Mac Plus and PowerBook: You will be assimilated! (maybe)

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Mac Plus and PowerBook: You will be assimilated! (maybe)

Check out my image gallery- I'm thinking of doing just that; painting my dead-as-a-doornail Plus black then inserting FPU'd 33MHz goodness and the LCD display from my 165c... anyone care to give me a reason not to go through with this?(if the screen won't fit...oh mister 180c! come over here! ;))

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LCD

The screen is going to be the toughest issue. It's not just whether it will fit. It's whether you can get an assembly that will fit, and whose actual screen is large enough to fill the hole in the front of the Plus. The Color Classic modders have found that few panels provide the desired size (8.4" IIRC) without having too much metal surrounding them to preclude fitting in the case.

If you can get a PB's screen to fit, however, it should be a great project. There are two more potential gotcha's, however:

(1) It may be very difficult to get everything where it's supposed to be -- i.e. floppy drive lined up, motherboard ports where you can access them from the rear of the Plus, etc. Doing so may require lengthening of cables that are very hard to work with and/or start acting flaky when lengthened (video ribbon from mobo to LCD is one that comes to mind). Your only alternative for the rear ports may be to wire up a whole new set of rear ports, and painstakingly solder jumper wires between them and the motherboard -- as was done with the recently posted G4 Taco Color Classic hack (see CC forum here on 'fritter).

(2) If you get the above solved, there's still the question of upgrades and expansion. RAM and HDs for a 1xx PB are often hard to find and relatively expensive. Often it's cheaper to just keep buying used or broken old PBs for $5-$20 a pop and raid them for parts.

Matt

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PlusBook

Well I'm thinking of sticking something black in to fill up the gaps the 'widescreen' LCD makes in the screen... that's if the 165c LCD will fit(if not- ill just keep the 165c and wreck the 180c). I'm going down to the garage now to check up on that. Maybe stiff black cardboard would suffice... as for the ports, I'm thinking of making cutouts vertically on the right side of the back case and mounting the motherboard that way- should allow just enough room for everything to fit.As for expansion- nah. The 165c has just enough oomph to blow the Plus' tech away, and I don't plan to use it for much anyway.

Jon
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Those older LCD screens suffe

Those older LCD screens suffer from the "goiter effect"; that is, the backlight and some electronics on one side stick out about 1"-2". Far too much to fit horizontally in the Plus case. Back on AF1, Laird Knox had the '030 MacQuarium, and had to mount the LCD on it's side to get it to fit. You may want to look into getting one of the smallish sized VGA LCD screens and using a Mac->VGA convertor.

PB 165C display: 8.9" 8-bit 640x400 color passive matrix
PB 165c overall width: 11.25"
Plus display: 9" b&w screen, 512x342 pixels
Plus overall width: 9.6"

It'll be getting a screen that fits into an 11.25" wide case to fit into a 9.6" wide case that'll be the real bugger here.

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err

...u reckon I could get away with bending some of that stuff backwards? Blum 3

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