Quite unique IIfx on ebay..

[volvo242gt]

To stay off-topic.
My eBay technique is to bid the maximum I'm willing to pay as soon as I decide I'm willing to bid. And I come to a firm conclusion on my maximum. If I place the bid, and am immediately outbid, I give up.

Then I ignore the auction until I get the "the auction is over" email.

Makes absolutely certain I don't go over my "max" amount.

I don't care if it goes for $0.01 over my maximum bid, I don't get worked up. It's likely that the other bidder was willing to make it go much higher, and I'm not out to "punish" the other bidder for outbidding me by driving their bid up artificially.

Exactly. Tried being a sniper and wound up overpaying for a bunch of stuff a few years ago.

Sometimes, it's relieving to see the "You have been outbid" message...

-J

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

IIRC, CelGen's a sniper.

Now now. What was the forum rule about going after other members?

Given the context of my posts on the subject, that was clearly a compliment! :lol:

I bet anyone here $1000 that if ebay ran like a REAL auction house (bid in the closing seconds and the listing time is extended ten more seconds, thus defeating snipers) the value of some of our most prized hardware would fall through the floor.

I don't follow that logic. Auctions at places like livestock corrals and Christies run until the the person who wants an item almost the most drops out. Is there any objection to late bidding by knowledgeable participants of such IRL auctions?

Pretty good article about auctions overall, cites emotion based objections to sniping and research on why it's the better strategy on eBay:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_sniping

The article points out that letting the unwashed masses in on the true value of an auction item early on isn't good strategy.

BIN is my preference, but I'll sometimes throw out an early bid when I think nobody else is looking.

This NuBus Mac video friendly Radius/KDS LCD Monitor being a prime example. Great display for that IIfx with the right card.

I thought that connector would be either SCSI II or a box interface, couldn't decide which though. Being a Sound Production workstation, as opposed to a throughput hungry Video Production setup, I guess there's no real need for I/O faster than pathetic 68k SCSI performance. Would that be the case?

Do the extra cards in the box support additional channels? Are those Digidesign Samplecell cards a later version of my Sound Accelerator II or are they sample input only cards?

 

[John_A]

Continuing the offtopic..

Some interesting thoughts regarding the IIfx.

Since it has 2x 6502 cpus running at 10mHz managing the io devices, and apple never implemented the use of them'in the OS, I have

always wondered; can they be used in other ways using clever programming?

The original 6502 at 1 mHz wasn't that far off from a 68000, reason for this is that performing its fastest instructions only took 2 cycles,

averaging the instruction totals to around 4-5 cycles. 6502 also accessed the memory at every clockcycle. The 68000 took a full 4 cycles to access memory,

and the relatively complex instructions set needed an average of 14-15 cycles/instruction. Running at 8mHz it kept its distance to the 6502s measly 1 , but

clocking 6502 at 10Mhz might change the game (Its 10X the speed of a apple II thats using the same chip as main cpu). Since the 6510 used in Atari and commodore

are a derivative of the 6502, there are loads of programming experience.

And since C64 with only 64Kb memory could do this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So-m4NUzKLw (Demo starts around 8min 40s) you don't need a lot

of memory either. Pretty impressive!

 

[James1095]

My eBay technique is to bid the maximum I'm willing to pay as soon as I decide I'm willing to bid. And I come to a firm conclusion on my maximum. If I place the bid, and am immediately outbid, I give up.

That's why I use Ezsniper. I paste in the item number and my max bid, set and forget. The Ezsniper service puts in a bid for me in the last few seconds of the auction and either I win or I don't. I don't have to be home, I don't even have to leave my computer on. The snipe does cost something like 1% of the final value fee but only if I win. I've been using it since 2005 with good results and unless ebay makes what I would consider a sensible move to combat sniping by extending the auction when late bids come in, I'll continue to use that method.

 

[volvo242gt]

If someone could find a way to shoehorn some Apple II ROMs onto a Nubus card that could talk with the 6502's, you could have a dual processor zip chip equipped Apple //e inside your Mac IIfx... Imagine playing Rampage on it.

-J

 

[James1095]

There is space to put Apple II ROMs on a custom ROM SIMM at which point they are accessible by the main CPU. I have no idea how those 6502s are wired up though, they may not be usable unless they can access the system ROM and RAM. There's a lot more to an Apple II than the CPU chip.

