• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

Mac 128/512/Plus with 128MB RAM running at 800mhz?

Status
Not open for further replies.

Frobozz

Well-known member
Imagine, for a moment, a drop-in CPU replacement for your 68K mac that brings it to 500-800Mhz, AND adds 128MB of RAM. Without, hopefully, a case mod. Compatible with legacy 68K software. Running 6.0.8 (and newer if you insist). $500-ish. 

Would that be interesting? To be clear: it doesn't exist, and I'm not the one to pull it off. BUT... Could it be done? 

Ingredients:

  • Vampire 68080 CPU from Apollo team. I don't have direct contact with them, but scan of forum there makes me think they'd need at least $200-300 per unit (not to consumers, to the company/person making the adapters). The full systems (which have video, etc. are 300 - 450 EUR it looks like). https://wiki.apollo-accelerators.com/doku.php/apollo_core:start
  • Engineer(s) to make the circuitry required between the vampire CPU and the mac 68000 socket. Would buy vampire units and resell with the hardware circuitry. 
  • Engineer(s) to write firmware? Not sure about this part. Maybe connectix virtual (for memory) and the Gemini (?) control panel (for accelerator recognition) are enough? Like I said, I'm not qualified to help in any way. ;)



I just looked now, and they have a little thing on the order page that says 5655 Vampires have been sold so far. If the Amiga community can produce those numbers, would the Mac 68K community produce more? Maybe less? Amiga is kind of a special community, because of the whole demise-of-commodore thing. But I would guess there are a lot more 68K macs in circulation nevertheless. 

So... any chance one of our gods wants to take a look? Maybe somebody who has made a disk emulator or some kind of scuzzy adapter? 

Any finally, I want to say: please don't bombard them with posts or email asking for "mac versions". They have been working on this for years, and years, and they are a small team focused on Amiga products. I believe they are open to supporting a business that was capable and serious about it; I am confident they don't want to hear from a bunch of people like me (consumers) about how great it would be to have a mac or Atari ST version. 

 

Frobozz

Well-known member
Sorry, I should have posted this in the hacking forum. Could I ask to have this post closed? I recreated it in the hack forum. 

 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top