PM 8200/120 with a bonus

[Franklinstein]

Browsing ebay-kleinanzeigen, I came across an 8200/120 a few hours away. It was of course missing its CD bezel, it looked a bit scruffy, and according the the seller it doesn't work, but it's only €60 and... what's this sticker? "Powered by Sonnet," eh? Well, this is interesting. Don't mind if I do. It's a gamble (the card may have been removed a while ago) but going by the seller's description and other stuff he has for sale, it's worth a shot.

Six hours later, I have it and an external Syquest drive of some flavor back home. I open the 8200 and, lo and behold, it has a Sonnet Crescendo 7200 inside. Sweet deal. Totally worth the drive (it was a really pretty day, too). A few bits of broken plastic later, I have the machine apart entirely. The power supply's fuse is bad but the multimeter doesn't report any faults (at least, no immediate fuse-blowing shorts) and nothing looks like it was on fire, so after cleaning it out I'll try to find a suitable fuse and fire it up some point this week.

I also went out earlier in the day and found a SCSI 1.4MB floppy drive. I have yet to look at it much but it may work on a Mac, which if it does would have been one way to get HD floppies on a pre-SuperDrive Mac without spending tons of money on new ROMs, SWIMs, and upgraded internal drives.

 

[joshc]

Nice, it's always exciting getting a machine with a Sonnet upgrade!

 

[Powerbase]

It is the G4 version perchance?

 

[Franklinstein]

No, just the G3/400. Which is more than enough since I only really wanted one to play with a little bit, but the Amiga weirdos have priced even these basic ones way beyond attainable at this point. Mac people don't go buying up your upgrades of questionable value, Amiga people, so quit doing it to ours!

It does work though... I think. I did find a replacement power supply in my stash (turns out the original one has a serious fault that I didn't feel was worth fixing especially since a protection device burned up and I don't want to try to find and buy a new one to stick in there) and now the computer itself works fine but I haven't got the Crescendo to fully boot yet; it would always hang on some extension. I just put fresh installs of 7.6 and 8.6 on it and I was just about to try the latest version of the Crescendo installer to see if it'll run properly once I reinstall the card (previously I tried v1.0.2, latest is v1.1).

 

[Powerbase]

I've mentioned to someone else in another thread, even Mac collectors aren't going to out price Amiga-folk. They got money and they throw it around.

I've always wondered performance-wise how badly running all that memory and fast processor over a 32-bit 33MHz hurt it. Still a VERY neat upgrade. Those were better times when companies actually made upgrades for basically one lone Mac model.

 

[Franklinstein]

It is interesting, and mad props to the engineers who created it because it's an impressive piece of kit, but it's of questionable value, I'd say: unlike most other types of upgrades, these don't always play nice with your computer's existing configuration. For example, earlier versions of the enabler/extension required the removal of the 7200 Graphics Accelerator extension. Excuse me? You want me to hobble my onboard graphics to use your upgrade? Well let's just hope I can find and afford one of the "approved" PCI video cards on the compatibility list, then (apparently compatibility issues were mostly resolved in the last version or two but early models were sensitive).
Then there's the fact that even with a mostly vanilla install of 7.6.1, it won't boot the Crescendo card past an as-yet unidentified extension/control panel. It must be a control panel though because I turned off all extensions and it still hangs somewhere unless I hold down SHIFT to disable everything. If it's just After Dark that's easy enough to lose, but still it's annoying to reconfigure my software load to get the accelerator to work properly. I don't remember having to do any of this with the PDS or L2 upgrades. At least 8.6 works pretty well, so far.