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Macintosh SE and a HyperCharger '020 Accelerator

bredfrown

Well-known member
I'm sorry I keep bumping this thread, lol - this is my first accelerator, so I've been having a lot of fun trying different stuff out to see what I can find.
I did some testing Tuesday evening and yesterday and found that these drivers for the Dove MaraThon gave me an impressive(?) 2.635 in Speedometer:

Screenshot 2023-04-20 at 8.02.23 AM.png

Link to these drivers:
(I'm using the config file for 4 MB of RAM on the accelerator, and 1 MB on the SE Logic Board, with 256 RAM cache.)

GemStart 3.0 drivers gave me higher math scores, as well as higher scores in a few areas, but the overall score was a bit lower:

Screenshot 2023-04-20 at 8.02.29 AM.png

I'm uncertain if I'll ever be able to use the accelerator's RAM or be able to copy the SE's ROM into cache, but I at least wanted to document my findings here in case someone else picks up one of these cards. :)

I'll probably be sticking with the GemStart 3.0 drivers for now, since they give me better stability in HyperCard and have working sound, but if something changes, or if I think of something else to try, I'll give it a shot.
 
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bredfrown

Well-known member
Alrighty, this should be the last post from me for a bit. I wanted to document what I discovered in the even that someone else picks up one of these cards and wants to know how to make it run a lot better!

I actually ended up toying around with the jumpers, after finding another photo of my card that I used for a reference.

The settings they had didn't work for me, but I figured a little bit of "calculated risk" would be fine (and I was standing by ready to yank the power cable out of the SE, or turn off the power switch – whichever my panicked would do first).

Anyway… I after a bit of trial and error, I found that these jumper settings increased performance by a huge amount:

jumper-setting-good.jpgscore-good.jpg


I ran my card with these settings, along with the Extreme Systems Vandal Accelerator (ExSys™ SE) drivers recommended by @Phipli :

I was very content with these settings, but I wanted to tinker just a bit more.
I moved the bottom jumper up one more position, and was able to turn my 3.905 Performance Rating in Speedometer into a rating of 4.914 (putting it roughly on par with an SE/30 according to Speedometer). Here's a photo of those settings:

jumper-setting-better.jpg

All in all, the accelerator seems to be stable. I do get some traps and crashes here and there, but I'm not sure what could be causing it.
I still haven't been able to get the "Copy ROM into RAM" function to work, but I'm thinking if I were to put 1 MB on the SE, and maybe tinker with these jumpers a bit more, I might be able to get that to work, too.
 

bredfrown

Well-known member
Just a quick amendment/update to my previous post:

I kept the jumper settings the same as I did in my previous post (Jumpers C, E, and F):

jumper-setting-better.jpg

But I swapped the Logic Board's 4 MB of RAM with 1 MB of RAM, and re-soldered on the resistor.

The result?

The accelerator used its own 4 MB of RAM! ;)

I had 4 MB on the accelerator and the Logic Board, so from my understanding, the accelerator was using the 4 MB on the Logic Board as sort of a "cache", while using its own RAM as system RAM, which would explain that nice little bump in speed.
I might fiddle around with the RAM cache settings, but besides that elusive "Copy ROM to RAM" feature, I think this is the best performance I can get from this card.

I hope by documenting all of this, it will help someone who happens to have one of these cards! :)
 
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cgp

Active member
For reference, here’s most of the original manual including scrawled notes about jumpers from a tech support call I made back in the day. 56D40397-C9C4-4AFD-9A67-EC44C358A765.jpeg
 

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bredfrown

Well-known member
@cgp , you are a gentleman and a scholar. Thank you so much for providing these screens!
It looks like I was right on the money with my settings, going by the notes you wrote on the cover! I got lucky! :)

Thank you so much again for taking time to scan these!
 

bredfrown

Well-known member
I wanted to drop by this thread and ask about something I had on my mind… I am well aware this is probably silly question.
Is it possible to accelerate an accelerator?

For instance, with this HyperCharger, upgrading the 68020 to a 68030 by dropping in a pin-compatible CPU?

No plans to do this, just curious.
 

Phipli

Well-known member
I wanted to drop by this thread and ask about something I had on my mind… I am well aware this is probably silly question.
Is it possible to accelerate an accelerator?

For instance, with this HyperCharger, upgrading the 68020 to a 68030 by dropping in a pin-compatible CPU?

No plans to do this, just curious.
The pinouts are different. most obviously because the 68020, so you'd need an adapter at the very least. I doubt there is room for an adapter in that chassis.

67020 :
68020-pga.png

68030 :
Screenshot_20230501_133831_Photo Editor.jpg

I guess the short answer is no.
 

bredfrown

Well-known member
This is cool!
I've never seen the pinouts detailed like this before!
That's what I was thinking as well. :)

The accelerator has been running great.
 

Phipli

Well-known member
For reference, here’s most of the original manual including scrawled notes about jumpers from a tech support call I made back in the day. View attachment 55780
This is really appreciated, do you have slightly higher resolution copies of the photos? They're right on the edge of readability.

Do you have a copy of an original drive disk? Or the installed control panel and extension from a machine?

Do you know anything about the 12 and 16MB jumper options? I'm surprised to see them. This shouldn't be possible without an MMU, does the board have one?
 

Phipli

Well-known member
This is cool!
I've never seen the pinouts detailed like this before!
That's what I was thinking as well. :)

The accelerator has been running great.
When you were trying to use the GCC software for your card, did you install the extension and the control panel? Or just the control panel?
 

