I'm thinking of modding my beige g3 into a new world machine. Do yu think it would be possible to fuse a beige g3 Rom with a gigabit ethernet and b&w one to create something that you could run nvidia grahics cards on and supports the xrl8 dual cpu adator?

Sorry if that was confusing but its late and im tired.

Hey, if people can put Ethernet and Apache on a C64, then anything is possible. Unfortunately I don't have the foggiest idea how to go about what you're suggesting

Yeah i figured that it'd be pretty technical, i was thinking about opening up the roms of all three computers and ***somehow*** making them play nice

Problem is that the B&W and Gigabit don't use the Mac ROM anymore, they rely completely on OF support.
Unless you can trick the Biege into thinking it's a B&W, and hack the firmware... Hmmm. It might be possible, but it'd be mind mashingly hard.

Lets see.. maybe you can grab pieces of the Biege OF and implant it into a B&W Firmware update, and then force the update upon the Biege. That way, it'll support the interface with the ROM, AND the OF, but still have the B&W stuff included.

How many macs do you have to experiment with? The chances of bricking one or 2 is fairly high... I bricked an iBook G4 messing with OF. Yay for warranty...

Not enough to make this worthwhile.

The amount of time/energy/sweat/blood/tears it would take is not equivalent to the cost of a sweet G4 tower that supports all that jazz up there out of the box.

The system still has a ROM but different software. I wouldn't flash the ROM on the board itself but get a IC socket and toss on another ROM and test it that way.

Hard part is identifying what chip is the ROM.

ROM is just a generic term for permanent storage, which usually makes it easy to find. It's just like finding the TSOP on an Xbox, it's obvious after a bit of detective work.

It's generally a large chip, although Apple likes to confuse by putting a ton of large chips on the board... It'll be a unique manufacturer most of the time. The package itself has markings on it which indicate exactly what it's intended purpose was, and usually a company logo. With those things, (and a macrophotography lens ) you can figure it out.

But even so... It'd require hacking and flashing of that chip, because it's a longshot the firmware from the newer macs would even boot on the Beige. It's not worth the time or the effort. You'd end up with a big Beige brick.

If I remember correctly the ROM on the B&W G3 was actually labelled with printing on the PCB.

On the B&W G3 is looks to be the long SHARP chip at U37 with the pins on only the short ends between "grackle4" chip and the CPU&bus multi jumpers.

On the G4 Gigabit Ethernet and I am assuming Sawtooth as well it looks like it is the same SHARP chip at U7 beside two rows of empty solder pads.

On my G4 Digital Audio it looks like the (again)same SHARP chip at U7 again between the ends of the RAM slots and the slower PATA connector.

Lombard CPU daughtercard has one of these suckers as well under the top RAM slot at U5.

I have not yet looked it up but on all these mobos it is a SHARP LH28F008BVT-BTLI0

Now if you will excuse me I have to put a bunch of computers together/away. :P