Macintosh Portable Slot Hackage

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Tilting at Luggable Windmills: Take 1

Portable Accelerator Card

Table 13-4 lists the MC68HC000 processor signals available at the Macintosh Portable 68000 Direct Slot expansion connector and describes their functions. Notice that most of the signals are the same as the Macintosh SE processor signals.

Since there is ZERO power budgeted in the Portable for any PDS device, it looks like removing the HDD and installing AztecMonter CF storage will be step one for harvesting a power budget allocation. Conveniently, this harvests a significant hunk of cubic contiguous with that allocated to the Portable's PDS. [] ]'>

Step two would appear to be electrical adaptation considerations for the design of a right angle/displacement adapter cards setup for the Luggable PDS Slot.

I wonder if the AztecMonster + MicroMac MMXL99 SE-PL-CL >< HD 40SC power budget? :?:

edit: that MicroMac 'O3O card fits very nicely in the HDD bay, BTW!

The empty thru-holes on the end could also be soldered directly to headers atop a single adapter card. }

 

[uniserver]

interesting, you might be on to something.

a complete 030 luggable on ebay would probably go for 3 grand.

talk about UNIQUE!

most would welcome the boost!

over all the +5v side of the system seems fairly rugged, the 12v side is what seems slightly odd.

as long as the upgrade uses the +5 power source.

another thing is maybe if we install a small pie fan we could run the 5v regulator harder w/o worrying about damage.

man an 030 /w fpu upgrade would be king!

Maybe make a 7v battery pack out of NIMH batteries,

or lithium ion? <--- obviously you need a whole completely different way to charge this technology.

can you post some pictures?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Screw the accelerator - WiFi, baby! SE PDS Ethernet card plus Ethernet-to-WiFi "game" adapter. Although the combination of the two may bump well over the available power budget... (How much power is available to the modem slot?)

 

[uniserver]

I think its more of, its all wired up to the +12v regulator and +5v regulator.

How much can you pull from these regulators before they over heat.

i know one of them has a heat sink on it.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The docs say that design of a card for the Portable's PDS requires an auxiliary power supply to be provided.

Worst case scenario: a relay circuit to take the PDS Accelerator Card offline unless the Portable is plugged in. You've still got the 68000 for use in the field and then the 68030/MMU and various goodies to run off a tap to the AC Adapter/Charging setup, bypassing the MoBo's power budget limitations for all but the AztecMonster CF Storage subsystem.



View attachment 19257

The thru-holes on the end of the card are slightly shifted to the back, but no big deal, the card is shown ith them almost directly over the Portable's PDS.

Anybody got a spare HDD carrier to sell me at a reasonable price for the project?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I found a pic of the SE version of the accelerator with a QFP SMT 68030 on board along with the PDS connector.

View attachment 19259

credit: FAB page! http://www.d4.dion.ne.jp/~motohiko/macseopen.htm There are really great SE project shots on that page.

The other suggestions for the Portable's PDS have got the wooden cogs in my noggin' spinning in another direction. Given the power relay work-around, there's probably not a lot to keep something like a Radius TPD card from working in there as well.

How hard would it be to turn the TPD card's signals into something a MultiSync TPD with BNC inputs could display? }

 

[uniserver]

Ah well then you are right on the money with a CF 2 SCSI card, then just use a Y cable at the molex, (of the Custom 34pin to 50pin scsi adaptor/cable) assume you have one or made one , basically the PDS card would consume what the original hard drive would have. maybe the pds card would be happy with a +12/+5 input from the molex and doesn't need any other regulated voltages.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

There are plenty of power connections on the PDS itself. I'm pretty sure it's an overall Power Budget limitation, not one of the slot specifically, there's just no designed in power to spare for authorized expansion. There should be quite a bit of juice to run a couple of cards and the AztecMonster when you deep-six the HD 40SC.

Heck there's room for a Zip Drive in lieu of the SD Monstrocity in there! }

 

[Gorgonops]

Completely ignorantly (seriously, without having done any research into the possible issues whatsoever) my gut tells me that the Portable's 2x faster bus speed and significantly different memory map is going to cause problems with just plug-and-play-ing a card built for an SE, but since I can't be bothered to dig up the developer's notes for the two machines I don't think I can say any more than that.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Dunno, G. :-/

AFAIK, these old Accelerators merely take over for the MoBo CPU when the Init tells the 68000 to turn itself off and then the more capable CPU boots to the same memory mapping in the ROMs as the host processor would. The card in question has no problems with the memory mapping differences between SE, Plus and Classic, so I don't see that as an immediate concern. The 68030 is very capable in terms of memory management, knocking another card together for running Compact Virtual would be the second or third of the Portable Slot Hackage windmills.

