Recent content by Franklinstein

The 603 has a 32-bit address bus and a selectable 32/64-bit data bus. The 603UM says that operation must be selected at boot, so it's not dynamic: you get either a 32 or 64-bit data bus. According to the Dev Note for the 5200, Capella resides on the 64-bit 603 bus along with ROM and L2 cache. So...

The original 603 probably could've gotten away with 16kB of cache if it was unified. Having it split into two 8kB sections is really what hampered it, especially with the 68LC040 Emulator which some resources suggest could run more efficiently with a minimum of 16kB (whether unified 16kB or...

Were they old-school Motorola chips or newer Freescale-branded ones? I may have seen some etched Freescale PLCC chips but they're a lot newer than the Moto ones. Maybe it'd be more accurate to say "etching PLCCs wasn't common until the late '90s/early '00s"? I don't remember etching/engraving...

Yeah counterfeits are a thing. It's less so much of a problem with midrange chips than those at the high end (i.e., you're more likely to get a counterfeit 50MHz 68030 than a counterfeit 25MHz 68030). Generally be wary of "NOS" chips because these are easier to re-mark than a used chip (you...

The Diamondtrons are Mitsubishi's off-patent Trinitron clones. Usually they have faults in the HV circuit as mentioned, but whether it's a dodgy flyback, some other failed component, or just poor manufacturing (i.e., bad solder joints) it's hard to say. I have one of these and a later ADC CRT of...

The GeForce 4MX is an example of dishonest marketing: the GPU is basically a warmed-over GF2MX and doesn't have any of the features of the true GF4. Find a GF4 Ti 4200 or 4600 instead if you want to play games. I've never seen a Creative card work in Classic Mac OS. I have seen some...

It's a Digital Audio/Video (DAV) connector. It's to directly feed signals to an add-in card such as a hardware MPEG codec. I'm pretty sure the TV Tuner card feeds into the logic board via the main harness connector. I can't help with the NatSemi ethernet card. It may have support built into...

As far as thermal paste goes, I definitely second checking it. One time I pulled the heat sink out of a NuBus Power Mac (I think it was an 8115 but maybe a 7100) and not only was the thermal paste dried out, from the factory it was applied off-center so only half of the CPU die actually had...

Yeah one day when I'm better at smd soldering I'll go back to it. IBM made some of their 603es in the very pretty blue epoxy package (which is what this chip is) so I'd definitely like to save it.

I wanted to transplant a 120MHz 603e into a 100MHz 5300 but i botched it pretty good. Not sure if it's salvageable but maybe one day I'll take another crack at it. I went with a 120MHz part because a. it was available (from a ruined 52/53xx board) and 2. I figure I could pair it with a 40MHz bus...

Now that's something I can get behind. If you need a starting point, one of the Interware Booster cards was designed with 060 in mind but it only ever had an 040 in it. As I'm sure you know (but others may not), 68k chips aren't always 100% backward compatible in hardware. Notably, with the...

The whole "PR" thing was a mess. Sometimes it was easy to work out the actual speed of the silicon (a 'PR150'chip would have a '50MHz x 2.5' BIOS/jumper block setting on the chip, for example), other times it was obscured and you had to go digging (as with AMD's Athlon line marketed as "3500+"...

The limit with the Alchemy systems was purely physical: there was only room for 2 cards in the space available. The 4400 is Tanzania which is similar to Gazelle. The presence of the onboard ATI video card has no bearing on the number of slots you can cram into a system. The clone versions of...

While the MFM floppy subsystem was intended for PReP compatibility, I don't think any Mac OS-compatible systems ever shipped with an MFM drive (the RS/6000s and Motorola Powerstacks were PPC with MFM drives but never ran Mac OS). Also the MFM controller chip is missing from the Gossamer board...

I had a 9600 power supply (also a Delta unit) that blew an IC after an inrush current killed it. I'm pretty sure it was in a TO-220 package so it looked like a MOSFET or Schottky diode but it was some sort of VRM or other power control IC. It had failed but it wasn't obvious (the fuse was OK...