Hacking a 90’s Internet Appliance
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- čas přidán 22. 08. 2024
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Today we're going to try hacking the i-Opener to run LInux. I'm sure it's very easy and we won't encounter any issues at all.
VIDEO LINKS:
🍎 LGR Video: • i-Opener 🍕The 1999 com...
🍎 MJD Video: • i-Opener - The $99 Com...
🍎 Linux on the iOpener (from back in the day): www.cassandra....
🍎 i-Opener V2 disk image: home.samfundet... (if you can get the firmware file out of here, let me know!)
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💾 For more vintage Apple stuff, please subscribe: www.youtube.co...
💾 Support these retro computing shenanigans on Patreon! / actionretro
🍎 I have merch now! shop.actionret...
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Check out my Amazon page with links to my tools, adapters, soldering equipment, camera gear and more: www.amazon.com...
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💬 Come talk about old computers on the BitBang Social Mastodon! bitbang.social
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#Netpliance #Linux #Retro
Long ago, for many years I worked at the company that Netpliance became after bankruptcy , and had an old iOpener on my desk for years as a showpiece.
Nice, thanks for sharing your own bit of history.
I was part of the modding scene of these back in the day. There was a person called “wild pencil” who made a modified BIOS for this that fixed a lot of problems with it, and I stumbled upon a CD with a copy of that the other day.
make sure to archive that online!
A few troubleshooting tips that you've probably already tried: did you swap in a new CMOS battery? Put the original RAM back in? I could potentially see either of those things causing a no-boot error. Looking forward to the exciting conclusion in any event!
Or that bios has some sort of check for the modem to boot to an os
You're an inspiration to us all, specially those of us who, for some inexplicable reason, found themselves with a non-booting computer despite not doing anything too crazy. We didn't even get to the crazy part!
It's weird finding out Rise MP6 became the Vortex86 after being sold to DM&P.
It was the same thing that happened to the MediaGX.
Both had promises to topple Intel and AMD but failed and became relegated to the embedded market then got aquired by another company.
The vortex must have picked up a bit of brain damage along the way because the mP6 is way better clock-for-clock against a Vortex86DX
@@Artemisgoldfish Source? Also, the Vortex86 (which is mostly for embedded use) has many different flavors at different clocks.
Trying to make it an AMD/Intel destroyer was a mistake, they would have sold better as "corpo's first IBM compatible". Especially if they pushed it as a high-power embedded platform they could have got some pretty good take-up.
@@absalomdraconis They both mostly did it after being aquired and being sent to the embedded market after they couldn't secure a place in the mainstream consumer market.
Cyrix did have some success in the budget market for a while until being bought by NS and later VIA, but RISE never saw that.
They just made a last gen level chip, licensed the core to STMicroelectronics, then flopped before being bought out by SiS in '99. Only real use for it was embedded hardware.
The year of hacky Linux installs on Action Retro
I've got one of these, it's been sitting in a closet for ~20 years. I put a 2.5" HDD in it and loaded Win98 on it. It made a nice little email/web machine for a friend while they were between real computers.
I've turned the sponsor spot into a game: Guess The Sopnsor!
Is it:
A. PCBWay
Or
B. SquareSpace
😂
I am so glad that the sponsors here are channel-appropriate. Some other tech / retro channels advertise man-scaping products and it is so jarring. 😱
I had 2 of these back when they came out. They were well worth the 200 and some change in exchange for two linux screens.
I’m not sure how I missed out on this. I had no idea this was a thing. I woulda dove in for sure
Happy Christmas buddy. Thanks for another year of pointless turd tinkering that inspires me to regularly dig out old kit and swear at it for hours :)
i started watching your videos a week ago and i appreciate how you may foul up things and unlike many youtubers who play some sad moment and apologize for ruining/destroying something, you smile and go "whoopsies, i guess we can learn from that".
keep your chin up champ and keep making videos.
you should dual boot windows and linux on it using the compact flash card
Oh and btw try replacing the CMOS battery with a new one. Some old systems don't want to boot if that thing is flat.
Man what a blast from the past. I must have hacked a half dozen of these back in the day. I had forgot all about them. Thanks for the memory blast!
ppl like u amaze me
Hey, you forgot to put the LGR and MJD video links in the descriptions
Whoops,. thanks!
