JC8080
Well-known member
Has anyone seen a manual or factory driver for this board?
I recently made an impulse buy and picked a Quesse '020 16mhz accelerator in unknown condition. After a bit of fiddling I got it up and running smoothly. I had never heard of Quesse before, and I can find zero information online about this particular board. I have found a couple posts and photos of the '030 version, but not the '020. The boards look identical, except the '030 has a couple more chips. This board has a couple bodges, so I think it's probably a pretty early version.
When I first got it I installed it with no RAM on the accelerator, I didn't expect this to work but figured I would try anyways. As expected it did not work, I just got a sad Mac. I installed 4x 1mb SIMMs on the accelerator, held my breath, and it booted! I opened Tattle Tech and it said the machine had an '020 running at 3mhz. Not unusual for a board without a driver. I downloaded all the drivers I could find that I thought might work with this board, and the only one I found that would work was the ExSys SE driver. GemStart did not work, despite the fact the ExSys driver is supposed to be a modified GemStart driver.
A couple quirks with the driver... The first time I booted with the driver I could instantly tell it was much faster. I opened Tattle Tech and saw the CPU speed was 16mhz, as expected. This is where things got a bit odd. I re-booted the machine and I got an error on boot that said I did not have a math co-processor installed. Hard to argue with a fact. I didn't have a 68881 around, but I had a 68882 so I installed that. Tried again, and it booted fine. I checked the control panel and all four options were enabled - Use FPU for SANE, instruction cache, data cache, and load ROM to RAM. When I tried opening Tattle Tech it crashed, I think it was a "bus error". I restarted and tried Speedometer 3.06. Speedometer showed the CPU as a '030 16mhz, not an '020. I restarted a couple more times, and when I checked the control panel now only the first two options were available, the last two were greyed out. Odd. I opened Tattle Tech, and now it correctly showed the CPU as a '020 16mhz. It was smooth sailing after that.
Today I tried GemStart 2.1 again since I had just read a post by @Phipli where he said the ExSys driver was a modified GemStart driver. I thought maybe I had made a mistake the first time around, but no, the machine crashed on boot again with the GemStart driver, saying FPU not installed. I re-installed the ExSys driver, and again all four control panel options were enabled, and Speedometer 3.06 showed the CPU as a '030. I restarted, and now all was right again, the CPU correctly shows as an '020. It seems once the control panel gets settled in, things work smoothly, at least as much as I have used it so far. Unfortunately I had run Speedometer during one of the odd "fake '030" boots, and Speedometer crashed, corrupting my machine records file. So I don't have any comparisons to post at the moment. (EDIT: added a benchmark against a stock SE/30)
Anyways I just thought I would share a couple photos, and ask if anyone knows anything about this particular board.
I recently made an impulse buy and picked a Quesse '020 16mhz accelerator in unknown condition. After a bit of fiddling I got it up and running smoothly. I had never heard of Quesse before, and I can find zero information online about this particular board. I have found a couple posts and photos of the '030 version, but not the '020. The boards look identical, except the '030 has a couple more chips. This board has a couple bodges, so I think it's probably a pretty early version.
When I first got it I installed it with no RAM on the accelerator, I didn't expect this to work but figured I would try anyways. As expected it did not work, I just got a sad Mac. I installed 4x 1mb SIMMs on the accelerator, held my breath, and it booted! I opened Tattle Tech and it said the machine had an '020 running at 3mhz. Not unusual for a board without a driver. I downloaded all the drivers I could find that I thought might work with this board, and the only one I found that would work was the ExSys SE driver. GemStart did not work, despite the fact the ExSys driver is supposed to be a modified GemStart driver.
A couple quirks with the driver... The first time I booted with the driver I could instantly tell it was much faster. I opened Tattle Tech and saw the CPU speed was 16mhz, as expected. This is where things got a bit odd. I re-booted the machine and I got an error on boot that said I did not have a math co-processor installed. Hard to argue with a fact. I didn't have a 68881 around, but I had a 68882 so I installed that. Tried again, and it booted fine. I checked the control panel and all four options were enabled - Use FPU for SANE, instruction cache, data cache, and load ROM to RAM. When I tried opening Tattle Tech it crashed, I think it was a "bus error". I restarted and tried Speedometer 3.06. Speedometer showed the CPU as a '030 16mhz, not an '020. I restarted a couple more times, and when I checked the control panel now only the first two options were available, the last two were greyed out. Odd. I opened Tattle Tech, and now it correctly showed the CPU as a '020 16mhz. It was smooth sailing after that.
Today I tried GemStart 2.1 again since I had just read a post by @Phipli where he said the ExSys driver was a modified GemStart driver. I thought maybe I had made a mistake the first time around, but no, the machine crashed on boot again with the GemStart driver, saying FPU not installed. I re-installed the ExSys driver, and again all four control panel options were enabled, and Speedometer 3.06 showed the CPU as a '030. I restarted, and now all was right again, the CPU correctly shows as an '020. It seems once the control panel gets settled in, things work smoothly, at least as much as I have used it so far. Unfortunately I had run Speedometer during one of the odd "fake '030" boots, and Speedometer crashed, corrupting my machine records file. So I don't have any comparisons to post at the moment. (EDIT: added a benchmark against a stock SE/30)
Anyways I just thought I would share a couple photos, and ask if anyone knows anything about this particular board.
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Does anyone know if the actual Gemini boards had a startup animation like the Radius cards? Not the extension icon/animation, but the Radius card has a Radius graphic that shows up in the lower left of the screen. The Radius graphic is much larger than the standard extension icon size.
Next I'll try out System 7 and see if this board is compatible.