The accelerators are asynchronous as regards the system bus, they've got their own clock on board and I'm not quite sure why the accelerator should give a hoot about what the clock of the host system might be. If its CPU bus calls get answered twice as fast as expected, that can't be nearly as bad as if they were answered half as fast as required.

After I noodle out any signal tweaks that might be required, maybe we'll have a chance to find out. I'm a bit bored with the SuperIIsi™ now that I've knocked over the largest and most annoying of its windmills. I have my Rocket up and running under RocketShare 1.0 on the unsupported IIsi.

I need another impossible dream, so this is the replacement Quixotic Quest . . . . and hacking something considered sacrosanct has its own rewards! }

The worst case scenario would be learning a couple of different ways NOT to play nicely with the Luggable's PDS Slot. )

 

[Bunsen]

I'm not quite sure why the accelerator should give a hoot about what the clock of the host system might be.

Er, well, it has to pass data back and forth to the host bus, and it'll be designed with a certain clock in mind for that. Was there a desktop Mac with a 16MHz 68000 and any available accelerators?

I suppose one could half-clock the Portable...

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Dunno, my working assumption on the matter is that there's little but a crystal, an FPU socket and the CPU on the card. There's nothing like the complexity of the Mobius 030 on that .jp page to get in the way of it working in a relatively plug-n-play scenario.

My gut tells me this accelerator just sits on the 68000 bus and bangs the crap out of it as fast as it can to get the maximum performance increase possible. It may have half as much time to latch the signals that it bangs out of the Portable's I/O bus, but it doesn't necessarily NEED the other half of the latch window that underclocking the system bus would provide.

At 8-16MHz we're still talking a low speed, unified bus system. The Mac didn't switch to the High/Low speed dual I/O bus model until about the time CPUs passed by the 25-33MHz barrier, IIRC. The first instance of an asynchronous I/O bus was probably the half-speed PDS of the IIfx. That was more likely due to the limits of 1989 PCB technology and RFI considerations than electrical necessity. The 840AV, with a full 68040 at the same clock rate has a unified I/O bus and a full speed PDS.

IIRC, asynchronous I/O first appeared in general on the Mac as an on die feature in the last series of "clock doubled" 68k CPUs. Dual I/O buses, clock multipliers and resistor blocks came much later to the Mac MoBo, when PPC CPUs doubled and tripled the 25-33MHz I/O barrier's limitations.

Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. At this point it's all inference and WAG time.

If I do manage to stick with the project and get really lucky, we'll see, who knows? ;D

 

[Gorgonops]

AFAIK, these old Accelerators merely take over for the MoBo CPU when the Init tells the 68000 to turn itself off and then the more capable CPU boots to the same memory mapping in the ROMs as the host processor would. The card in question has no problems with the memory mapping differences between SE, Plus and Classic, so I don't see that as an immediate concern.

The SE, Plus, and Classic are all more similar to each other than any of them is to the Portable. (I just looked, coincidentally there's a comparison of the Portable's and SE's memory maps in the Portable's developer notes. This:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA46747?viewlocale=en_US

Says the SE's and Classic's memory maps are identical, and there's extensive docs of the Plus floating around, which again, matches the SE's quite closely.) Therefore:

The 68030 is very capable in terms of memory management, knocking another card together for running Compact Virtual would be the second or third of the Portable Slot Hackage windmills.

If *any* part of this card's hardware or the driver software does any physical address translation to map the motherboard's peripherals into the 68030's bus it'll screech and die when it finds that the base of ROM is 5MB higher than it's "supposed to be". (Not to mention all the peripherals are in the wrong place, which could be a big deal if the driver for the accelerator applies any ROM/OS patches to paper over the speed differences. Certain peripherals in the Mac, such as the floppy controller, are very processor speed dependant.) At the very least I smell the need for a new version of the Init software.

In a number of respects the Portable can be thought of as being a strange hybrid between the Monochrome Macs and a Mac II. I just don't see "shove it in and see if it works" as being a good strategy here.

