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Macintosh SE and a HyperCharger '020 Accelerator

bredfrown

Well-known member
So... I did what I've been doing for a lot of accelerators, I dug up some contact names and went on linkedIn. I Just sent a message to Kevin Curran, let's hope for a repeat of my success with Lincoln from NewLife.
"GCC was founded in 1981 during the onset of the video game craze. C.E.O. Kevin Curran and MIT classmates Doug Macrae and John Tylko." (GCC website 1998). Unfortunately no docs from the 80s on the cached website.
Oddly enough, these folks were also responsible for Ms. Pac-Man.
I've been using my SE to mostly make a HyperCard game, so this is a silly, but interesting coincidence.
It would be crazy if they replied! :)
 

Phipli

Well-known member
So... I did what I've been doing for a lot of accelerators, I dug up some contact names and went on linkedIn. I Just sent a message to Kevin Curran, let's hope for a repeat of my success with Lincoln from NewLife.
"GCC was founded in 1981 during the onset of the video game craze. C.E.O. Kevin Curran and MIT classmates Doug Macrae and John Tylko." (GCC website 1998). Unfortunately no docs from the 80s on the cached website.
@olePigeon has been in touch with GCC management before. See the following.


I couldn't see feedback from the questions, so perhaps the answers didn't come back.
 

Realitystorm

Well-known member
That obviously never went anywhere. I sent him several followup emails and he never responded. :(
Hmm, looks like you were in contact with someone named Michael, I've reached out to Kevin Curran and Doug Macrae. I'm hoping since they are founders they may have kept some nostalgia items the same way Lincoln has for Newlife accelerators. It's a long shot, but worth a try.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
@Realitystorm If you ask the other guys and they give you a name, I'll confirm who it is. I do know his last name, but he respectfully asked me not to share it online.
 

bredfrown

Well-known member
Just a quick update from me: I've switched back over to System 6.0.8 and noticed a bigger speed boost with the accelerator!

I also bought some 150Ω resistors that will be arriving today. I'm going to get these added back onto the Logic Board and try booting with 1 MB to see what happens.

At the very least, I'll clip these the correct way, so they can be easily added/removed.
 

bredfrown

Well-known member
Alrighty, gang, I installed a 150 ohm resistor and placed 1 MB (4 x 256kb SIMMs), and have 4 MB installed on the accelerator, tried booting and… I got another Sad Mac code. I thought it could be the resistor, so after I removed the accelerator and it booted with 1 MB of RAM.

I’ve attached a photo of the error code - it’s: 00000005 00300000.

I’ve tried swapped the 4 MB of RAM on the board for another set of 4 (both are 4 x 1 MB SIMMs) but no luck - same error. I’m considering downgrading to maybe 2.5 or 2, or maybe just 1 MB on the accelerator to see if I can get anything.
 

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Phipli

Well-known member
Alrighty, gang, I installed a 150 ohm resistor and placed 1 MB (4 x 256kb SIMMs), and have 4 MB installed on the accelerator, tried booting and… I got another Sad Mac code. I thought it could be the resistor, so after I removed the accelerator and it booted with 1 MB of RAM.

I’ve attached a photo of the error code - it’s: 00000005 00300000.

I’ve tried swapped the 4 MB of RAM on the board for another set of 4 (both are 4 x 1 MB SIMMs) but no luck - same error. I’m considering downgrading to maybe 2.5 or 2, or maybe just 1 MB on the accelerator to see if I can get anything.
I'd try cleaning the RAM contacts with alcohol or contact cleaner, and trying again.
 

bredfrown

Well-known member
I tried all sorts of RAM combinations but didn’t make any progress.

I clipped a leg from the resistor I installed (to make it easy to reinstall) and set my SE and accelerator back to the way it was before in the meantime.
 

Melkhior

Well-known member
Yep! I tested them in my Mac afterwards without the accelerator and they worked.
Beware the speed of the RAM. The SE requires only 120-ns or faster RAM (I think previous systems like the Plus were 150-ns or faster), which is quite slow. The DP8429 DRAM controller I see in the pictures of the accelerator seems to be the highest speed grade from the markings, -70 (the datasheet is still available, and so is the one for the accompanying PALs! look for DP8429.pdf and DP84522-2.pdf). I suspect it means the accelerator wants reasonably fast RAM - otherwise the -80 speed grade would have presumably been cheaper to use. I don't know enough about FPM RAM timings to figure out the required performance of the RAM from the DP8429 datasheet.

OTOH, all of Apple's system with 16 MHz '020 and '030 only requires 120-ns SIMM (II, IIx, IIcx, SE/30 at least IIRC), and that accelerator is using a 16-MHz-rated '020 like a regular II...

Just in case, I would try to use SIMMs that are known to work in a IIci, as they will be 80ns or faster, or at least make sure the markings suggest that the RAM you put in the accelerator are faster than what the SE requires. 80-ns is likely enough, I doubt 70-ns were common/cheap enough back when putting a '020 in a SE would have been of commercial interest.
 

bredfrown

Well-known member
Just a quick update - it was late last night, so I didn't post, but I made a bit of progress! (I think so, anyway, lol)
I found that the GemStart 3.0 driver gave me a tiny bit more of a speed boost from what I can tell, and made the system a bit more stable.

When I was using HyperCard's "random" function, it would crash unless I turned off the FPU's SANE and switched over to Apple's on the HyperCharger driver.

This GemStart driver hasn't had any issues of the sort, and I was able to use applications normally without any odd crashes, and I also noticed a bit better performance in AfterDark.
I noticed it uses about 300 KB more RAM (this might have something to do with the extension's requirements or cache?), but that's not a big deal.

GemStart 3.0 took some digging. The original link to download it was broken, but I was able to grab a working copy here:
If anyone needs this in the future, and if this link dies, I'm going to re-upload it.
 

bredfrown

Well-known member
I found this interesting snippet from an article I found archived from MacWorld:
"…
the HyperCharger ran at about 70 percent
of the Prodigy’s speed. However, GCC
shipped us an early version of an applica-
tion that does load the ROM into the fast
RAM. Using this application, the Hyper-
Charger’s performance was dead-even
with the Prodigy’s in just about every
benchmark and was faster in several. GCC
has indicated that a version of this applica-
tion will be available to HyperCharger
owners. "

I'm thinking they might've had a standalone application that loaded the ROM into RAM, but never released it.
By accident yesterday, I disabled extensions and noticed that the accelerator's graphics (testing out AfterDark) were faster, but I think this has to deal with a sound extension not loading.

Link to the article:
 

Phipli

Well-known member
By accident yesterday, I disabled extensions and noticed that the accelerator's graphics (testing out AfterDark) were faster, but I think this has to deal with a sound extension not loading.
This is the case with the sound fixes - it tends to be a tradeoff between graphics and "working" sound.
 

bredfrown

Well-known member
This is the case with the sound fixes - it tends to be a tradeoff between graphics and "working" sound.
That's exactly what I was thinking, too - a weird anecdote would be when I ran emulators on my DS or PSP for other consoles. If I had choppy/distorted sound, the emulated games would run perfectly, but when I fixed the sound, the framerate dropped, lol

I'm just keeping the sound "distorted" since I'm not gaming much on this machine by any means.
 
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