ive been reviewing some threads on 68kmla that seem to indicate there are a number of utilities that are able to flash firmware + also talk of a few that are able to save a copy of the firmware made by 3rd party cpu producers like powerlogix
heres an update for the 500-600mhz powerbook g4s (mac os 9 bootable)
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1141
pic of the powerbook g4 667mhz (os9 bootable)
the firmware update requires that you be booted into 9 but i read that there was a way to inject the firmware
by having the file on the drive and installing it via openfirmware which would bypass the version checking that would
take place by mac os 9... the real flashing happens ont he openfirmware level anyway.. so this is similar in theory to how one would open an osx installer app by displaying the contents of a package and directly launching an executable that gets called after the implemented version checks..
the procedure for writing the rom file was already detailed to us by blitter on this thread..
it should be pretty much the same thing to do it on a powerbook rather then a desktop g4.
question is, could flashing a powerbook above 1ghz with a firmware from a 667mhz powerbook
render the powerbook unbootable.. ? i think in this case the benefit to figuring htis out would outweigh the risk!!!!!
especially if a powerbook could be attained for under 50$ which is possible only pretty much for powerbooks under 1ghz
people still are asking 100-200$ for the g4 powerbooks in the 1.x ghz range in my area
it might be worthwhile to find a way to extract the firmware from 1 ghz powerbook g4 somehow
and save that to a file.. like i stated before i think this is totally possible in openfirmware but would require
some skill + perfect execution
and of cousre the only reason why we havent seen these running os 9 yet is.. noone has tried;)
and the cpus are soldered to the motherboard i think otherwise someone would have already swapped a cpu
from a 1.67 into a 1.0ghz

pic of the powerbook g4 1.0ghz