Good luck, they only show up every couple years… I picked up a dual 66 Mhz prototype recently but as you hopefully already know the pickins are extremely slim. You’ll probably end up watching forums for these for years and when one shows up someone else may beat you to it lol that’s just how it goes. So, unless you have some specific reason for wanting a BeBox you may want to focus on some other more common machine.

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Hi thanks for answering. Well the be honest this machine is on my list for many years to fully explore and see how it was back then. I was studying back then and read about this machine, but never got my hands on one as they were hard to get back then. Then time passed by and it is 2019.
When you don’t look you won’t find. :wink:

There is yet one another machine that has my interest as well that is a Sharp X68000 (XVI model). Which is also hard to get. Other than BeBox and the X68000 there is no other machine on my list to to explore. :wink:

Yeah I know there is a draw for a machine like this but if you just want the experience, just build a period x86 box, which far more BeOS users would have actually ended up using… something like Tyan S1834D, which is a super nice board from back then, Apolo Pro 133A chipset, AGP 4x (my Tyan Thunder 2 ATX only has 2x) and supports 450-750Mhz slot one CPUs unlike my tyan which maxes out at 333Mhz officially and maybe 450 with celerons unofficially.

That’s a machine you can source today… have fun building and not stress over and it isn’t too expensive. If you come across the BeBox someday all the better. Also worth mentioning is there is limited BeOS PPC software compared to for x86 lots more of that is left around.

Note the reason you’d want an Apollo Pro vs a 440BX is desyncronised AGP and FSB… on later 440BX boards they OCed the FSB to 133Mhz and the AGP to 89Mhz and some cards couldn’t handle that. So the Via chipset would be a bit slower but allow you to play with a wider range of hardware.

It isn’t much. Lots of cool interfaces on the back. As I understand it the CPUs were without cache (L2?) because they didn’t have a way to manage cache on parallel CPUs. I upgraded a Power Macintosh 7500 to PPC 604 at work, it ran BeOS much faster than the dual 133 603e BeBox (it seemed to me, and vs. MacOS 8, BeOS was wonderful.)

That was the trigger for my post here, he doesn’t ship to Europe and it is broken.

If you just want to run BeOS R5.03 on a PowerPC machine, get a compatible Mac. The experience after booting is identical. The PM9500 isn’t a bad box and comes with a Dual Processor option. I think the PM8500 and 8600 are smaller, and the compatible (600’s are faster. I have a 9500 in storage I wan’t to get it out and play about again.

The PM’s also have the advantage of having 604e’s which are faster and an do SMP in hardware, not the soft emulation the BeBox needs to use because the 603 is not SMP compliant. The BeBox 66MHz is really not worth having. I owned one and it’s too slow to be useful for anything. I think the 180Mhz 9500/MP is faster than the BeBox 133Mhz also.

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A 9600 with Tsunami board would be the fastest right outside of clones? Powermac 9600 with under 300mhz CPU should be a Tsunami board and compatible with BeOS faster than that and it’s Kansas.

The only reason I occasionally think about firing up my old relics is to get a look at the early development releases. Mainly the filesystem, which the way I remember it was a database. All I specifically remember about that was some kind of second indirection for extra-large “records”.

I think way back it was a database and then the moved all that functionality into BFS… which does exactly what you are talking about so maybe you are mixing the two together?

Right, way back it was a database, that’s what I’m talking about. BFS has an extra level of indirection for storing extra-large files that don’t fit in its records, that you’d have to be aware of during retrieval through the database? Seems unlikely to me, I think that was the original database filesystem.

No you don’t have to be aware of … but the FS is aware of it. That’s how most filesystems with extended file attributes are implemented.

Ah … bearing in mind that this was over 20 years ago and only a dim memory … The old filesystem supported conventional (UNIX) access, but you could also go to a database query system to retrieve file contents. The file CONTENTS were database records, that could be only so large. Never mind extended attributes.

Well, the fastest was probably the 9600, but the best was the Daystar Genesis. That came in a quadcore configuration. It was the holy grail of BeOS compatibility in the PowerPC arena. Back in the day there was a guy called Nathan (iirc) on the BeOS forums who had one. All us ppc-ers secretly envied him.

I’d say a Daystar Genesis MP with quad cores would be the ultimate BeOS PowerPC machine these days. It would make the BeBox look quite average for performance. All you really lose is the blinken lights (you could replicate those with a micro controller and some led’s connected to the serial port and a small app on the computer side - which is all the actually did on the BeBox) and the extra I/O (that barely anyone actually used).

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The original file system was a database. But it was massively flawed. The index could get corrupted quite easily so the boot menu had an option to rekey it. It was also completely lacking any easy way to mount foreign file systems because of they way it interfaced in to the kernel.

By looking at the thread it brings back old memories. Fun to read for a BeBox “newbie” like myself.

About the Daystar Genesis (unknown to me), this seems some sort of Mac Clone with different configurations. 4 CPU’s that is great at that time. Feels like Silicon Graphics territories.

image

https://everymac.com/systems/daystar/mp_plus/genesis_mp932_plus.html

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And on that page it says that the model was introduced on August 11, 1997 but on August 25, DayStar stopped manufacturing PowerPC machines. So that’s quite a short lifespan for that machine!

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That was I believe the production run of their last model Genesis MP 932+.
If you look back to the earlier models you get other production periods.
What I can see they cancelled the entire production of Genesis MP series also the low end models.

An interesting read is that DayStar Digital, Inc. stared in 1986 Mac upgrades and later becoming an official Mac Clone builder. This program was killed by Apple when OS8 came along and several years later in 1999 it was also the end of the company DayStar Digital, Inc.

Also interesting to read is that the DayStar Genesis M is seen as one of the 25 most influential Macs for the first 25 years of the Mac product line.

Some of the clones came with BeOS install media. That was one of the things that turned Apple off on the clone program, I believe. I don’t remember for sure that DayStar did that, but I do remember that it became widely known that their MP machines performed very well running BeOS, partly because they set one up that way at a trade show. I’d say that’s the closest BeOS, and PPC too, ever came to making it.