Decided to take a break from my expedition into Subnatica’s Lost River and break out my old PowerBook Duos. I must have a strange concept of fun.
I’m a little saddened that the Duo 2300c has gone to smear and physical rubber band land while it’s been in storage. But I now know a few things about how it boots. Thanks to Shion unexpectedly being able to mount its drive, I know the system doesn’t boot because the 8.6 install files from Apple’s anthology repo are looking for 8.5 files. Nuts. On the flip side I also learned that plugging in my Duo 230’s drive, that it will boot on the 2300c. Actually runs pretty nice despite it all being emulated, since all the applications on that drive are either for a Motorola 68030 or older, or a fat binary for both.
Given the state of the screen, even if it has a snazzy PowerPC, I opted to swap my memory cards back so that the 230 has 24M of RAM and the 2300c probably has 8M or whatever. At first, after seeing the state of the screen, I decided to try seeing if the touchpad could be swapped. The 2300c and 230 top covers only differ in the labelling and having a trackpad mounted where the cutout for the trackball would go. Sadly, I wasn’t about to use the trackpad, so I swapped these back. I don’t mind the 230’s trackball, so much as it tends to stick or stop sensing the ball rolling no matter what I do to the darn thing. Probably should just buy a Wombat to connect a USB mouse to it.
Interestingly, I also learned that the 2300c mainboard has both its new IDE header and an old SCSI header in exactly the same place as the earlier 230 and its relations. The machines are really, really similar. I’m pretty sure that the only major differences are adapting the chipset to accommodate a PowerPC instead of a Motorola processor. Since the screen is going bad and its keyboard sticks less than the 1992 one, I decided to at least switch out the keyboards so that the 230 has a better typing experience.