QNX is a love/hate thing. Back in the early naughts, I had a Pentium 200MMX with a Voodoo3 2000 that was strictly speaking out of date, and I had newer/better computers, but I wanted to keep it around, and so I installed QNX Neutrino on it. It took me weeks to get a serial mouse actually working on it. There were no actual functional web browsers, so I had to compile Mozilla for it. There was a lot of software that straight up refused to compile. But d**n, it was what Apple describes as "snappy". Snappy to the extent that it was the first OS/DE since Amiga Kickstart/Workbench where the everyday lag wasn't noticeable.
Can you please do this video again, but try to install QNX Neutrino (6) on it?
Your shirt explains this video perfectly Sean. OMG! Hopefully everything will work, uh, out.
I am waiting for part 2 eagerly
What an i-opening video.
i had one of those machines given to me back in the late 90's i hacked the crap out of it dropped in a bigger drive and a new cpu and fan i ran windows 98se for about a year. worked alright. i was running 256mb of ram too.
It's the "Several hours later" portions that makes me love these videos.
See this is one of the machines i'd have loved back when it was new specifically to tear open and make do things it wasn't intended both because cheap and, to be blunt? It looks neat.
mood. that's what i love doing to tech. alot of stuff is pretty standard hardware nowadays
It's definitely much harder to get an actual better machine out of the process then you went in with though doing hackintoshing lol
I bought one of these back in the day. I had worked for #9, an early graphics company that created a tablet before the Ipad. I got a touch screen from them and with some careful hacking of the lip around the iopener screen, I installed it. There was an internal serial port IIRC that I sued to control it. I then bought an adapter for my car and used to listen to podcasts off an old PCMCIA hard drive on my drive into work. Fun times. I even have a letter from them claiming I owed them money because I violated their terms of service by not using their service :)
This has been a real i-opener
to be honest they could've dropped the dash and have it be the iOpener but then we all know who would get mad.
Alright, finally decided it's time for me to buy one of these. Found one that appears to be new-open-box for $109 and went for it. I actually have a Toshiba laptop currently set up in my kitchen that this thing would probably make a more suitable replacement for.
Just found this channel. Its perfect. Just intresting stuff! Its amazing!
And if you like shenanigans with vintage tech, wish this man a Merry Christmas 🎄
Looking forward to the cpu swap! I used to do mods a little like yours, 10 years ago, so your videos are doubly nostalgic to me :)
Merry Christmas Sean, if you celebrate. Glad tidings to the second i-opener!
this video is an allegory of my life
I was playing with Alcatel branded i-Opener P.O.S:s back in the day and there were umlocked BIOS for them. What i remember that PCI bridge chip was crap. I burned quite a few of them by mistake :D
Did yoi think that meaby that other sandisk chip that might have been a ide constroller has died. It makes sence since if CF card isn't corrupted it must be some sort of connection issue and since that chip was under a heatsink before meaby it has been cooked or somerhing. Im not in any way a electrician so idk if that makes any sense at all, but try reflowing chips around the ROM if you run out of ideas.
yeah that's what I was thinking
Have a wonderful Christmas, Sean, and may your shenanigans be merry and bright.
I never got in on the iOpener, but I did score a few Compaq IA-1s. The 90's were a weird time, and those machines were unbelievably hackable if you didn't mind wearing out CF cards really fast with tiny Windows 98 installs. My favorite IA-1 had a hole cut in the back so I could get a faster CPU in the thing. (the hole was for a heat sink & fan). Sadly, I never got the built-in Ethernet port to work in the blue unit I had, but USB-Ethernet worked "fine".
If I hadn't dumped them in the trash years ago, I'd donate one to the channel. They really were cool little machines.
It makes me wonder if the RAM had anything to do with the disk issues.
Not so sure what's wrong with it, but I'd try to see what RAM it can take and just how far that socket 7 can go. Slackware and FreeDOS can probably go a long way on that thing
Yes this is why I watch ActionRetro!!! 🤘🤘🤘
I can’t wait for part 2!!
Controller chip is fried... Merry Christmas
Can't wait to see the next installment of the I-opener saga
I could hear some buzzing sound for as far as I know it could be in the full video since I am only about 2 mins and 30 seconds in but any other videos or sounds don't have this sound just pointing it out.
It's been a minute since I have seen one of these. And I would never have suspected that they were still available. So I took the modern-ish route, and I bought one of those "Virgin web players" instead.
Yay birthday episode!
Benny Hill music would be fun during high speed disassembly
One of the simplest things when "CMOS ERROR" is to replace the CR2032 battery and I haven't seen this on the video. I Wonder if older machines were able to start if the battery's dead.
I've never encountered a computer that wasn't. In case of IBM compatibles just confirm the error message and either boot (if the hard drive is detected automatically) or re-enter the hard drive values in setup and then boot. Macs could be a bit peculiar with a flat battery but leaving them on for a minute or so and then rebooting fixed the problem.
yes. I remember when I was little my dad brought an old computer home for me to basically take it apart as it didn't want to boot. I ended up accidentally find out that it can only boot with a good CMOS battery so yeah that could be the case.
@@Ragnar8504 It's rare but I've seen it before. My Sony VAIO won't power on without a clock battery. It's an ASUS-made Socket 370 board with some version of 810/815 chipset.
I very much appreciate the madness
It's always a good video when I'm sitting here saying "Oh god" at every turn.
Anyone else hear the subtle buzzing here during the opening?
Man, I remember wanting one of these soooooo badly…
I modded one of these recently. I didn’t do most of the steps you’ve shown. I’m pretty sure I just flashed a modded bios with an external flasher, and then installed a HD with an inverted cable with files required to install windows 98.
any chance you have the modded bios? i'm trying to downgrade mine and would like to flash
@@tww1982 Yes, can get to it next week. I did find it online recently, can’t exactly remember where it took some looking, maybe with the Wayback machine
Try using a USB to Ethernet adapter. There are PS/2 splitters that can enable using both a regular PS/2 keyboard & a PS/2 mouse. With a laptop 2 1/2" HD installed, you should be able to install & run WinXP, or other Windows versions. The easiest method is to use another desktop PC to install XP, then transfer the HD to the IOpener for final boot to desktop. There are some AMD CPU's such as the K-6 600 MHz that should be compatible. For the full IOpener hack experience, get one that has the bios chip glued in place. Those machines required a bios flash to allow booting anything but the QNX operating system. However, simply buying one of the cheap Chrome book laptops from WalMart is going to be less aggravating than an IOpener.
I tried to do this same hack over 20 years ago and it failed to boot. It was pretty sad because I was pretty hopeful. It's like it has a hardware failsafe self-destruct function in it.
Congrats on fucking the machine up. That’s how you know the channel is real. Looking forward to a few more painful videos before the satisfying end.
I can't wait to see how this ends
- Was watching Michael MJD’s 2x videos & LGR’s ( all 3 at least 2-3mths old ) within the last 1 hr and out pop yours !
Talk about creepy coincidence ! 😯
This thing kind of reminds me of the thin client I have, but that one has a 250 megabytes flash drive built-in and doesn't really lock you out of anything so it was possible to install Linux on it fairly easily.
Did you try reducing the memory to what it was configured to prior to the issue?
Im really looking foward to seeing you running Linux on the i-Opener. I've already seen someone running Windows 98 on a revision 2 i-Opener. I'm hoping that even though you have a revision 4 you will succeed and get Linux running on the revision 4 i-Opener. What would make it more exciting is getting it online and browsing the modern web or even the Old Net.
You did memory chip removal etc, but did you reinstall the Modem? wouldnt be suprised if that's part of some check.
There's something to be said about opening up something with "opener" in its name.
Have you heard of "Kolibri OS"? It's a fork of Minuet OS. Both written in assembly; they are graphical desktop operating systems and Kolibri OS fits on a 1.44mb floppy disk. using just 2.5mb of space total and requiring just 8mb RAM and a Pentium (i586), it can run on most old PCs . It can also be run entirely in RAM. I thought about how often you try putting entirely inappropriate operating systems on old PCs and figured you would enjoy such shenanigans.
9:21 we know in this channel when we hear "I did the only reasonable thing" to be prepared for some weird crazyness coming up
I have one of those with a IDE, RAM + upgraded CPU with slim fan. I used it as a laptop sort of thing for a while. I ran Linux and XP on it.... No idea if it still works...
Linux makes everything better 😁👍
only for older systems tho.
Fakk yes. I'm a fairly new subscriber, but I always prioritize your videos no matter what. They're funny and entertaining. Please keep doing your thing in 2024
What a Christmas present. A cliffhanger! :P
Hey, you wanna try my MCL 1.2 release for 486 and pentium systems on this? the hardware would be pretty much ideal for the distro
The ram stick might be the issue try the original ram to see if it boots before quitting on it.
