Franken-mac ... can we do it???

Question

I have some very strange questions about some older macs that I have lying around the house. I use an isight iMacG5 for day to day work and my partner uses an older iBookG4 on his desk.
That leaves our old bondi blue imac (un-upgraded) original specs
and our old iBook G3 lying about.
I would love to be able to use the original imac's speakers and screen as a movie/internet viewer in our public area. Is is possible to pull apart both of these machines and make a franken-mac that uses the iBook keyboard and disk drives and hard drive and all that but drives the screen and speakers of the old iMac? It doesn't have to LOOK pretty or fit into the carapace of the iMac. But would it work? Could it work? Am I completely insane??
let me know! ~kt

Answer 1

I think as Kenichi already mentioned this is a rather involved hardware hack. Not that it couldn't be done as evidenced by the work done on old Color Classics but my first thought would be why....
I skimmed through and noticed someone mentioning Bose speakers in iMacs. I can't say I've heard of that either, but one generation of iMac G3's did incorporate Harmon Kardon speakers and they actually don't sound to bad. Especially if you mate it up to an iSub from Harmon Kardon. I have this in an Indigo iMac G3 350mhz which is a slot loading iMac.
http://www.lowendmac.com/ed/keel/08tk/slot-loading-imacs.html is an interesting little article.
But back to your question, personally I don't think I would try and rip one apart. There might be simpler ways of doing it. First you could upgrade the CPU to a 333 mhz unit if it was a 233, a couple of years ago I bought a lot of iMac cpu's off a seller in the southern US for $20 so these things can be cheap.
Looking at the original Bondi I wonder if you can swap out the CD drive with a DVD drive, the usefulness of this swap will greatly depend on whether the iMac will support DVD playback which a very lame google search didn't answer just now. The reason I mention this is because DVD drives for PC laptops are dirt cheap for example a DVD/RW can be had for $30 that works with Toast and with Apples built in DVD authoring sw in OSX and I suspect you could replace the tray loader in the Bondi with a PC DVD drive.
Plan B, find a cheap used iMac G3 DV which would be a 400 or 500 mhz unit. That should also allow you to upgrade as far as Tiger since it has firewire......
Plan C, instead of gutting the iBook use it's external video output to hook it up to an external monitor..... CRT's are being tossed into the tipper at incredible rates these days. I have three skids at work waiting to go out to a recycler stacked with 3 rows high with 17" and 19"ers.......although personally I would go with a cheap LCD if the screen on the iBook is bad.
Kevin
Message was edited by: Niteshooter