Another minor point is the Mac Portable is all CMOS, whilst I *believe* all the desktop Macs listed were still using TTL-level circuitry. The developer note doesn't mention difference in voltage levels, but there's a non-trivial possibility that even if the clock speed differences aren't a problem (and I wouldn't underestimate the chances of that) if there's TTL circuity on that card it may not reliably drive the portable's bus.

Anyway, good luck. Hope you don't end up killing anything.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

One of the pinout places has a blurb about the Portable's PDS as being about the same thing as the LC's 68020 PDS.

If you are determined to design an expansion card for the Macintosh Portable Direct Slot and can live with within the aforementioned design limitations . . .

< gobbledegook about no power being budgeted for the slot's DC voltage and ground provisions >

. . . you can contact Apple Macintosh Develo . . .

Remember, an expansion card designed for the Macintosh SE will not physically fit in the Macintosh Portable and vice versa.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Electrical description of the Macintosh Portable expansion connector

The Macintosh Portable expansion connector provides the same microprocessor signals as the Macintosh SE, but the pinout of the expansion connector is different

Gotta look up the function of the active ICs on the two versions of the accelerator yet, but it doesn't look like I'll be borking anything if I manage to get the pin conversion card design done right.

Chippies say GAL16V8B with a Lattice(?) logo. also say 15LJ

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Lattice GAL16V8B 15LJ

http://html.alldatasheet.net/html-pdf/70195/LATTICE/GAL16V8B-15LJ/252/1/GAL16V8B-15LJ.html

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I found the first TechNote vote for clocking the Portable down to 8MHz. The Video accesses to MoBo RAM as frame buffer could be a potential sticking point.

This is fun, I've never studied the 68000's signals or a PDS connected to Vampire Video frame buffering outside the IIsi, which was never really an issue for me. I've always intended to use the Radius Color Pivot II/IIsi to leave Bank 1 unmolested in the SuperIIsi™ hack. I've spent a lot of time exploring the various permutations of the bridged '030 bus in PowerBooks and Quadras 605/630, so I find the SE/Portable PDS intriguing.

Looks like I'll need to build a wire wrap or etched extender board from Portable EuroDin to 68000 socket. ;D

 

[techknight]

Power isnt a concern more than what battery life is.

I have built MIC4680 based switching regulators before, so i could make a good solid 5V 1Amp regulator, that runs outside of the main 5V. Then theres the 12V, Assuming its even necessary, as most accelerators were 5V based?

Definitely NOT 7805ing the thing, too much heat.

But Thats not my goal, the goal is to run an Eth card. Since LC, SE is basically the same, an LC card could run as long as the thing is mapped in the correct slot space. $E

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I found an interesting tidbit in an old ScuzzyGraph thread, it appears that . . .

Second Wave makes a two-slot chassis for the Portable that takes SE cards

http://www.macgui.com/usenet/?group=70&id=10731

. . . so I'm again wondering about adapting this accelerator to my Portable's PDS. }

Second Wave 's line of expansion chassis systems gives you the ability to expand your Mac Portable, Plus, SE, or II. With the Home Base, for example, you are able to add two slots to your Mac Portable.
Expansion Chassis Systems for Macs

Second Wave's line of Expanse expansion chassis systems lets you add to your Macintosh. The Home Base, the chassis for the Mac Portable, fits under the machine and contains two slots for standard SE option cards, enabling you to get more out of your Portable when it's parked on your desk at home or in the office.

Other Expanse chassis systems include the Plus, which adds four SE slots to the Mac Plus; the SE chassis, which adds four SE slots to the Mac SE; and the SE/30 chassis, which adds four NuBus slots to the Mac SE/30. Other chassis are available for the Mac II family.

All the chassis connect to the Macs through an interface card and cable assembly. Each chassis has a power supply, a cooling fan, and the slots. The NuBus chassis can accommodate internal disk drives, according to Second Wave.

Price: Home Base, $995; SE Plus, $795; SE, $995; SE/30, $1295.

Contact: Second Wave, Inc.,

9430 Research Blvd., Echelon

II, Suite 260, Austin, TX

78759,(512)343-9661.

Inquiry 1285.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I've been mulling this notion on the back burner and I may have a better way to take a stab at it.

Does anyone know if the Luggable is electrically compatible with a PowerBook FDD? :?: