ID Mac Plus 030 upgrade card

[MOS8_030]

From the more-stuff-I've-had-so-long-I-forgot-I-had-it category...

So while digging in the garage I found several spare compact mac boards.

Among them was a Plus board with this unknown (to me) '030 upgrade card. It looks like it requires extra power.

It appears to be a 25Mhz '030. (I didn't want to remove the sticker and void the warranty!)

It piggy-backs on the original processor and has no manufacturer name anywhere on it.

I did find this:http://appletothecore.me/files/mac_plus_with_68030_upgrade.php

Which appears to be the same card. And appears I'm missing some associated hardware.

Can anyone here ID this card?

Thx,

 

[Bolle]

That's a Novy Quick30Plus.

 

[pb3623]

Note to defunct manufacturers: go back in time before you started production and label your damn boards.

 

[MOS8_030]

That's a Novy Quick30Plus.

Ah, thank you! Very cool, now I'm finding more info, most of it right here on this forum!

It looks like it needs a dual-output PS, 5/12v for the card/fan and some special software.

I have no idea if this card/board works. The mobo has at least a broken resistor that I see.

I probably picked it up when I was volunteering at Goodwill back in the '90's fixing Macs for them.

That may also explain why I have still have a stock Mac Plus. I may have had the plan to install this in it but never got around to it.

 

[Bolle]

The accelerator itself only needs 5V. The 12V output on the original PSU was for the fan only. You could probably grab 12V somewhere from the analog board in case you want to install a fan and go for a small 5V PSU that you wire up to the mains switch on the analog board.

At least that is what I did on my Classic that has a Novy accelerator as well.

To use the extra RAM on there you need CompactVirtual:



The accelerator will work without a driver but if you install the driver software for it you will be able to fiddle with some FPU and memory settings:



Driver version 5.42 can be found here http://vintageapple.org/macdrivers/railgun.hqx

I have an original Novy floppy with version 5.35 on it if you are interested.

 

[MOS8_030]

Thanks more!

Meanwell has small dual-output PS's that would work well for this card.

I might tackle this project in the future after I get my HyperDrive 512k and Lisa/XL fully working again.

It would be neat to get this card working and maybe add a 68882. That would make a much more interesting Mac Plus!

Heh, funny the software says MacProducts USA. I'm in Austin and I remember that company.

 

[MOS8_030]

So I found this in my Plus today. The Plus that has been in the closet for ~20 years.

The 5V and 12V have been tapped and the 5V connector matches the one on the Novy board.

What I have no memory of but suspect is that the Novy board was in my Plus when I got it and for some reason I pulled it out and replaced it with a regular Plus board.

That probably also explains why the original analog board in the Plus looks so toasty.

I assume the 12V is for a fan but I find no evidence of a fan having been installed.

Anyway, I still think a separate PS for the Novy board is a better idea.

 

[MOS8_030]

So I've been playing around with board in my Plus.

After recapping the analog board rather than using the original setup that tapped the 5v from the Mac I installed a Mean Well PD-25 as a 5v source.

After going through many iterations of OS and accelerater drivers I finally got it to boot up with System 6.0.3 and the Dove Racer 030 control panel!

Every other driver/OS combo I tried was rejected immediately. (Except Gemstart 2.1, it would show as disabled at boot up with 6.0.3.)

This was with just 4mb on the motherboard and no memory in the card.

(Unfortunately only have four 1mb simms and I think the 256K simms I have are too slow for the card.)

I suspect I might have more luck with system 7.0.x however I can't get this Plus to boot from SCSI.

Attempting to boot from SCSI just results in a black screen.

If I boot from just a clean 6.0.x disk SCSI probe can see the drives but the OS bombs when I try to mount them.

I need to remove the accelerater card from the mobo and see if that's causing the problem.

I'll do some more testing tomorrow. Without the ability to boot from SCSI there's not much point to this accelerated Plus...

But hey, at least I know the card works!

 

[MOS8_030]

Got it to boot up with 6.0.5 and the Mobius driver.

For some reason the system folder on the floppy keeps becoming "unblessed".

