IIci with Quadra 650

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Belay that last. It looks like the last hack available Q700 of the Trio might be getting a Beige G3 Desktop @SSgraft.

How often do you really need to use the CD? :?:

 

[Cosmo]

Needing the CD is not really the point - point is it being quite cool mod. Of cos there's the ZIP and other means available...

Saw one Beige G3 offered for 80€ - insane asking price.

Bit of Hot-Rodding going on, that's always good.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

IIfx/CD 5 year tune-up . . .

I've seem a couple of CD-ROM hacks cut into Snow White lined cases, an unsightly SE mod comes to mind. Even if I source a working unit or manage to fix my single SCSI SlotLoader, I don't think I want to make a diunty a slot in the side of the IIfx in between the ridges. Experience tells me that the pet IIfx spends more of its life in lidless NuBus Playtime mode than buttoned up, so a SlotLoader will go into another Mac

I retract that "blast you" comment, buddy, you've done me a big favor. I'm home sick with a nasty cold and you've gotten me out of bed, out of MovieDaze Mode away from the KBD enough to have accomplished a bit in terms of re-organization. I snagged one of those Glass(less) Topped Multilevel Computer Desks with a really wide, metal mesh KBD drawer next to the apartment complex dumpster. Now it has a big piece of white vinyl coated plywood (the blue protective film may never come off of it, it's that old) for the main desktop, a piece of 1/4" plexi (the blue protective film may never come off of it, it's that old, but I think I've got a nice Borg motif going here) on the top level, my SunBlade150 is the middle shelf and the floor works fine for now as the bottom shelf. [] ]'>

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

OK, it's settled, the 7600 MoBo fits in the Quadra 700 case right down to three of the four Q700 MoBo side-slot supports!

The PSU from Quadra 700 #3 is missing, but it has 20MB of RAM and enough VRAM onboard to do 16" @ 24bit, so it'll be stored as backup MoBo for a the last remaining stock Q700. Either the very pretty #1 or the really butt ugly #3, a magic marker/grease pencil priced $4.00 as is special from a thrift shop, will be getting a PowerTuschie7600 @$$graft. A converted ATX PSU, a converted laptop slot loader DVD Superdrivemounted behind a lengthened floppy slot and a G4/800MHz-Quadra_700 tune up with a Hardware DVD Decoding ATI VidCard will complete the hack! [}] ]'>

 

[Cosmo]

Trash - do you happen to have any extra VRAM for the Quadra 650 project of mine? I have none.

Haven't had time over the weekend to continue this project, it's just missing the speaker modification and PRAM battery wich i forgot to swap from another machine when assembling it back.

Was able to take a look of the 9600/300 i had in back of my car for weeks and tonight also the Powermac G3 333mhz Minitower is coming home.. the 9600 was ok, some cables torn off and HDD without any screws (wonder if this machine actually works?) it has PCI USB and Firewire cards and loooong graphcis card (stock). Have ZIP-drive! Brilliant. Not yet been fired up.

I'll trash the Quadra 650 case, the Performa 6200CD case, Performa 6400/180 case... no space to keep those. All parts stripped that could be used later of cos.

 

[Cosmo]

This project's been pushed aside as i finally (!) managed to find suitable shelf to put more machines on, thanks to Ikea :O So building up that shelf and arranging things around to be finished soon then care fire up this baby and try how it likes the Radius LeMans GT.

Just need to find myself an Quadra 700. I have wanted to own one for ages, but those babies just do not come across anymore around here.

 

[mcdermd]

Which Ikea shelf did you go with?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Yeah, piccies!

Trash - do you happen to have any extra VRAM for the Quadra 650 project of mine? I have none.

I haven't got any really, just what's n the various boxes. I ordered a pair of 512k DIMMs (?) off eBay for my own toys, haven't arrived yet. :-/

 

[Cosmo]

Got this one : http://www.ikea.com/fi/fi/catalog/products/S59897987/ as it was perfect fit per color-style and space available. I have another Galant- serie shelf with sliding doors (4pcs) but that model is no longer available.

Those tower-sizes Powermac's won't possibly fit there anyway wich means it's time to choose wich one to keep out of 8200/120, 6500/250, 9600/300 or G3 333mhz Minitower -models. Few are missing CD-ROM front bezels (9600 and 8200 if i remember correctly).

Another thing, anobody with extra Powermac 6500 -suitable ZIP-drive with front bezel?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Nice shelves, there's no way to move it far enough out from the corner to make a few matching shelves to fit or a deeper matched unit for a stack-o-Towers between it and the wall? Maybe buy a second unit to bolt up to the first that's far enough forward to mount a Jewel Case CD rack top to bottom? Sell it as a feature, it could look really nice and if you have enough shelves left over it'd be easy to make angled shelves for her knick-knacks facing a pullout for storing smaller items, anything to appease MacLimitingMaritalUnit! [}] ]'>

if not: :-/

The 6500 is the first one I'd gut and save all the goodies from to hack into another case that will fit onto the shelves.

I was going to say deep six the 8200, but it's probably a rare beast and the Crescendo/7200 G3 500 MHz/1MB is one of only two choices for NIB accelerators and it's the only Sonnet Card I can recall with on-board RAM like the Rocket had back in the day. Having that available for the 7100/8100 card would have side-stepped much of that series' limitations, but they would have had to make another version for the 6100.

The beige G3 MoBo could go into another IIcx/IIci/Q700 case easily enough and the 9600 case is about as cool as they come. Might as well preserve the largest case available and try to save one of the Beige MiniTowers, my choice would be the 8200 and put the G3 into something smaller and interesting or a matching sib for your IIci/650 hack.