 

[volvo242gt]

Yep, that's very true. Might have to build a hacked version of the Apple IIe card that uses the processors on the motherboard, instead of the one on the card... Not sure how that would be done, or if it's even possible.

-J

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Since they're I/O coprocessors, they're likely too embedded into inaccessible niches of the block diagram for use as CPUs of any kind. Dunno, that's just a WAG on my part.

 

[finkmac]

If you're willing to believe Wikipedia,

The IIfx also included two special dedicated processors for sound and serial communications. These I/O chips featured a pair of embedded 6502 CPUs, meaning that this Mac also had the core of two Apple II machines inside it (albeit at 10 MHz rather than the 1 MHz of the Apple II). However the machine's architecture did not expose these CPUs to developers.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The Macintosh IIfx computer has two custom integrated circuits, the I/O Processors (IOPs), that control the SCC and SWIM ICs and the ADB, serial I/O, and AppleTalk. Each IOP has its own built-in microprocessor and its own dedicated RAM, which it can use for DMA data transfers to and from the I/O interface it controls.

The Guide doesn't specifically address the issue of what microprocessor is on the IOP die, but it was common knowledge that they were 6502s. The first reviews of the IIfx in the Mags all mentioned them IIRC.

 

[John_A]

Found this information:

The I/O Processor (IOP) is an Apple custom IC designed to provide intelligent support for I/O controllers. There are two of these IOP chips in the Macintosh IIfx computer: one for the SWIM and ADB and one for the SCC. The IOP sits between the main processor and the I/O controllers. The features of the IOP include:•A built-in microprocessor (6502 running at 2 MHz)

•A 17-bit timer

•Two DMA controllers: one for each serial I/O channel (only used in the Serial IOP)

•Address and data busses for RAM used by the IOP and host processor

•Two digital I/O ports for controlling the ADB (on the SWIM-ADB IOP)

•32K of external memory of IOP code and data storage

The 68030 communicates with the IOP through a set of control registers in the IOP that are mapped into the main processors' I/O space. The main processor can interrupt the IOP using a bit in one of the control registers, whereas the IOP can interrupt the 68030 by using an interrupt line.

Each IOP has 32K of external RAM that holds the driver and acts as a buffer for the data processed by the processor. The IOP contains a 16-bit auto-incrementing address register and an 8-bit data port that the host processor uses for access to the shared RAM.

 

[zackl]

Annnnnnd it's sold for ~$360

 

[uniserver]

i guess it was not as valuable as i thought it would be

i was thinking 1.3 to 1.6k for some strange reason.

 

[Unknown_K]

It went for about what I figured. The IIfx in decent condition with full RAM is around $250ish. I don't think the cards are worth that much.

 

[CelGen]

Eight bids stuffed in 15 seconds, driving the price up the price by $211 by two people locked in a bidding war and both to lose to some other schmuck who only bid only once in the very last possible second and whose history says he's been doing this a lot.

 

[volvo242gt]

Yeah, the Avid cards seem to be going for about $40-$60 BIN on evilBay...

-J

 

[John_A]

Well, for the money it went for, I would have been interested. Soundcards or not, a IIfx with maxed out Ram in good condition is very difficult to find. Overseas shipping + import taxes would have driven the price up to $500+ though.

 

[retrocore9]

Yes it went for a small amount of money compared to what was being offered. It is too bad a sniper got it but thats how ebay works really.

 

[Bunsen]

The Samplecell is a hardware audio sample playback engine with a Mac GUI front end. It takes the place of a hardware sampler in music production. It has 8 audio outs, but no ins: it is not a recording card. They made Nubus Mac, PCI Mac and PCI PC versions.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1995_articles/nov95/samplecell2.html

Nowadays most of that functionality would be done in software, using the computer's CPU for the grunt work, and any old soundcard or built-in audio for the IO.

 

[trag]

Post deleted as further reading in the thread made it irrelevant. Was about the 6502 co-processors, but the quote above by John_A superceded my speculation on what code the 6502s run off of.

Interestingly, from the description posted above, it sounds like the IIfx CPU must load the driver for the 6502 in the IOP every time the machine boots up. Otherwise there's no code in the 32K of RAM which the 6502 uses for instruction memory. I would have assumed that there was a mask ROM in there, but I guess not.