I Turned My Toshiba Libretto into a Teeny Tiny Hackintosh with Apple Rhapsody OS!

back when i was a kid i was fascinated by the idea of portable computing not to age myself too much but back then portable computers all pretty much look like these loud hot bulky and way underpowered compared to their desktop brethren but there was one laptop that broke this mold and to me as a kid it seemed to come from the freaking future the toshiba libretto a full windows experience in a teeny tiny package with a crisp active matrix display and now many years later i finally have one so today let's take a look at this thing fix one of its major annoyances and then well we're gonna get a little weird with it so stay tuned today's macintosh shenanigans are brought to you by pcb way so many retro computing projects that we've come to depend on started with prototyping via pcbway.com in no small part due to their great pricing and turnarounds as fast as 24 hours just take a look through their shared project sections where you can find absolute gems like this amazing entire apple one clone so if you have any pcb needs i hope you'll give pcbway.com a try the first toshiba librettos came out in 1996 in japan with 46 processors and a 6.1 inch color tft display at the time it was the world's smallest pc weighing just 30 ounces and it was quite successful with japanese where small versions of things were and still are a popular trend toshiba actually kept making librettos into the early 2000s with modern touches like webcams and even this really weird dual screen w100 but none of them really have the charm or evoke the sense of futuristic miniaturization as the original mid 90s variants at least to me the one i have here is the libretto 50ct one of the first librettos available in north america it sports a fast pentium mmx processor a whopping 32 megs of ram which is expandable to 64 with a hard to find memory module and a whopping 2.1 gig hard drive with a crisp 7.1 inch color tft display and ports are pretty scarce in fact on the libretto itself you have a single infrared port on the back pcmcia card slot your power adapter of course and a single port on the bottom for your dock unfortunately i do also have the mini dock which has a parallel port serial and vga out in case you want to mirror your screen on a monitor which is probably 10 times bigger than the libretto itself and of course there's no floppy drive and no cd-rom drive in fact the only floppier cd option is to have one connected to a pcmcia card but actually what i've been doing is just using this pcmcia card adapter with a 32gb cf card which is a pretty convenient way to move files back and forth from my modern machine into this tiny little computer and it's actually pretty nice because it fits flush along the side of the machine here providing a nice way to add additional storage of course the hard drive in here originally is two gigs so a 32 gig cf card isn't too shabby so there's two things i want to do today one is a much needed quality of life upgrade and the other one is a bit of an experiment first we need to replace the original hard drive with a nice silent cf card because the original hard drive is literally the loudest clickiest and most annoying thing i've ever heard how does a computer make a noise that terrible second since we're going to have the hard drive out i want to have a little fun with operating systems you see the libretto just barely meets the requirements for apple's rhapsody os that's right way before the 2006 power pc to intel transition apple was flirting with both x86 and deck platforms for its precursor to mac os 10. and it made sense too rhapsody the operating system that would become the basis for mac os 10 started out as open step which itself started out as next step apple purchased the os with steve jobs next computers the company he founded after being forced out from apple in 1985 and openstep already ran on x86 so apple didn't really have to do anything to target that platform and rhapsody was basically the beginning of the revitalization of apple and macintosh in the 2000s and many of the pieces of the original rhapsody and next software still live on in mac os today so an openstep or rhapsody install requires both a floppy drive and a cd-rom to be connected at the same time and unfortunately i don't have either one for the libretto but with the cf card we have another interesting option install rhapsody in a virtual machine and then write the virtual hard disk directly to the card okay to install rhapsody in a virtual machine i've broken out our 400 megahertz upgraded g4 pismo now before i actually got the pismo out i did try to do this on a modern linux machine with virtualbox but i ran into all sorts of problems with rhapsody like it didn't have the right video drivers and i was stuck at 640 by 480 in black and white and it was really slow and it crashed sometimes and then i found a guide online which explained that connectix virtual pc 5.0.4 is the best version to actually run rhapsody correctly and that guide was from like 2003 but it did seem to be the case because i installed it in virtual pc and it does work so here we are booted into rhapsody developer release 2 on this virtual machine and remember even though this looks like mac os 8 this is not a power pc or 68k virtual machine this is an intel virtual machine and this is the intel version of rhapsody and we've got full color on here and look that spinning beach ball you might remember from early versions of actual mac os 10 but yeah this is full color and we have 1024 by 768 actually i have this at 800 by 600 right now so i'll include a link to this fully set up and configure disk image in the description below along with a link to download virtual pc from the macintosh garden in case you want to try out rhapsody for yourself but what i'm going to do now is copy this hard disk image directly to this 2 gigabyte cf card and this will be the hard drive for the libretto and i don't have high hopes that this is going to work first try but we're going to give it a shot and man is it going to be cool if it does work so i have one of these nice little adapters here and we'll just plug this into the pismos usb so one quirk of the