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Comment by pcurve | Hacker News Reader

New-ish video of actual BeBox running in HD video quality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkM9WbB8cWM I didn't know it had functional LED light meter in front of the case. very cool.

Obligatory demo from the 90s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ

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It's actually the system load on each 603e.

Source: dual BeBox/133 on my desk

Still have one? I am jelly. Is there a working version of Haiku for them yet?

Sadly no, but still get a lot of wear out of R5. I have it on this BeBox and on a 6500/275 that I'm trying to figure out sound issues on.

I wonder if they will ever target such an old ISA.

What are your sound problems? I only briefly used BeOS on an actual mac and it, amazingly enough, worked without a hitch.

Something with the AWACS driver (need to run off an instrumented build and boot the kernel in debug mode to see what's up, just gotta get a round tuit). The 6500 is technically Unsupported but Compatible in Be's support matrix. Some people report the sound works, some people report it doesn't. Ditto for the TAM, which is basically a 6500 in a cool suit with an LCD.

mmuman was still talking about it recently, but the issue is that the compiler used under BeOS is proprietary - Metrowerks mwcc, and is basically DOA now (do they even still make is commercially available?.) The PowerPC version of BeOS uses the proprietary Apple PEF exe format too, and there are almost no modern compilers that support that format (Retro68 is the only one I know of.) Haiku is therefore likely to not support anything legacy from BeOS PowerPC, and that makes even bootstrapping difficult, as you need a whole new OS to run the new code.

it can play MULTIPLE VIDEOS AT THE SAME TIME (!)

That kind of multitasking was one of the most impressive things about it. I could play four MPEG videos at once smoothly (with the interface and other windows still responsive) while Windows struggled to play one on the same hardware. That and it booted in 30 seconds including detecting and loading built-in drivers for all my hardware (Windows took 1-2 minutes and needed drivers manually installed).

I never used BeOS much though, as there wasn't much software available for it. This was in ~2000.

It's easy to boot quickly when you have very little supported hardware to look for. I remember compiling custom FreeBSD kernels with only the hardware on my box and racing my roommate's BeBox to login prompt. Then he would start playing a bunch of movies at once and I'd open up Netscape.

ironically, freebsd was late to the multiprocessor party, with a global kernel mode lock that existed well into the mid-2000s.

Even better, they had a real I/O scheduler. I could transfer video from a DV tape reader with a tiny buffer while Mozilla compiled in the background and while the compiler got slower the tape drive never stalled and the UI never lagged. That was quite a change compared to Windows or classic macOS where you had to treat the system as a single-app device.

It can show the content of a folder window while dragging it around the screen!

yes! The Blinkenlights on the front of the case were a hoot. I had a prototype BeBox for awhile and it was delight. I linked to some images in another comment.

Dude sure has enough plants on their desk

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