sonnet prototype boards

[indibil]

Perhaps it's already known here on the forum, but yesterday I found this protoboard on eBay that appears to be from the Dual 500MHz upgrade for G4 Gigabit.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1636297406...55-0&campid=5338722076&customid=&toolid=10050


It's a shame it can't be reconstructed without the schematics.

.

 

[Daniël]

It's probably not impossible to figure out how to populate the board, it doesn't look like it strays too far from Apple's official dual 7400/7410 cards of that period, though I'm not sure if the CPU connector is still available.
If you look at pictures of the Apple 820-1053-A card, it seems pretty close to that, with the main difference being the fact they replaced the toroidal with a flatter, SMD part, which fixes clearance issues on the Cube.

The seller has more boards for Sonnet accelerators, but all of those are the types that have CPLDs/FPGAs that would need to be cracked and recreated in order to actually be able to populate those.
Or they'd have to be harvested from other Sonnets, but unless they're broken, that's a bit silly to do.

 

[Byrd]

Those unpopulated boards have been on eBay for years, but used to be sold as just that … not prototypes which of course jacks up the price.

 

[cheesestraws]

Those unpopulated boards have been on eBay for years, but used to be sold as just that … not prototypes which of course jacks up the price.

Yes - just because a board is unpopulated doesn't make it a prototype!

 

[Powerbase]

Perhaps it's already known here on the forum, but yesterday I found this protoboard on eBay that appears to be from the Dual 500MHz upgrade for G4 Gigabit.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1636297406...55-0&campid=5338722076&customid=&toolid=10050

View attachment 87831
It's a shame it can't be reconstructed without the schematics.

.

That's in my town here, Opelika. I've been meaning to go there one weekend and see where they got all these sonnet boards at. I don't know if they're prototype boards or just unpopulated production boards, or something. Weird that they got a bunch of them.

 

[Byrd]

Yes - just because a board is unpopulated doesn't make it a prototype!

Source: years of searching "sonnet" on eBay and coming across these unpopulated boards sold at a fraction of this price. I'm guessing they have hundreds of 'em.