[LordOZ]

I just wanted to post a little bit about my journey to find and refurbish this stunning dual 133MHz BeBox. I've been looking for one for about 20 years and finally found one on eBay Japan. It was in rough shape, back panel/geek port all rusty, case dinged up and paint chipped, bezel half yellowed from sun and possibly smoke, case was a little bent/distorted.

It took me 3 full days of direct sunlight to retrobright the bezel to what I thought was the correct shade of white/gray.

       

I found a metal 5.25" drive bay insert and I had it and the cover professionally powder coated in cobalt blue.

           

It needed a new power supply, so I get a brand new 350w AT, I also got rid of the huge rfi filter and put in smaller ones. Here's a nice shot of the cleaned mobo too:

       

Modified the 12vdc CPU cooling fan to run off the 12vdc fan mobo header.

There were several broken or missing blinken lights, so I worked with Amiga of Rochester to carefully replace them, but with a twist!

   

Here are a couple shots of the BeBox fully refurbished and happily running GL Teapot:

       

To complete the build I updated the BeBox firmware to R4.5. I also had read that it should be capable of using upto 1GB of ram, however, after extensive testing with dozens of 72-pin SIMM combinations (EDO, parity, FPM), I could only get it to recognize 320MB's. I also tried many different PCI video cards and came to the conclusion that the Matrox Millennium 1 w/8MB's of ram is the best card. It's fully compatible with the Be logo startup and you can enter into the HDD/CD drive manager. Many of the cards I tested would not work with the Be startup screen and did not provide any noticeable increase in desktop speed.

I also tested a bunch of NIC's and probably the cheapest easiest one to use are based on the DEC "Tuplip" chipset. I was able to find an early generation Netgear FA310 that worked great... although ethernet performance is poor with whatever you use. For the hard drive I ended up using a Zulu RP2040. The IDE interface on the BeBox is insanely slow and I had strange issues with it. The Zulu provides probably the best performance out of the 10MB/s SCSI interface. It's also super easy to just drop different HDD or CD images to a CF card. I'm dual booting R4.5.2 and R5.0.3. I also found brand new really nice white/grey floppy and a Toshiba SD-M1711 SCSI DVD rom drives.

I think that about covers it! I intend to bring this BeBox to VCF west at some point, hopefully with some other interesting workstations from that time period. I'm also on the lookout for PPC software for it as well, so let me know if you have anything cool to share. Thanks!

[vishnu]

I also found brand new really nice white/grey floppy and a Toshiba SD-M1711 SCSI DVD rom drives.

I've got a 3.5 inch USB floppy drive that I use on my main Linux driver fairly often. I've got a ton of old stuff on hundreds of floppies that I'm slowly going through and recovering. I've got a box I just throw the floppy disk into when I've recovered it, and there's a company in Washington that will recycle the disks (for a price), so when I'm done I'm going to send them all off to that company. Can't throw 'em in the dumpster, gotta be green! 😁

[jpstewart]

Wow, congrats on the BeBox and the beautiful restoration work. I know how hard they are to find, and then to have to go through all that effort.... But the result was worth it. It looks amazing in the pics, and sounds like you'll be able to have tons of fun with it. Great project, thanks for showing it to us.

[Raion]

Congrats!

[robespierre]

Wow, did you see the serial number sticker?
Looks like #17.

[LordOZ]

Wow, did you see the serial number sticker?
Looks like #17.

Yeah, I wasn't sure where I landed on the serial number list as the mobo and the case sticker have different serial numbers. I think this might be somewhat common as I've read that dual 66mhz box owners were provided a dual 133mhz upgrade path. That might explain the different serial numbers. I asked about the history of this computer and other then it was from Japan, there was no other information. I've noticed that many of the BeBoxes also have a name tag on the back of them. Mine is named "Faust"... but I've seen other BeBoxes named differently but also with a similar penmanship. I'm wondering if some or all BeBoxes had these tags on them, and if the same person wrote them?

   

[Gamefan]

What a beauty! Great work on the restoration

[Shiunbird]

Beautiful!

[octaneirix6530]

Could you make a video of it playing the videos included on it ?
Just wondering how smooth they run on your bebox.

Thank you