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PPC Blackbird memory issue

Crutch

Well-known member
Curious if anyone has seen this before. I had a working 550c with 117 MHz PPC upgrade that someone had installed Japanese OS 8.0 on. I swapped out the hard drive for a SCSI2SD with a known good 7.5.5 install (copied from my SE/30)  and suddenly have an obscure problem: the Mac periodically reports it is out of memory. In particular, most apps can’t play any sounds (Crystal Quest does for some reason, and the POST chime works), instead blinking the menu bar. If I open the System suitcase and double-click a snd resource directly, I get a memory error (see photo). This happens 100% of the time including with extensions off.  The system has 40MB RAM and most it is reported as free. Is there a config somewhere I’m missing? I haven’t played with a PPC machine in a while but this just seems strange. 
 

10792FB3-B668-4198-9D58-F824D5C3D2AC.jpeg

 
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MOS8_030

Well-known member
You're using a 68K '030 install on an '040 PB with a PPC upgrade card.

I'm not surprised there are issues.  ;)

I'm sure there are at least PB/040/PPC enablers/extensions that are missing.

I would just do a clean install on the PB.

 

Crutch

Well-known member
Thanks! I thought of that too of course .... but had thought that 7.5.5 in particular didn’t need any extensions/enablers to run on that generation of PPC machine. (I know that if I were running for example 7.1 I’d need the PowerPC Enabler.)
 

Of course I will try that soon ... but was thinking there must be a simpler/more targeted fix. 

 

MOS8_030

Well-known member
If it's 117mhz upgrade then it's probably a Newertech card and would certainly require Newertech software to properly enable.

 

Crutch

Well-known member
I think it is a NewerTech card yeah.  I have tried poking around for software/drivers for this on the archive sites but no luck so far.  A 177MHz PPC card for the 500 series listed on eBay right now comes with a disk labeled “NuPowr System Update 1.1” but I haven’t been able to find any such drivers online anywhere.

 

Crutch

Well-known member
Oh jeez.  Thanks!!  Yeah, checking the actual company’s website is a good idea when they’re still in business. :)

 

Byrd

Well-known member
The NuPowr system update doesn't do much apart from report the CPU speed correctly, and enable the cache (if present - only the high end 183Mhz model had this, and I'm yet to see one i n the wild).  As others have noted, a system reinstall to ideally OS 7.6+ should sort out some of your system errors and improve compatibility.

 
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