Re: Problems installing OBSD 3.4 on IIsi

Hi guys, thank you for the quick replies.

Otto Moerbeek wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Feb 2004, Nick Holland wrote:
> 
> 
>>sunder wrote:
>>
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>I've got a Mac IIsi with 17Mb of RAM, and a Sonic 10BT/10B2/AUI network
>>>card.  It's currently running MacOS 7.5.
>>
>>That card doesn't happen to include a FPU (Floating Point Unit, math
>>co-processor, whatever you want to call it), does it?

There's no actual 68882 chip on the card, however it does have a square 
empty socket with mating pins on all four sides (it's not like pentium 
chips where the pins are on the bottom.)  It doesn't look like it would be 
for a boot rom, so it's very likely it's for the FPU -- if I can find a 
spare one somewhere... :)

>>The installer requires an FPU (I have NO idea why).  The IIsi does not
>>include one standard.

Ok guys, I wasn't fully aware that the IIsi's lacked FPU's by default. 
This was just a (working) junker that I wanted to put to better use. :) 
I've looked at ebay and didn't see anyone selling a IIsi coprocessor or 
just the chip at all, let alone cheaply.

> This is total speculation: there used to be a utility SoftFPU for MacOS.  
> The m68k only version of this was shareware, iirc. This allowed programs
> requiring an FPU, like Mathemetica, to run on FPU-less Macs by doing an
> emulation of the coprocessor in software.  Maybe you can try that....

I suppose it might work *IF* the kernel either doesn't require an FPU to 
boot up, or if when it boots it doesn't disturb already allocated MacOS 
memory + exception vectors...  might be worth a try. :)