2 minutes into your video and what I see looks very similar if not identical to touch screen point of sale hardware. Flat box at an angle, ports at the bottom, plugging in a keyboard for programming.
i know that feeling bro! when you mees up a computer by accident and then turn to ebay for another one! merry christmas btw!
Task failed successfully! Good video..
Either the i-opener hasn't arrived yet or he forgot about the video
I've got one of these new in box. I took it apart just to check it didn't have some kind of doomsday corrosive clock battery. It didn't. That's an hour of my life I'll never get back. Seemed quite well made, but whilst I understand the 'because it's there' mentality, I don't see the point in hacking these things. Who wants to look at a DSTN screen anyway?
Hey, i-came here !
Disgusting
Giggity n Gooey Eh... so Tongue in cheek" Eh & lol_ey Eh... (huh? ) Ha
📻☕🦫☃️🌲🎄🤯oh no 🚘 🧠 dirrty #thugοüghtzEh
@@daveThbfusionwtf are you saying, bot?
I know it's going to sound like a stupid question but...
...did you revert the bios back to c only from d, a, scsi?
hah yes
This video was very i-Opening.
I think it's really interesting when you repurpose proprietary machines like this.
just for giggles, you did try putting back the original ram BEFORE doing all kinds of whacky stuff right? does it even show the bios screen anymore, or is it just completely dead?
I modded two of those back in the day. Sold them from 3 times what I paid for it., Added Hard Drive and Hacked Bios.
Well, im glad im not the only one that had my iOpener inexplicably brick.... Don't do what i did and try to flash the PLoP bootloader to internal flash!
You’d need to upgrade to an x64 chip; that will open up more options and install a solid state drive because frankly modern operating systems won’t run on 512 MB drives anymore. Your biggest hurdle is the memory and its possible it isn’t booting because the motherboard won’t take more than it has installed on it so really what you could do is buy a modern motherboard instead and solve all your issues. The fact its upgradeable is cool.
Bummer. Good luck!
That was a real eye-Opener.
I assume you removed the partiyion of off the onboard flash, then the CF card becomes the first drive and you should set the system to boot off off the C-Drive.
Yikes man. Hopefully you'll get the parts you need. It's unfortunate how sensitive those old machines can be.
I remember that! I believe i wanted to just to mod it for linux. Hopefully you are able to fix it!
Ooooooh, you broke it! 😆
Hi, I know the.following comment is for a previous video but I needed help quickly and so the question is as follows, regarding the turning the MacBook Air 11 video: "Can someone help me out and let me know if this model I'm looking at "Identifiers: Mid-2013 - MD711LL/A*" will work for this project?" It seems to be just about a year past the one AR used in his video but it seems pretty much the same so should work for Linux machine conversion, yes? Polite helpful comments would be very much appreciated.
bro, you are so cool. so glad i discovered your channel.
it blows my mind that u said someone figured out how to put linux on that 16mb chip, damn!
Hello! Relatively new viewer here. I've noticed this video has weird but really quiet buzzing sound? I can't hear it on speakers, but I do hear it when I'm using headset. I was worried that my headset might've been faulty but with your other videos, I don't hear it. It eventually goes away at around 3 min mark. Still could be something wrong on my side, IDK.
I rember running one of these with DSL linux
2:58 Anyone else thought of "A for Asthma" with the sound of the screwdriver?
As someone who just broke his 8500 (hopefully not irreparably) two days ago, this was an encouragement to me.
i love breaking things without even trying! the horrors of trying to enjoy old hardware lol
hey action retro i have a question with these old devices you own, how do u update the drivers? i have a asus k42f asus laptop i resetted it and don't know how to update it to the latest even tho the asus website claim its the latest espically the graphics card driver its actually now what website do you reccammend using?
We be Gone.
The first time I saw this computer was with Michael MJD, looks like install Windows is easier than Linux haha
Hope you can fix it!
5:54 I wonder how this connects, maybe one could get some expandability out of this header with some kind of adapter.
Ok, but will it blend?
Don't smell it!
Was this the thing you and Steve picked up at the vcf swapmeet? Or was that another netpliance type of machine?
COMPUTER IT IS!
Hey Conan... How's that Song Go....? MONORAIL!!!!