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A $75 SE/30 Surprise

warmech

Well-known member
I finally got around to doing this project! I am using a Radius Color Pivot IIsi video card which doesn't fit inside the SE/30, but I was able to hack something together outside the machine, and it works! I don't think that I will be able to connect this model of video card to my AppleColor High-Resolution Monitor, because the Pivot video card only seems to support one video resolution, which of course doesn't happen to be the same one as my CRT.

I was able to get Myst to run, but it performs terribly on my SE/30 for some reason. I only have 4MB of RAM, and the game is running off of an IMG file mounted with DiskCopy, but it seems like the performance ought to be way better. The game completely crashes/freezes when I try to click on the book video, and the music stutters pretty badly. I could try mounting the CD image with my SCSI2SD as a separate SCSI ID, so it wouldn't run off of the same virtual drive, but I don't really know where the bottleneck is. If I had to guess, 4MB of RAM + System 7.1 w/ extensions is the most likely culprit.

Thanks to everyone in this thread who posted pictures of Myst running on their Macintosh SE/30's!

Awesome - congratulations on getting that running! As far as performance issues are concerned, there is a possible cause that I can think of. The game was designed to be run using a physical CD and its data was compressed and arranged* to get the most throughput out of the 1x and 2x drives that existed when Myst came out. Myst also used the hard disk for storing some game resources (along with the executable), so it may be bottlenecking due to constantly seeking back and forth across the disk (which may explain the stuttering audio). My SE/30 ran it with no discernible performance issues and it's fairly close to stock, but it was running off of a CD. I haven't tried running an imaged version of it on a period Mac, but that might possibly be the culprit.

Kudos again on the external video! Always a delight to see a compact Mac doing something it wasn't really originally intended to do. :)

*From an Ars Technica interview with Rand Miller - if you haven't seen it, the whole thing is a captivating watch. He discusses the issues with audio and compression in the section prior to the one linked here.
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
I finally got around to doing this project! I am using a Radius Color Pivot IIsi video card which doesn't fit inside the SE/30, but I was able to hack something together outside the machine, and it works! I don't think that I will be able to connect this model of video card to my AppleColor High-Resolution Monitor, because the Pivot video card only seems to support one video resolution, which of course doesn't happen to be the same one as my CRT.

I was able to get Myst to run, but it performs terribly on my SE/30 for some reason. I only have 4MB of RAM, and the game is running off of an IMG file mounted with DiskCopy, but it seems like the performance ought to be way better. The game completely crashes/freezes when I try to click on the book video, and the music stutters pretty badly. I could try mounting the CD image with my SCSI2SD as a separate SCSI ID, so it wouldn't run off of the same virtual drive, but I don't really know where the bottleneck is. If I had to guess, 4MB of RAM + System 7.1 w/ extensions is the most likely culprit.

Thanks to everyone in this thread who posted pictures of Myst running on their Macintosh SE/30's!

Definitely a low RAM issue with performance. The SE/30 is more than capable of running MYST with a color display. In fact, I ran it successfully on a Classic II in black and white mode with 10MB of machine RAM. 4 is your problem.
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
Awesome - congratulations on getting that running! As far as performance issues are concerned, there is a possible cause that I can think of. The game was designed to be run using a physical CD and its data was compressed and arranged* to get the most throughput out of the 1x and 2x drives that existed when Myst came out. Myst also used the hard disk for storing some game resources (along with the executable), so it may be bottlenecking due to constantly seeking back and forth across the disk (which may explain the stuttering audio). My SE/30 ran it with no discernible performance issues and it's fairly close to stock, but it was running off of a CD. I haven't tried running an imaged version of it on a period Mac, but that might possibly be the culprit.

Kudos again on the external video! Always a delight to see a compact Mac doing something it wasn't really originally intended to do. :)

*From an Ars Technica interview with Rand Miller - if you haven't seen it, the whole thing is a captivating watch. He discusses the issues with audio and compression in the section prior to the one linked here.

You are right, the files were configured on the disk for loading performance. Back then engineers would re-orient files on a CD for best performance. Something not necessary these days.

I used Mac OS X and terminal to dd the MYST ISO over to a Magneto Optical disk, and ran it using that and had great performance.
 

davidg5678

Well-known member
Thanks for the tips! I threw another 4MB of RAM into my SE/30, and the performance became noticeably better. The game no longer crashes after the first few seconds, and it runs more smoothly. I can tell now that each time the drive seek light turns on, the music stutters, so I think running the game from a separate SCSI2SD CD partition is in order. Presumably, the SCSI2SD v5 has more than enough bandwidth for this game, and it just needs to be set up differently? I think both the limited RAM and the way I store the game files contribute to the slowdown.

I wish I had a different model of ethernet card, so I could stick this video card into the SE/30 permanently. It needs to be elevated above the metal chassis to fit, and I read that certain models of ethernet cards with a PDS passthrough would provide enough space (some minor PCB trimming is also required). Alas, my ethernet card doesn't have a PDS passthrough on it. Apparently, there is something called a SuperMac riser card that would also work, but aside from a forum post from 10 years ago, I couldn't find any other information about it. Still, color video (and Myst) are really cool to see on my SE/30, and for the $4 I paid for my IIsi video card, I really can't complain. :)
 
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