I think that's why some of my previous attempts with the other drivers failed.

Still working on SCSI boot. I think the drive on my SCSI2SD got corrupted. It's being cranky hooked up to my laptop.

Might have to wipe it and set up the drives again

 

[MOS8_030]

Railgun active!

I found some simms that played nice with the card so I was able to get the ram disk and other features active.

The system is noticeably faster using the ram on the card.

Now I just need to find a PGA 68882.

 

[Bolle]

Does spund work well for you?

I could never get sound to work without distortion no matter what OS or driver/patch combination with any of my compact Mac 030 upgrades.

 

[MOS8_030]

The only sound I've tried are just the built-in sounds, beep, boing, clank, etc. but they play with no distortion.

I still can't get the damn thing to boot from my SCSI2SD yet, using the exact same setup that worked fine with another Plus board I have.

I can mount the drive after I boot from a floppy but when I try to boot from SCSI the screen just goes black and never boots.

Now that I've got an OS/ram/init combo that positively works I'll tackle the SCSI issue tomorrow.

 

[MOS8_030]

Ok, it's all happy now.

I disabled the extra drives on the SCSI2SD and now it boots up from the SCSI2SD.

I kinda thought that might be the problem. I probably have to renumber the drives, I thought the Plus hit SCSI 0 first but I guess I have that backwards.

I tried to test the sound a bit more but most of the games I have at the moment are 128-512K era and don't have a lot of variety in the sounds they use.

I do hear some scratchiness in some of the sounds. I'll find some better games.

I tried Compact Virtual but it made the mouse stop working. I'll revisit that later.

Anyway, now I need to install a fan and I can button it back up!

(I do have a Kensington "System Saver" I suppose I could use. Hmm.)

 

[MOS8_030]

Loaded up Prince of Persia to test the sound.

(I used to play this at work on an SE/30 when I was working the night shift back in '92-'93. Unfortunately ~25 years on I can't remember the controls...)

Aside from occasional crackling it sounded pretty good. No distortion, some occasional, random, very short pauses.

But I'm not using the ram disk feature or Compact Virtual and don't have the FPU.

 

[Byrd]

I remember playing Prince of Persia on a 1MB Mac Plus - took about five minutes to load each level, I'd imagine on this speed demon it'd be ready much more quickly!

Great Plus upgrade - I love the techy control panel, owning one of these in the day would have been exciting.

 

[rickrob]

Does spund work well for you?

I could never get sound to work without distortion no matter what OS or driver/patch combination with any of my compact Mac 030 upgrades.

I used to have a Novy Quik30 in my SE way back-- I remember the sound issues, but I thought they fixed those by version 5.35.

 

[Bolle]

I tested all possible versions of the drivers on everything from System 6 to 7.1. It gets better with the newer drivers but the cracks and pops never go away completely in some applications. (mostly games)

Also I noticed things are getting slower once you enable the sound fixes.

 

[MOS8_030]

I tested all possible versions of the drivers on everything from System 6 to 7.1. It gets better with the newer drivers but the cracks and pops never go away completely in some applications. (mostly games)

Also I noticed things are getting slower once you enable the sound fixes.

Right now I'm using the Railgun software with 7.0.1.

According to an old version of MacBench it's running as fast as an LCIII.

After I install a fan and get the system back together I'll try Compact Virtual again.

Beyond that I'll probably leave it as is. There's really not a lot I want to do with this system.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The system is noticeably faster using the ram on the card.

That must be some kick in the pants. The card's probably using VM as main memory at 3x the 8MHz clock of system memory. Without cache on the accelerator, using only the SIMMs on the board would be a nasty bottleneck. That hit's not as bad on the the 16MHz II/IIx/IIcx/SE/30 bus, the cache on adapted IIci accelerators makes up for much of that. Has anyone taken a crack at figuring out how to benchmark memory bus constriction on the SE/30 vs. IIsi and IIci? Isolating that from overall system performance in a handicap league kinda deal might be interesting.

That System Saver was born to run on your accelerated Plus. []