The PowerBook G3 Lombard parts machine I ordered is waiting for me at home.

Watch the keyboard on it be even more broken than the one I'm trying to fix.

The donor keyboard works perfectly! The parts machine also included a DVD-ROM, which has now replaced the CD-ROM with a broken plastic cover that this machine originally came with, and to celebrate the working keyboard (and test the DVD-ROM), I played one of my CDs, Discovery by ELO, in the Apple CD Player app.

And look at that CD Player app! It's so gorgeous. All software should be required to look like this. By law.

The donor machine also includes a 400MHz CPU card compared to my current 333MHz card, so I may look into swapping that at some point. I'd also have to give the machine a well-overdue repaste.

Pictures taken with the Mavica CD400 btw.

The PowerBook G3 Lombard parts machine I ordered is waiting for me at home.

Watch the keyboard on it be even more broken than the one I'm trying to fix.

I recently got this G3 Lombard on the cheap and it's a pretty neat machine. Unfortunately many keys on the keyboard are totally unresponsive. Specifically, the entire number row, the return/enter, apostrophe/quote, and the up and right keys. This makes the machine, understandably, a little difficult to use.

And I have yet to find any reasonably priced listing for the keyboards for this machine. In fact, the only listing I've found so far is from DV Warehouse, who I have no idea the reputability of, for $99! Ninety-nine whole ass dollars for a laptop keyboard from the 90s... It supposedly comes with a nice warranty, but again, I don't know if this is even a legit company.

Now, there are plenty of keyboards available for the later Wall Street and Pismo variants of the PowerBoom G3, but from what I've read, these use a different connector that makes them incompatible with the Lombard. So I'm up shit creek without a paddle.

Does anyone know of a solution here? Is it wrong that the Pismo keyboards are incompatible? If they are actually incompatible, is there some way of adapting them to work on the Lombard? Do you, reading this right now, have a working Lombard keyboard you no longer need? I'll buy it! Please, anything but this insane BS. I'd like to actually use this machine someday.

The ecstatic delight of getting a CF to IDE adapter installed, burning a disc image, and getting Mac OS 8.6 up and running on the PowerBook G3 Lombard I recently obtained, only to be followed by the crushing defeat of realizing the keyboard is just broken enough to be effectively useless (entire number row, return/enter, apostrophe/quote, right and up arrow keys all unresponsive), and that it's due to a common and known issue of fragile traces on the keyboard PCB, and because of that the only listing I can find on the entire internet for a keyboard for this thing is $99 from DV Warehouse 🙃