Conquest: Powermac 9600

[classic]

System 7.1 on a G3 upgraded NuBus PowerMac

That would be awesome!

+ it appears to be possible!

http://www.welovemacs.com/cfg31m300r.html

This card seamlessly integrates with your software, and supports System 7.1.2 through Mac® OS 9.1.

Anyone on here got a sonnetized nubus rig and Mac OS 7.1.2 to tell us just how awesome it might be?

 

[kite210]

I could make a video of it running on my PM 7100 if you would like.

 

[kite210]

I made a video showing the boot times using the stock 66mhz 601 and the sonnet G3 Card under system 7.1.2

 

[LCGuy]

Interesting...for some reason I actually thought the bootup would've been a tad quicker, but still, very impressive!

 

[kite210]

I think it's mostly due to the fact that I haven't installed anything yet, it's still a clean install from a year ago.

 

[classic]

Amazing the difference a few hundred megahertz will make!

Thanks for going to the effort of showing us the difference in speed between the two processors.

Do you think that the speed doubler software would rev things up more?

 

[kite210]

I'm not sure, but I don't have a copy of speed doubler to test it out with.

Isn't speed doubler a disk caching program? I never actually used it.

 

[classic]

Yes, disk caching software it is.

For Mac OS 7.1.2 it will improve performance for 68k apps (how many applications for 7.1.2 were PPC native?), particularly on nubus machines.

This seller on ebay has a copy if you are interested:

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/NEW-Speed-Doubler-2-RAM-Doubler-2-Macintosh-LAST-one-sale-/150865057798?pt=AU_software&hash=item2320421806

 

[trag]

On the X100 machines Speed Doubler is much more than disk caching software. It changes the 680x0 code emulator from an interpreting emulator (translates each instruction as it goes, if it's in a loop, every instruction will be translated every time through the loop) to more of a compiler, by which the 680x0 code is converted to PPC and a chunk of it is retained in memory. If the program loops, most of the instructions' translations are still around and the translation needn't be repeated.

This can do things like double the speed of emulation of 680x0 code.

On later machines (x500, x600) Apple used the same kind of scheme; they may have licensed Connectix's code, I'm not sure.

So the place Speed Doubler really shines is on X100 machines. Sure, it still has some nifty copy and disk caching functions on later machines, but it really speed things up on the 6100, 7100, 8100 and related clones.

 

[kite210]

Awesome, I'll have to try it out soon, and see the difference, I've got a lot of 68k applications that I can throw at it.

 

[thatsteve]

Have had a busy few weeks and haven't had much time to tinker with this beast but I've just managed to have a little play with her.

OS7.6.1 is amazing on this monster. Everything happens INSTANTANEOUSLY! I run an expanded Amiga 1200 too and the Amiga OS is famous for being super responsive, and OS7 on the 9600 feels very much like that, stuff loads almost before you've double clicked it!

Got OS9.2.2 installed on another partition, using OS9 Helper. Works fine, but is sluggish compared to the other system on the computer, but still a very nice OS9 experience.

The bad news though is that there are some annoying stability issues. It all just hangs from time to time. The PRAM battery is dead, so I'll replace that first to see if that helps, but i suspect there's some bad RAM in there somewhere.

I made a couple of videos last night. I was mildly boozed up, so they do ramble a little. Peppered with foul language too I'm afraid, so NSFW...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxlQSyYHzzk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfH11Rx-Hw0

Not the greatest or most enlightening vids perhaps, but I'm treating them as an experiment and will do some more in depth and sober ones at some point soon.

S

 

[LCGuy]

In regards to Netscape 2.02 freezing, crashing and quitting - even back in its day Netscape was known for its instability on both Macs and Windows.