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MicroMac DiiMO and RasterOps 264/30… Compatibility Issues?

Macobyte

Active member
In my SE/30 I have a MicroMac DiiMO 50MHz 68030 PDS accelerator card with an Asanté MacCon PDS Ethernet card plugged into its PDS pass-through. I recently acquired a RasterOps ColorBoard 264/30 and was intending to swap it in for the MacCon.

When I install it on top of the MacCon and turn the Mac on, I get the RasterOps boot screen with a lot of red linear noise, and distorted video while the system loads to the desktop (although I move my cursor across to the screen and it shows up just fine over the distortion). Once at the desktop, it seems to work fine, although when tested in Monkey Island 1 and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure I get major slowdowns and then after some length of time, the Mac hangs and then locks up completely. And in the case of Monkey Island, if my menubar is set to the SE/30’s built-in screen instead of the one running off of the card, the game’s fullscreen window is shifted way to the right, almost offscreen (although I think this is a system glitch and unrelated to any hardware issue with the card(s)).

When I run the RasterOps card on its own without the DiiMO, I get a perfectly clear RasterOps splash screen and a largely clear boot process (the bottom of the Mac OS progress bar startup panel is cut off, but everything else is fine). When I get to the desktop, everything works fine here as well. Indiana Jones appears to run fine, however Monkey Island runs better but will still stall out for a few seconds at a time accessing the game files. I also turned off sound which seems to help. I haven’t stress-tested it for a long time but I get the impression the game would still hang eventually.

Does anyone else here have any experience using both a DiiMO and the RasterOps ColorBoard 264/30? I guess they just aren’t fully compatible (since I can take out the DiiMO and external video performance improves) although I’m wondering if the issue could be at least partially caused by something else, for instance my ROMinator II. Any and all advice and input is appreciated; I guess for now I’m going to revert to leaving my DiiMO and MacCon in the machine and only swapping in the RasterOps when I want to use video out, as having the accelerator takes precedent for me. Thanks in advance!
 

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JT737

Well-known member
@Macobyte- I do. I have had similar issues trying to get a RasterOps 264/30 to work with an accelerator card in my SE/30. My current setup is an SE/30 with one of Bolle's adapters (the tall one with the integrated NIC), a Daystar 68030 50mhz and an Interware GrandVimage video card. All of this works fine.

But if I try to use a RasterOps 264 card.....not so much. Now, I still have yet to recapp the power supply in this machine, so it could be both me and you don't have enough power to run everything properly, but I don't know. I do know that I have excellent luck with Interware cards....including the Interware VDR-2a.
 

Macobyte

Active member
@Macobyte- I do. I have had similar issues trying to get a RasterOps 264/30 to work with an accelerator card in my SE/30. My current setup is an SE/30 with one of Bolle's adapters (the tall one with the integrated NIC), a Daystar 68030 50mhz and an Interware GrandVimage video card. All of this works fine.

But if I try to use a RasterOps 264 card.....not so much. Now, I still have yet to recapp the power supply in this machine, so it could be both me and you don't have enough power to run everything properly, but I don't know. I do know that I have excellent luck with Interware cards....including the Interware VDR-2a.
Interesting! Thank you for your reply. My power supply has been recapped although I haven’t checked its voltage output with any cards installed… but I also suspect voltage isn’t the cause of the incompatibility.

I appreciate the input! I’ll have to consider grabbing an Interware VDR-2a in the future.
 
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