Within the retrocomputing world, [DosDude1] is a reputation spoken with greater than slightly respect. He’s again once more with a long-awaited hack for PowerPC Macintosh: soldered RAM upgrades!
[DosDude1] isn’t any stranger to soldering his technique to extra storage– upgrading the SSD on an M4 Mac Mini, or doubling the VRAM on an previous GPU. For a PPC Mac, although, it’s not sufficient simply to solder extra RAM onto the board; if that’s all it was, we’d have been doing it 20 years in the past. As soon as the RAM is in place, you must have a way to verify the pc is aware of the RAM is in place. For a WinTel machine, getting that data to the BIOS might be as simple as plugging in the proper resistors.
PowerPC Macintoshes don’t have BIOS, although. As an alternative, what’s required is a hack to switch the machine’s BootROM, and write an edited model again into the motherboard’s EEPROM. Nobody knew make that work, till now. [DosDude1] credit a doc found by [LightBulbFun] on “Boot Flash System Configuration Block” for the key sauce to hacking the HEX configuration. For instance, including 4 extra 128 MB DIMMS to max out an iBook G3 was a matter of discovering the Hex worth for variety of soldered chips–apparently it was at offset 0x5C. Change this from 0x01 to 0x02 tells the board to search for all 6 chips. Then it’s a matter of flashing the edited hex dump EEPROM, which might be completed with a programmer or the flashrom command beneath Linux.
Whereas a number of further hundred MB of RAM isn’t precisely bringing this machine into the twenty first century, it’s a nice quality-of-life improve to make previous price range {hardware} match the very best of the period. This isn’t magic: should you’re growing the density, slightly than filling up footprints as [DosDude1] demonstrates, you’ve obtained to verify the board has obtained tackle strains to spare or there’s a technique to bodge them in. (128 MB was the max for this one.) The footprints clearly need to match, too, and so do the specs. You’re not going to be placing further gigabytes of DDR5 right into a machine designed with OS9 in thoughts, however then, you most likely don’t have to. It’s already obtained greater than 640 KB, in any case, and that’s sufficient for anyone.
Discovered through r/VintageApple on Reddit.
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