ID Mac Plus 030 upgrade card

[ArmorAlley]

Hi MOS_030,

 Does your Plus on Speed run under System 4? With the possible exception of an accelerated Mac II, this is about as fast as System 4 can get. I'm not sure if the drivers will work for it though. I'd curious to see if it would, just to see.

aa

 

[MOS8_030]

That must be some kick in the pants. The card's probably using VM as main memory at 3x the 8MHz clock of system memory. Without cache on the accelerator, using only the SIMMs on the board would be a nasty bottleneck. That hit's not as bad on the the 16MHz II/IIx/IIcx/SE/30 bus, the cache on adapted IIci accelerators makes up for much of that. Has anyone taken a crack at figuring out how to benchmark memory bus constriction on the SE/30 vs. IIsi and IIci? Isolating that from overall system performance in a handicap league kinda deal might be interesting.

That System Saver was born to run on your accelerated Plus. []

As far as I can tell the only way to have it use the on-card ram at all is to enable the ram disk function, otherwise it reverts to using the mobo memory.

I wish the card could use more than 4mb of ram but oh well. (I did try some 4mb simms just for the heck of it but no-go.)

As far as cooling, I've got a fan and extra 12v from the Mean Well PS and by golly I'm determined to use it!

But the System Saver might get added too, you can never be too cool.

 

[MOS8_030]

Hi MOS_030,

 Does your Plus on Speed run under System 4? With the possible exception of an accelerated Mac II, this is about as fast as System 4 can get. I'm not sure if the drivers will work for it though. I'd curious to see if it would, just to see.

aa

I can find out. But I suspect you're right about the drivers.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

To use the extra RAM on there you need CompactVirtual:

View attachment 11137

What he said.

 

[MOS8_030]

What he said.

After I install a fan and get the system back together I'll try Compact Virtual again.

Working on fan now...

 

[MOS8_030]

Internal fan all squared away.

It seems that Compact Virtual doesn't play nice with the Railgun extensions.

After I install CV 3.02 and reboot the system comes back up but the mouse won't move.

Clicker works, but no movement.

Played with the settings & load order of the control panels with no luck.

Bolle appears to be using Gemstart. I couldn't get Gemstart to recognize this card.

Perhaps I'll try CV with the Dove init and see what happens.

 

[MOS8_030]

So to continue to beat this horse...

I got the system working with Gemstart 3.0 and Compact Virtual.

I guess Gemstart likes System 7.0.1 better than System 6.

With Gemstart there's no ramdisk option like the Railgun init has.

Compact Virtual appears to be using the HD for VM, not the on-board ram. It creates a swapfile in the system folder.

I could not figure out a way to enable a ramdisk with the on-board ram and direct CV to use that which would be the ideal.

As I mentioned above using the Railgun init with CV resulted in mouse not working, probably because CV moves the I/O addresses.

(I did try disabling that function in CV but still no mouse.)

ANYway, I think I'll stay with the Gemstart/CV config for this system.

The CPU benchmarks with Gemstart were almost the same as with the Railgun but the FPU results were a lot better with Gemstart.

(And for some reason my camera is crap today!)

 

[Crutch]

Resurrecting slightly stale thread but I recently got one of these (25MHz Novy Quick30) and am starting to play with it - forgive a rookie question but mine came with just 4MB on the card and I’m trying to upgrade to 16MB, and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to remove those SIMMs. Is a special tool required? (I’m having trouble attaching a photo but they look identical to yours from the original photo of your board @MOS8_030, definitely not a standard Mac motherboard attachment type SIMM.)

 

[Bolle]

Those need a special tool. I got one with my boxed Quick30. Can take a picture tomorrow if I find it.

 

[Crutch]

Thanks Bolle, would very much appreciate it.  (trying to imagine the engineering decision to not use a standard, snap-in SIMM socket...)

 

[Bolle]

 

[Crutch]

Thanks Bolle.  Based on some googling and your helpful photo I believe that is AMP SIMM Removal Tool part number 382264-1.  I found one on BTW-electronics.net for $6.  We'll see if it works!

 

[MOS8_030]

I've always used a small flat head screwdriver. However it requires extreme care to not break the very fragile tines.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I believe that is AMP SIMM Removal Tool part number 382264-1.  I found one on BTW-electronics.net for $6.

Got linkage?

 

[Crutch]

I would have posted sooner but I think I got their last one: https://www.btw-electronics.net/AMP/SIMM-Extraction-Tool,-382264-1

 

[Paralel]

I never would have guessed there was an actual tool for that.

 

[Crutch]

@MOS8_030 did you try messing with the jumpers on this board at all?  Thanks to Bolle’s tip above I’m now running mine with 4x4MB SIMMs.  I can’t seem to get it to recognize 16MB, but if I move the jumper labeled “0/1/4M” down one position from where it’s shown in your photo (so, jumping the 2nd and 3rd pins counting from the “4M” side), I see 4MB total memory (I presume on my motherboard) and the Railgun extension boots with a 6.7MB RAM disk (the RailgunCdev shows “on board: 1024k, logic board: 4096k, protected: 7104k”).  This is without running Compact Virtual.  I’m not sure why it’s 7MB instead of 8MB, or if there’s any way to get access to all 16MB ...

Also — I had the same issue as you with CV freezing my mouse (actually, I could move mine vertically and use the button, but not move it horizontally).  Weirdly I found I was able to fix that by installing CV and telling it I have a Mercury board instead of a Novy Quick30Plus (mine looks identical to yours so I assume it is indeed a Quick30Plus).  Once I did that, I can run CV and the Railgun CDEV/extensions together with no problem.  (To be clear, without doing this I couldn’t run CV with any accelerator extensions, including GemStart ... I don’t think you had this issue with GemStart?)  However, CV only seems to let me use 4MB of memory (is it the motherboard or the Novy card?) — i.e. if I set it to 8MB of VM, it uses 4MB on my HD.  Also, having told it I’m using a Mercury board to get it working, CV won’t let me create a RAM disk.

 

[Crutch]

p.s. I am also running 7.0.1. 

 

[MOS8_030]

As an update to this project I finally found a reasonably priced 68882 FPU on ebay last week.

I installed it in my card today and ran a few bench marks.

It looks like I now have the equivalent of a B&W IIci.

I may go ahead and try 7.1 on this and see how it works.

Crutch, I'm sorry I missed your posts!

I'm still using Gemstart with CV & 7.0.1.

Regarding the memory issue, the Plus, even with the 030, can't run in 32-bit mode.

That's why the system can't address more than 8mb of ram.

The other cool thing about the FPU is it had a date code of Jan '93.

Like the '92 dated 030 there's a very good chance I processed the wafers that these chips came off of!

 

[MOS8_030]

p.s. I am also running 7.0.1. 

Playing around with my card and thinking about this more, I think this particular card only supports 4mb, regardless of 32 bit support.

The instruction manual provided by Bolle is for a later model Quick30 board.

Wish I could a find the specific manual for this card.