libretto that i found out during my research from an article on bs labs about installing openstep on the libretto is that there is a built-in hibernate function in bios which dumps the contents of ram to disk and powers off the machine in response to closing the lid or pushing the power button so in that article they left 200 banks free at the end of the disk so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to leave this disk unformatted and i'm going to dd in the command line to this cf card so that should work but fair bit of warning dd is sometimes nicknamed disk destroyer because if you type these arguments wrong you could very well mess up your machine so only use dd with the utmost of caution and that's probably going to take a while so we'll come back to this when it either completes or fails okay so before i take apart the libretto i just want to make sure that the cf card actually works so i've pulled out this absolute pile of garbage compact for serio 1255 from 1999 which has a an amd k6 processor and 32 megs of ram so a pretty good stand-in for the libretto and can we just take a moment and appreciate the horrible mid-90s design language of this thing look at that this is the only laptop to have come with its own internet zone all right let's power this up and see if we get rhapsody the light on the adapter is turning red that's a good sign i heard the cd drive spin up and i did boot this into windows 98 so this laptop does work and boot just fine hey look at that it's in the rhapsody bootloader it sees all 32 megs of memory oh my god there we go rhapsody developer release 2 starting rhapsody all right let's take apart the toshiba libretto all right taking apart the libretto [Music] look at that tiny battery that's adorable [Music] okay we don't actually have to take it apart that far uh to pull the hard drive out but i think we're gonna need to continue taking this apart just because i can't really push this all the way down to the hard drive connector so i do need to get underneath this casing here to actually connect this to the ide connector [Music] and there's our memory module which is extremely hard to find i believe this computer has 16 megs built in and this is another 16 meg module right here all right all of that just to get down into this bottom section here and install our cf card all right now before we put all the screws back in why don't we make sure it's just gonna boot into rhapsody nope insert system disk in drive press any key when ready ah well that sucks okay well just to rule out the cf card not being compatible i made an image of the original hard drive which actually turned out to be 815 megs and not two gigs like i thought and i just stuck that image on this sd card and then i tested this sd card in my computer and was able to mount the drive just fine so let's install this and see if it boots into windows 98 all right insert system disk into drive that's not a good sign all right let's try this 16 gig sd card then okay maybe a 60 gigabyte msata drive will do better i mean maybe it's a little bit overkill for a pentium 166 but hey it's a libretto it's worth it right all right so as a last minute hail mary i copied the virtual hard drive to the sd card again and just tried it one more time and look it worked we're booting into rhapsody on the libretto which is in kind of a sorry state so let's see if this boots all the way to the desktop and if so we'll put this thing back together well that's not good when it clicked into loading colors and i think it jumped to 800x600 we got stuck with this corruption so i think what i'm gonna have to do is boot up the vm on the pismo again change the resolution to i guess 640 by 480 and then recopy it to the sd card so i guess i'll do that now all right it works so i fired up the virtual machine i deselected the graphics driver and just wrote that to the sd card and now we are booted into the well grayscale version of rhapsody so let's put this thing back together and then try to tweak the settings and get color on this thing and have our mid 90s tiny hackintosh toshiba libretto so check it out we really have a toshiba libretto running apple rhapsody os the precursor to mac os 10 with the apple menu and everything and it's in grayscale right now but we should see if we can try to mess around with the drivers and get some color but the mouse works and the keyboard seems to work i honestly can't believe it i mean it was kind of a lot of drama to get this to work but we got it to work yeah using the mouse cursor on here is a little bit annoying the mouse buttons are actually in the back of the screen but you kind of get used to it but yeah look at that it's actually it's not even that slow i mean using it on the virtual machine was torture on the pismo so this is this is pretty good so we'll open up configure.app which is basically drivers and see if we can get some color on here all right so i chose the s3 generic pci driver and 640x480 so let's see if that gives us color oh well that's not good all right well we now have a teeny tiny mid 90s hackintosh on our toshiba libretto 50 ct and i'm pretty amazed with rhapsody and how well it runs on here i mean we couldn't get color working and i'm gonna have to restore this thing from the previous sd card maybe i'll trial and error some of the drivers to see if i can get it to work but still this is pretty darn cool absolutely useless even more useless than a libretto was already but very cool nonetheless and i'm super happy with this teeny tiny hackintosh so if you have any ideas for software that i should run on here that would be interesting rhapsody software let me know in the comments below but if you like this video i'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more sort of macintosh shenanigans like this please subscribe thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to justin chris rocky mods sword eclectic and spike who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping make these videos possible [Music] you

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 121,144

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: YWyUbN5tFYo

Length: 17min 36sec (1056 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2021