Dunno, I'd go with the customized corner shelf unit, my ex used to love all the bonus storage I built into the co-op, she still makes use of the one she didn't care for at first. [] ]'>

 

[bbraun]

I haven't seen anything specific about that, but I do have a tweak or two I'd try if I had one of these setup with a replaceable ROM.

Just to follow up on this, I did find a Centris 610 and it even came stock with a ROM SIMM slot complete with ROM SIMM. As a bonus, it works with dougg3's SIMMs. FWIW, the Centris/Quadra 610, 650, and 800 all share the djMEMC memory controller, so this should be applicable to all of the above, so in theory one could populate the ROM SIMM solder pads on those machines and have this work.

With a fairly minor tweak to the ROM (plus disabling the ROM checksum test, and RAM test), I've got the Centris 610 seeing 128MB SIMMs (the 610 only has 2 RAM slots)

 

[dougg3]

Haha, that's great! Another model I can add to the compatibility list I think I have one of those here too...

The Quadra 840av's SIMM pinout is slightly different. I wonder at what point it changed...

That's awesome that you were able to hack the ROM for that!

 

[trag]

With a fairly minor tweak to the ROM (plus disabling the ROM checksum test, and RAM test), I've got the Centris 610 seeing 128MB SIMMs (the 610 only has 2 RAM slots)

That is really cool. Is it possible to explain in simple terms what you changed in the ROM to make it work?

I'm kind of surprised that the lack of 12 X 12 support was fixable in firmware. Why in the world didn't Apple put that in to begin with?

Yes, the Q840AV is different. It seems to have a memory control system similar to the later PM7100 and PM8100. At least, it behaves similarly, treating 64MB and 128MB SIMMs as 1/4 of their capacity. Apparently, it only has support for 11 X 11 memory banks.

Hmmm. The PM6100 has support for 64MB and 128MB SIMMs and used the same ROM and chipset as the 7100 and 8100. However, on the 7100 and 8100 the upper address lines run through some kind of CPLD before going to the ROM slots. So, I do not think that the memory addressing in the 7100 and 8100 can be changed with firmware, but who knows.

But, if the 840AV does not use that CPLD arrangement, then perhaps all that's needs is the same tweak that changed the memory addressing in the Q610 to 12 X 12.

 

[bbraun]

Here's my understanding, which is by no means complete or authoritative...:

The ProductInfo tables allocate address space for 64MB/bank with 2 banks per SIMM slot.

When determining the size of memory available, the ROM starts at address 0 of each bank, probing to determine the amount of memory in each bank, assuming each bank is contiguous. However, the djMEMC's per-bank DRAM configuration register requires a different value for >32MB SIMMs, and the ROM doesn't iterate the probe twice, with the two different configuration values. It just iterates once, detecting <= 32MB in each bank. So when we plugin a 128MB SIMM, it finds 32MB in the first bank, skips the 2nd 32MB, finds the 3rd 32MB in the second bank, and skips the 4th 32MB.

My hack was to just change the value written to every bank's DRAM config register to only work in 64MB. So, it really only detects 64 or 128MB SIMMs. A more complete solution might be to iterate once looking for <=32MB in each bank, then iterate again looking for 64MB in each bank, and making sure to set each bank's configuration register appropriately for what was found. But that'd require restructuring the logic of the code (and moving it to make more room), rather than just messing with an existing value, and I'm not really sure that's worth the effort.

This code is the same for all of the djMEMC based machines, so as long as the ROM SIMM works in the 650 and 800 machines, it seems pretty easy to get 520MB working in them.

Disabling the RAM test was very helpful. I didn't disable it initially and thought my change didn't work, since the machine sat there without video so long at power on.

 

[trag]

Thank you for the explanation. Interesting. I wonder what that value in the configuration register is representing. It sounds like it has one value for all of the bank size possibilities up to 32 MB, which should encompass several different possibilities and a different value for the single bank size of 64MB.

BTW, every 32MB SIMM I've seen is actually a 2-bank X 16MB/bank. Does the first configuration value actually detect up to 32MB per bank or just up to 16MB/bank?

 

[bbraun]

I haven't messed with smaller SIMMs, but with the stock value, it was seeing the 128MB SIMMs as 64MB, so I'm kind of guessing that's 32MB/bank. I'm not really sure though.

 

[bbraun]

FWIW, I checked the Q605 ROM, and it just does one iteration over the banks, always leaving the value the same as what I used to make 128MB SIMMs work. Additionally, I realized for my mod, a full 260MB is being recognized, which means the builtin 4MB is still being seen with the same configuration value as the 128MB SIMMs. Now I'm really wondering why it ever was the original value.

 

[CC_333]

Now I'm really wondering why it ever was the original value.

Maybe it was an arbitrary decision because Apple didn't want these machines to be perceived as more capable than the higher-end models.
Nonetheless, it sounds interesting!

c

 

[trag]

Well

Additionally, I realized for my mod, a full 260MB is being recognized, which means the builtin 4MB is still being seen with the same configuration value as the 128MB SIMMs. Now I'm really wondering why it ever was the original value.

That is truly cool. It would be worth getting some of Doug's SIMMs just to use your firmware modification and get the 72 pin SIMM Quadra family to their full capacity.

I'm trying to stick to a strict, "Only buy it when you are ready to actually use it" policy right now, so I won't be doing that until I clear other projects, like the PEX DIMM. Little League baseball season has started up again...

In case you run out of things to do.... You might take a look at VRAM limitations in some of these machines. I think that may be more closely tied to the hardware, but then, I would not have guessed that you could fix the RAM limitation in firmware.