Early Power Macintosh 3D cards for Quickdraw 3D

[stynx]

I thought it was a good idea to focus all the findings and rest results about early 3D hardware acceleration on the Mac (1995-1999) here.

1st up is the

TwinTurbo 128 3D (1997).

The AT27C010 ROM is a PLCC32 1mbit rom (128KiB). It creates 2 Displays in Mac OS.

The AT27C512 ROM is a DIP28 512K rom (64KiB). Is seems to be the normal TwinTurbo rom.


I could not get 3D acceleration to work in 16bit mode. This will make most games impossible to work since they automatically switch to 16bit mode. In 32bit mode, RaveBench worked ok and all test except transparency looked ok. The card is fast with few big Polygons and reaches 30Mpix/s. Smaller Triangles bog the engine down and limit it to around 120Ktri/s. Textured triangles limit the filtrate to 3-4Mtex/s with filtering and 6-8Mtex/s without texture filtering. The texture and image quality is good when texture filtering is active.

 

[Phipli]

I thought it was a good idea to focus all the findings and rest results about early 3D hardware acceleration on the Mac (1995-1999) here.

1st up is the

TwinTurbo 128 3D (1997).

The AT27C010 ROM is a PLCC32 1mbit rom (128KiB). It creates 2 Displays in Mac OS.
View attachment 67129

This is a weird card! Never seen this one. I think my cards only do one monitor at a time.

The AT27C512 ROM is a DIP28 512K rom (64KiB). Is seems to be the normal TwinTurbo rom.

View attachment 67130

I could not get 3D acceleration to work in 16bit mode. This will make most games impossible to work since they automatically switch to 16bit mode.

Hum, have you tried editing the .ini files for some games? It might be possible to set 32bit, even though the game settings GUI doesn't support it?

 

[stynx]

This is a weird card! Never seen this one. I think my cards only do one monitor at a time.

The card can only do up to 1024x768 per monitor it seems. One Monitor is driven from the external RamDac while the other seems to be directly connected to the TT128 3D.

 

[Powerbase]

That's a Dual Display Twin Turbo. They did make one. I've only ever seen one on eBay once. You can tell from the different vram layout, I think it was a later card than the Twin Turbos.

Sadly, a lot of early 3d accelerators were just 2D cards with 3D features sort of tacked on.

 

[stynx]

The card can only do up to 1024x768 per monitor it seems. One Monitor is driven from the external RamDac while the other seems to be directly connected to the TT128 3D.

That's a Dual Display Twin Turbo. They did make one. I've only ever seen one on eBay once. You can tell from the different vram layout, I think it was a later card than the Twin Turbos.

Sadly, a lot of early 3d accelerators were just 2D cards with 3D features sort of tacked on.

I tested a bit around and the VGA-output can only do 1024x768 16bit color (24bit color at 832x624) and the full 1920x1080x24bit on the Mac monitor port. I could not actually get video out of the Mac port although the resolution change is seemingly done. The two monitors are registered in the control panel and should be working. I would have to hook an oscilloscope to the Mac video port to be sure...

The 3D is a bit slower on the dual-display TT128 3D than the other normal TT128 3D. I suspect that the additional load or the rom-driver take up some performance.

Looking inside the rom of the dual-monitor TT, i could see two display firmwares. ix3dm1 and ix3dm2.

 

[stynx]

I could get the dual display TT128 3D working with 2 monitors. The TVP3030 has a lot of loose pins on one side. I still have a jail-bar kind of error where the whole screen has vertical lines running through. I suspect the there is still a or some loose pins?

 

[Phipli]

I could get the dual display TT128 3D working with 2 monitors. The TVP3030 has a lot of loose pins on one side. I still have a jail-bar kind of error where the whole screen has vertical lines running through. I suspect the there is still a or some loose pins?

Sounds like it is probably a dry solder joint yes. It can be a damaged trace or partially failed VRAM chip, but it is usually just a pin that needs reattaching, or is bent into another pin and shorting.

 

[stynx]

Sounds like it is probably a dry solder joint yes. It can be a damaged trace or partially failed VRAM chip, but it is usually just a pin that needs reattaching, or is bent into another pin and shorting.

One pin was still loose. The card is now working.
Version 2.00 will recognize the card while version 1.05 will not.
Here is a list of the supported cards in the 2.00 control panel:


"Apple Ultimate-Rez": tt3d
"IX Ultimate-Rez": tt3di
"IX Pro Rez": tt3dGi
"IX Rocket": tt3dRi
"OEM Ultimate-Rez": tt3dx
"Dual Monitor": tt3dm

 

[Phipli]

One pin was still loose. The card is now working.
Version 2.00 will recognize the card while version 1.05 will not.
Here is a list of the supported cards in the 2.00 control panel:
View attachment 67176

The RoadRocket is a PCMCIA version for laptops. I don't have one. I have the VillageTronic laptop card though. It's great in my Pismo, gives me a DVI port to drive big external monitors.

Glad to hear you got the card working, good work