Daystar NuBus RAM Expansion Board?

[trag]

This tech note:

http://developer.apple.com/legacy/mac/library/technotes/hw/hw_520.html

states that:

"There is no way that the Macintosh operating system can recognize NuBus RAM and

use it for applications."

Yes, Daystar had a product, and darn it, I can't remember the exact name, which was a Nubus card covered in RAM sockets which did exactly that.

Anyone know if Daystar found a way to directly add it to available RAM, or did they use a trick like making the extra RAM a RAM Disk and then using Virtual to use the RAM Disk as scratch space for virtual memory?

Or does anyone remember what the Daystar product was called? NewerTech made a similar product, albeit with 72 pin sockets instead of 30 pin sockets.

 

[Unknown_K]

As far as I know they were all just used for RAM disks.

Didn't the original Daystar cards have some kind of bridge for connecting to other Daystar cards without using the Nubus?

 

[ppuskari]

Triangle Computing used to have one as well. Missed that one on Ebay years ago too, but I do have their Scsi accelerator card. It had drivers for up to OS 6.0.8 too! That card still works but yet to find the ram disk. I think the Daystar design actually came from Triangle when they were bought out, but I could be extremely wrong.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

This tech note:http://developer.apple.com/legacy/mac/library/technotes/hw/hw_520.html

states that:

"There is no way that the Macintosh operating system can recognize NuBus RAM and

use it for applications."

Hackers have proved Apple wrong at every turn since the first person piggybacked RAM on the 128k!

NEVER believe such broad stroke, self serving, purposeful misinformation/drivel in the TechNotes or or in the old hardbound Docs! Apple has ALWAYS had a vested interest in hobbling the low and mid-range product line to "Protect High End Sales." They've done so incessantly since the intro of the SE and Mac II waaay back in the day!

I'm almost certain that such NuBus RAM-Disk cards were addressed as VM operating at NuBus Speeds, not HDD speeds of the era. Check out this thread about the same thing, except that for the SE's PDS Slot, the VM addressed memory was accessed at the system RAM speed, much faster than NuBus! [] ]'>

http://68kmla.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=12844

} :rambo: )

 

[bear]

Daystar RAM PowerCard. I'm pretty sure it was not addressable as system memory, just as RAM disk, print spool, and disk cache.

FWIW I have been searching for this and any similar NUBUS RAM card (e.g. National Semi 8/16; I hear rumors of an Intel one) which is required for the Symbolics MacIvory 1 and 2. Symbolics sold them with the NS8/16 boards. I have been hoping to experimentally determine whether any NUBUS memory board may be used, as the 8/16 boards get older and more failure prone (to say nothing of more difficult to find).

 

[beachycove]

I have seen only one of these, on eBay a few years back. It sold for something outrageous even then, before the prices of nubus-era equipment began to go up.

As I recall, the write up on the item description seemed knowledgeable, and mentioned that the boards were used mostly in the publishing industry for RAM disk purposes. Mind you, they couldn't have been very widely used, or there would be more of them about.

I haven't been able to find any reference to them in my manuals/ books collection, so there the scent ends for me.

 

[Unknown_K]

Somebody from the old IRC channel has the 840AV version of a RAM card that used 8 x 72 pin SIMMs (32MB max each for 256MB total). I think Newer technology sold it. It was pretty fast for a scratch disk used by apps like Photoshop, wish I had one at the price he got it for ($15 I think).

Last one I seen on ebay (years ago) must have gone for $200, way more then I want to pay for one. I have quite a few Nubus cards in the collection but no RAM cards.

 

[trag]

Daystar RAM PowerCard.

Thanks for the actual product name. A Google search turned up this page:

http://www.linkology.com/daystar/

however, all the links to software and manuals result in a:

"Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /daystar/ftp/documents/ on this server."

So I did a Whois on linkology.com and found Jeff Davis at hostmaster@SOUPWIZARD.COM. I've emailed him to see if there's actually any content behind those links and if I can get access to it. There's a link near the bottom which actually mentions the RAM PowerCard.

 

[trag]

And I found this:

By Jonathan A. Oski
The Mac is tackling many tasks that were not thought possible just a couple of years ago, but there are many areas where timesaving improvements are still sorely needed. DayStar Digital Inc. recently introduced the RAM PowerCard for Macintosh NuBus.

Targeted at applications with high I/O requirements, such as raster-image processing, multimedia, photo imaging, graphics manipulation, software development and database manipulation, multiple RAM PowerCards can be combined to add up to 1.25 Gbytes of RAM-disk space. This disk can be partitioned to provide System 7.0 virtual memory, which is significantly faster than that using conventional rigid disks. Also, unlike volatile motherboard-based RAM disks, the RAM PowerCard preserves data in the event of a system restart or crash.

Configuring the RAM PowerCard. Random access memory, which is much faster than any high-performance disk system, can be used to speed up many applications that are choked by current I/O bottlenecks. The RAM PowerCard is priced at $649 with no RAM installed and is geared for those users who spend much of their time waiting while their Mac chugs through disk-intensive tasks. Each RAM PowerCard can be configured in up to 19 different configurations, depending on the distribution and size of the RAM on the card's four SIMM (single in-line memory module) banks.

There are two varieties of the RAM PowerCard, based on SIMM orientation. One with diagonally mounted SIMMs can accommodate 1-, 2- and 4-Mbyte SIMMs. The other accommodates horizontally mounted 16-Mbyte composite SIMMs in addition to the smaller capacity SIMMs. Each card type is priced identically, and DayStar will exchange board types free of charge should you outgrow the capacity of a card designed for diagonally mounted SIMMs.

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-11385007/powercard-charges-up-performance.html

So it appears that the RAM PowerCard was a RAM Disk based solution, not something which added RAM to applications memory. Although, one could, using virtual memory.

The thought that prompted my curiosity is that on 32 bit machines there is 1 GB of address space available for RAM. If one was building a hardware hack, there ought to be some way to actually put 1 GB of physical RAM into the machine...

Oh, and this:

PowerStart. RAM PowerCard, the company's NuBus RAM disk card, will gain auto-loading features next month when the company releases PowerStart free to all current users. The control panel lets users create file sets that are automatically copied to a RAM PowerCard's RAM disk at start-up. Users previously had to manually copy files to the RAM disk each time they turned on the Mac.
If a System folder is copied to the RAM disk, PowerStart can reboot from the RAM disk after copying the files. The program can keep a log of files copied, and automatically copy changed files back to the hard disk when a user shuts down the Mac.