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Daystar Genesis MP

RadRacer203

Well-known member
Just made a deal for one of my bucket list computers and had a friend pick it up for me, a Daystar Genesis MP! Got it for a decent price "broken", but I'm betting the power button is just broken and the seller didn't try the one on the keyboard. The one unfortunate part of it is it's missing its original dual or quad cpu board, that's been replaced with a g3 accelerator. If anyone knows where I might be able to find a (preferably a quad) cpu board, PLEASE let me know!
 

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RadRacer203

Well-known member
And it works! Needs the power supply recapped BAD but it does turn on, after you leave it plugged in for an hour or twoPXL_20220410_211826641.jpg
 

mdeverhart

Well-known member
Congrats! Sounds like a great find! I hope you can get the power supply recapped and find the original CPU board somewhere.
 

Byrd

Well-known member
Great find! At least you know it works - what are all the cards in there, is that 2 x SCSI cards?
 

RadRacer203

Well-known member
Great find! At least you know it works - what are all the cards in there, is that 2 x SCSI cards?
I'll be honest, I don't really know at the moment, definitely 2 scsi cards and I thing the one is a video capture card of some description, it seems like this thing was set up for video editing of some sort. I wish I had it in my hands right now, but it's about halfway across the country, had a friend pick it up for me! I'll pick it and the rest of the junk I bought up later this year.
Congrats! Sounds like a great find! I hope you can get the power supply recapped and find the original CPU board somewhere.
I'm really excited! I have a friend who's going to do the power supply for me, the only big worry is finding an original cpu board. But for now, it's alright with the g3 accelerator in it now
 

bdurbrow

Well-known member
I remember being at Macworld when these first came out, seeing it run - and really wanting one badly, but knowing that there was no way I was going to be able to get the budget for that.

IIRC, the initial multiprocessing services manager that Apple shipped with the OS was licensed from Daystar...
 

Byrd

Well-known member
I suppose the question is what happened to the Quad CPU - is your friend still in contact with the seller, maybe it still exists, somewhere?
 

RadRacer203

Well-known member
I suppose the question is what happened to the Quad CPU - is your friend still in contact with the seller, maybe it still exists, somewhere?
Unfortunately it was swapped out a long time ago, and probably has been passed through several owners since then. I think the seller found it in some sort of cleanout or something
 

RadRacer203

Well-known member
I remember being at Macworld when these first came out, seeing it run - and really wanting one badly, but knowing that there was no way I was going to be able to get the budget for that.

IIRC, the initial multiprocessing services manager that Apple shipped with the OS was licensed from Daystar...
I believe it! I've been wanting one of these ever since I learned they existed. My plan is to go back to the stock quad cpu board if I can find one, and run BeOS on this thing, because I've never messed with that before at all!
 

Powerbase

Well-known member
Good luck. Ive seen ONE on ebay, probably close to 10 years ago. Thats the only time Ive seen one avaliable. They were big huge cards too but worth it for authenticity.
 

ScutBoy

Well-known member
Welcome to the club! :) When I got mine a while back, it also had had the quad board replaced by a G3 accelerator card. Mine came from a print shop, so it made sense that they would have upgraded to keep the machine as "useful" as long as they could.

It took me a _long_ time to find the quad CPU card, but I did finally track one down.

The Daystar control panels/extensions that enabled MP functionality seemed to only be applicable to Photoshop and maybe one other pacakage, at least in the software I have.

And as referenced above, the quad does make a kick-butt BeOS machine! Mine dual-boots BeOS with OS9
 

CircuitBored

Well-known member
Nice find. It would be interesting just to see a quad CPU card. Could OS X run on it?

I have been thinking about this all day! It is fairly well known that you can Xpostfacto a lowly PPC603 as high as OSX Tiger but I have no idea how the OS would handle a machine with multiple "unsupported" CPUs. I don't even know if Xpostfacto can handle multi-CPU configurations.
 

Powerbase

Well-known member
Nice find. It would be interesting just to see a quad CPU card. Could OS X run on it?
From what I understand, Yes. But only on one chip. Even Daystar dropped OS X support for their dual zif upgrade they offered at one point.
 

CC_333

Well-known member
Nice find. It would be interesting just to see a quad CPU card. Could OS X run on it?
From what I understand, Yes. But only on one chip.
Probably too non-trivial to be worth the effort, but what about patching the OS X kernel somehow? I know there are many other things that determine what CPUs are supported, as well as other low level hardware (things which xPostFacto apparently patches to great effect), but from what little I know, the kernel and maybe a kext or two are responsible for basic CPU support... I know this from experimenting with booting Snow Leopard on a non-supported Ivy Bridge MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 models), because it won't boot with the stock kernel at all (it throws a "CPU not supported" error and halts the system), but simply modifying the kernel to add Ivy Bridge support is all it took to make it boot (I think it also required a modified boot.efi because if I remember correctly, the original breaks if the kernel isn't original).

This, of course, is at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum, as OS X goes (adding support for newer CPUs in older OS X versions (as in my Snow Leopard on Ivy Bridge anecdote) on one end, versus adding old CPU support to a newer OS X version (as in making OS X boot on one or more PPC 603 or 604 CPUs) on the other.

Anyway, TL;DR: is it possible to somehow hack OS X's inner workings in ways xPostFacto does not or cannot do to support running more than one PPC603 or 604?

c
 

beachycove

Well-known member
Via xpostfacto, I’ve had OSX (X.2?) running on an 8600/300 with the 604ev, and it wasn‘t what you’d call snappy. Some of that may have been due to the graphics limitations, as the 8600’s PCI slots are compromised somehow, plus the cards I had available wouldn‘t have been especially high end at the time. Anyway, I really wasn’t thrilled with the performance.

The Radius system may have faster PCI, and of course you likely have a better graphics card, plus there would be multiple 604e chips, so YMMD.

This was years and years ago. It was only an experiment, and given how well the 8600 ran OS9, I went back to it more or less immediately.
 

DarthNvader

Well-known member
Could OS X run on it?
Yes, but ether you need to patch Open Firmware to present all the CPU's in the Device-Tree or you need a Kernel Extension to enable the rest of the CPU's not enumerate in the Device-Tree.

Ryan Rempel( XpostFacto ) did some work trying to get L2Cache Slot upgrades to work with OS X, but I don't know whatever came of it.

Other than that, Daystar had a kernel extension to enable its' G4 Dual ZIF, but 10.1 broke it and they never updated it. I did try to get them to let me look at the source code for their extension, but they would not do it.

Either way, it is doable, but you are pretty much going to have to take on the project on you own. A place to start is SLOF because it's pretty much the only full Open Firmware implementation that supports Multi-CPU's that is Open Source. Should be pretty easy to create a Forth Script you can load in Open Firmware to enable the extra CPU's in the device-tree.

You just need to learn to speak 4th.

May the 4th be with you.
 
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