MacBook1,1 A1181 Core Duo

[Lilendianppcnes]

I have an old MB1,1 that's been laying around my house forever. It works great! I was going to install Libreboot on it, but unlike the MB2,1, doing so will require near total disassembly and external flashing. That stuff never ends well for me...
Then I was reading it was possible to upgrade the firmware to MB2,1! But sadly that appears to be an urban legend.
I already have a few Macs with various Linux distros, so been there done that.
Any ideas for something cool or unique?

 

[theMarble]

The 1,1 to 2,1 firmware upgrades are only for the Mac Pro and Mac mini, desktop machines. I think dosdude1 did it on a MBP1,1 once, but I'm not 100% on that.

I would put a large (eg: 500GB) SSD in it and multi-boot a bunch of 32-bit systems. You could run Tiger, Snow Leopard, Windows XP, 7, old versions of Debian...

 

[rampancy]

If you've got the money to spend, you could try really pushing the 1,1 to its expansion limit by replacing the original AirPort card for one that supports 802.11n, and getting an IDE-SATA optical drive bay caddy to put an SSD/large capacity HDD in place of the optical drive – in addition to replacing the stock hard drive with an SSD. Beyond that would be cool cosmetic mods with parts from a black A1181 (e.g the display bezel and key caps).

Another intriguing alternative is to replace the AirPort card with a BCM70015/70012 Crystal Media HD card to accelerate HD video playback. You'd need the drivers (which IIRC are only compatible with 10.6), and a video player that supports it; there's a guide written by someone who did that with their Mac Mini here: https://ae.dhs.nu/crystalhd/

Other than that, it'd be a really great machine to use to play around with more obscure lightweight Linux distros, like BunsenLabs Lithium, MX Linux, or Peppermint OS.

 

[TheShortTimer]

Another intriguing alternative is to replace the AirPort card with a BCM70015/70012 Crystal Media HD card to accelerate HD video playback.

Can you share more information about this and how it would work within the Mac to achieve the acceleration? I noticed with my MacBook 1,1 that even with a working battery to prevent throttling down to 1Ghz that it couldn't cope with my HDTV recordings.

 

[rampancy]

Can you share more information about this and how it would work within the Mac to achieve the acceleration? I noticed with my MacBook 1,1 that even with a working battery to prevent throttling down to 1Ghz that it couldn't cope with my HDTV recordings.

From what I understand, this was a popular upgrade with 1st Gen AppleTV owners, and fairly well-known among Mac mini 1,1/2,1 owners who used their minis as HTPCs. Since the AirPort card slot is basically a mini PCIe slot, it's simply a matter of swapping the AirPort card for the Crystal HD card (and sourcing a compatible USB 802.11 dongle to make up for the loss of WiFi). I also have to add a point of clarification: the card to use would be either the BCM9700012 or the BCM9700015.

On a software level, in addition to installing the drivers, you apparently needed a video player that had awareness of the Crystal HD card, which is where things get a little dicey. Kodi (neé XBMC) supports the card up until v14 Helix; apparently it works quite well in v11 and v12 (as long as one uses the 32-bit OS X binaries). VLC supposedly supported it too in its nightlies. I think they baked in official support around version 2.x but I know it was removed much later. I'm still trying to Google for when it was taken out, and which versions actually supported it. There's more information on Crystal HD cards in the Mac mini here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=65616 - given how similar the mini 1,1 is to the MacBook 1,1 I'd wager most of the information there would also apply to the MacBook too.

One of the main kickers is that the original Googlecode site which hosted the binaries for OS X drivers (and had information on how to install them and get them working) is gone, replaced by a GitHub site with just the source code, and no documentation. I did eventually find some more instructions there, but I think you'd still have to compile the source yourself. Maybe the Internet Archive might have the original site backed up?

Also, what I feel is worth pointing out, is that the person who wrote the guide I linked to earlier later reported issues with some dropped frames during movie playback.

 

[Amethyst1]

One of the main kickers is that the original Googlecode site which hosted the binaries for OS X drivers (and had information on how to install them and get them working) is gone [...] Maybe the Internet Archive might have the original site backed up?

Downloads - crystalhd-for-osx - OSX driver and library support for the Broadcom Crystal HD Video Accelerator. - Google Project Hosting

web.archive.org