Melkhior

Well-known member
Do you know anything about the 12 and 16MB jumper options?
With the 'FP' labelling near them, my guess is that it's for 12 or 16 MHz clocking of the FPU (the '881 and '882 don't need to run as the same lock as their host processor). 12.5 MHz-rated '881 where cheaper than 16 MHz-rated one, and would have already been a huge boost over software-based FP.
 

Phipli

Well-known member
With the 'FP' labelling near them, my guess is that it's for 12 or 16 MHz clocking of the FPU (the '881 and '882 don't need to run as the same lock as their host processor). 12.5 MHz-rated '881 where cheaper than 16 MHz-rated one, and would have already been a huge boost over software-based FP.
That makes perfect sense. I misread the M as MB, not MHz.
 

Melkhior

Well-known member
For instance, with this HyperCharger, upgrading the 68020 to a 68030 by dropping in a pin-compatible CPU?
As mentioned by @Phipli, they are not pin-compatible, but are mostly backward-compatible in hardware - a 68030 can run with a design made for the 68020 for the most part. @Qrani just posted the relevant section of the '030 manual in another thread.

However, there's only little benefit to replacing a '020 by a '030 that way. Without burst mode to refill the internal data cache, the '030 is not that much faster than a '020. And said data cache may require software changes in some cases. It would probably only be meaningfully faster if some external cache was added as well (there's some details on how to do that in the PAK68/3 accelerator design for ST available with translation on TD).
 

bredfrown

Well-known member
When you were trying to use the GCC software for your card, did you install the extension and the control panel? Or just the control panel?

I extension and control panel gave me a hard time. In all the drivers I've come across, there was a HyperCharger 020 and HyperCharger INIT file.
Installing both of those yielded these results:

System 6.0.8 - Freeze when loading the extensions
System 6.0.7 - Freeze when loading the extensions
System 7.0.1 - Worked
I never got the "Copy ROM to RAM" function to work. I think there is a part of the driver called "ROM Copy" that's missing.
The performance with those drivers were OK, but I got a lot better performance from the ExSys drivers you told me about.

In Speedometer, I got around 3.5-ish(I can't remember) performance rating with the HyperCharger drivers in System 7.0.1 vs. 4.19 performance rating with the ExSys drivers.
 

Phipli

Well-known member
As mentioned by @Phipli, they are not pin-compatible, but are mostly backward-compatible in hardware - a 68030 can run with a design made for the 68020 for the most part. @Qrani just posted the relevant section of the '030 manual in another thread.

However, there's only little benefit to replacing a '020 by a '030 that way. Without burst mode to refill the internal data cache, the '030 is not that much faster than a '020. And said data cache may require software changes in some cases. It would probably only be meaningfully faster if some external cache was added as well (there's some details on how to do that in the PAK68/3 accelerator design for ST available with translation on TD).
The worthwhile gain would be the MMU, but that is mostly rendered useless because the RAM on this board is likely not wired to support >4MB anyway. Although there does seem to be something going on with possibly using the Logic Board RAM as a cache, separately, so perhaps you could get to 8MB... but you would need custom software to set up the MMU to do it, and I doubt anyone is going to be able/motivated to make that any time soon.
 

bredfrown

Well-known member
As mentioned by @Phipli, they are not pin-compatible, but are mostly backward-compatible in hardware - a 68030 can run with a design made for the 68020 for the most part. @Qrani just posted the relevant section of the '030 manual in another thread.

However, there's only little benefit to replacing a '020 by a '030 that way. Without burst mode to refill the internal data cache, the '030 is not that much faster than a '020. And said data cache may require software changes in some cases. It would probably only be meaningfully faster if some external cache was added as well (there's some details on how to do that in the PAK68/3 accelerator design for ST available with translation on TD).
I wish there was a way to like posts! I'm learning a lot through these replies. :)
 

bredfrown

Well-known member
The worthwhile gain would be the MMU, but that is mostly rendered useless because the RAM on this board is likely not wired to support >4MB anyway. Although there does seem to be something going on with possibly using the Logic Board RAM as a cache, separately, so perhaps you could get to 8MB... but you would need custom software to set up the MMU to do it, and I doubt anyone is going to be able/motivated to make that any time soon.
From what I discovered, I was able to use 4 MB of the accelerator's RAM, and it uses the LB's RAM for maybe some caching.
Being able to use 8 MB would be cool, but I'm with you on this one - I don't think it would be possible unless there were some new drivers made for it.
 

ObeyDaleks

Well-known member
Is it possible to accelerate an accelerator?

Yes, it’s possible. Would it work on your specific card? Not sure. I’ve now done it on two different SE accelerators. One upgraded from 16Mhz to 33Mhz, and one from 25Mhz to 33Mhz I’m about to attempt 50Mhz by the end of the week as soon as I get my new oscillators (ordered wrong ones the first time around). Both of the cards had 030 processors. I would think that you could upgrade yours, but only to a faster 020, not 030. It takes a certain amount of gonads to experiment with these cards. I fully expected to fry them in the process. :).
 

Phipli

Well-known member
Yes, it’s possible. Would it work on your specific card? Not sure. I’ve now done it on two different SE accelerators. One upgraded from 16Mhz to 33Mhz, and one from 25Mhz to 33Mhz I’m about to attempt 50Mhz by the end of the week as soon as I get my new oscillators (ordered wrong ones the first time around). Both of these cards had 030 processors. I would think that you could upgrade yours, but only to a faster 020, not 030. It takes a certain amount of gonads to experiment with these cards. I fully expected to fry them in the process. :).
He can't speed bump his card because it doesn't have a clock - it uses double the logicboard clock.
 
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