My BeOS Machines

Long gone are the days where all my computers ran BeOS primarily, except maybe a modern Mac laptop. 

These days, my main machine is a Lenovo Yoga which is unlikely to even run Haiku well - touchscreen, screen position sensor, legacy-free, etc etc... I should probably try sometime but I don't hold out hope.

I mainly run R5 in emulation on my work laptop - it has significantly more grunt, as a quad i5 rather than a dual i3 in the Yoga - in Virtualbox using this guide, but I do have two real machines

My x86 machine is a Dell Latitude C600 which has been upgraded about as far as it can go - it has a 1Ghz Pentium III Mobile, 512MB RAM, a 64GB SSD, an Intel 2200 miniPCI wifi card (which is too new for Windows 98SE, the other OS on this) and a 1600x1200 screen. 

There's not even 2D graphics acceleration - although I think a driver ID hack might make this work somewhat as its Rage Pro based; and no sound driver for the onboard ESS Maestro sound. 

But I have a PCMCIA soundcard with BeOS drivers, so that solves that. I also have a PCMCIA wireless card that has drivers (ORiNOCO Gold), should I ever want to put back in the 3Com 905 that was formerly installed, and also has drivers, for wired ethernet - its wired *or* wireless on this!

I have the multi-bay floppy, and also a DVD-RW drive that is from a vastly newer Dell laptop but still fully compatible and working.

My PPC machine is a Power Macintosh 5400 I've had for significantly over a decade - it was only tilting towards 'too dated to use' when I bought it, rather than 'clonky retro nightmare' like it is now.

This has a 180Mhz 603e processor, which is really appalling, and currently has 2432MB ram. 32, not a typo. There is 8MB soldered to the board and 16MB in the expansion slots - I have ordered 2x64MB, the most it can take, for buttons off eBay but this is on its very slow way from the US. The DEC NIC that it came with has since died; but I have some others to try and if I can get it working again I will replace the now 23 year old HDD with an SSD; and maybe replace the CD drive with a burner. Burners are very useful when old machines have dodgy NICs, ancient browsers or whatever - although my NAS does NFS and there are R5 NFS tools I should really try use.

However, I do intend to dump this machine for a Mac clone desktop machine that should work on a KVM - as most have VGA and PS/2 - and there are 225Mhz 604e or even 604-with-G3 upgrade machines available in desktop and tower formats, rather than the quite limited 832x624, 15" CRT all-in-one format of the 5400. Whenever I find one suitable, its retirement time for the 5400.

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