radius rocket info

[oldappleguy]

radius rocket spec sheets

 

[Solinco]

I have a Radius Rocket in its antistatic bag in its box.  The S/Ns on bag box and board match. The box is plainly marked as a "33".  The board's appearance is fresh and clean.  The processor is a 68LC040/33!   It has no heat sink and there doesn't appear to be any scuffs from a pull.  Any stories, history or thoughts on this?   I have a full 040/33 chip (with a heat sink) available that I could swap in -- should I?  

 

[omidimo]

Cost saving model, you can swap it out, just remove the processor carefully. 

 

[Solinco]

You think?  Shouldn't it have been labelled a "33i"?  I have never noticed an ad for a 68LC040 Rocket, but I'm weirded out enough to go looking thru my old Mac Zone, MacConnection etc etc etc catalogs to confirm your take, which is odds-on exactly what it is.  I am just technically limited enough to wonder if my board is different from a full-chip board (which would make a cpu swap a mistake) OR is there only one kind of Rocket board that will not ever work properly without an FPU and the LC chip was (a) an accidental mistake in original assembly or (b) a sleazy swap by the seller.    Thanks for your response.

 

[Byrd]

Sleazy swap most likely; no reason why the FPU equipped '040 wouldn't work in such a card.

 

[olePigeon]

I think someone swapped it before they sold it.

 

[nglevin]

I'm curious how the board identifies itself when observed by RocketShare. There were four 68040 variants*, not counting the differences between the original Rockets and the Stage II Rockets that were clocked higher but lacked the ability for Mac IIs to boot to the Rocket.

I want to say that there was an LC Rocket, but it's true that it's easy enough to do a CPU swap on the socketed boards themselves. So who knows.

* - strictly speaking in terms of clock speed, and FPU/No FPU.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The 25i was the LC Rocket.

68LC040/25

68040/25

68040/33?????

68040/33

68040/40

No stock Macintosh II was compatible with any Rocket. PMMU upgrade was a minimum requirement. IIRC 1.44 MB Superdrive ROMs were required as well. I looked into a used Mac II from Sun Remarketing as my launch pad, thankfully the sales guy steered me to a compatible IIx which wasn't much more money than a II w/required upgrades.

Don't recall any Mac on a 33MHz clock with a numerically challenged CPU. Didn't realize there was such a beast as a 68LC040/33 at all!

 

[Solinco]

Thanks again, guys for the feedback.  As you core members of this forum know, I am entering the serious phase of my liquidation, so the first thing I did with my pile of recapped boards was to assemble a IIci so I could test stuff, especially my Daystar stuff.  As I was gathering the Daystars which were in the same place as the Rocket I happened to pull the Rocket out of its box and noticed the LC.  I have been bingeing on multiple threads this forum for better understanding of what I have and you guys are nothing short of amazing --both in your knowledge and experience and your generosity with your wisdom.  The testing of the Rocket was low on my present agenda (especially since my original experience with it was not good), but I will absolutely try to get RocketShare to ID it.  I tried 5 Turbo 040's in the IIci already and all 5 booted but one froze with both a SuperMac 8*24 PDQ and a Radius PC 8*24x.  Quad Control 1.5.1 ID'd the ROMs (2.01, 4.01, 4.11, 4.11i, and ? (froze exactly when I clicked on "Turbo 040 info" in Quad Control!).  I will report on the Rocket here and continue with the Daystars somewhere else.  Oh yeah, the only Turbo 040 that froze was the only 68LC040/33(Trash please note!).  I am nowhere near your level of technical expertise but I hope I can contribute in some way as I chew through this pile of hardware.  I thought this was all going to end my Mac OCD, but reading the fun and enthusiasm you guys have has flared up my infection again and I feel myself getting sucked right back in to the fun I felt the first time I dove in.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Glad to hear you're getting a bit of interest back, sounds like quite a collection of toys you have there. I sort of fade in and out of several hobbies and art forms. I never get rid of everything from any area of interest. []

 

[pgreffet]

Hi all !

I've just bought a radius rocket stage II to drop into my IIfx.

I have RocketShare installed but when I try to launch mission control for the first time it asks me to put a serial number written on the first floppy disk which I don't have.

So could any one help me with this ?

Thanks

Pierre

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Welcome aboard and congratulations! Great news there for your first post. Did you try the garden, they usually have keys for abandonware like RocketShare. Quibbling over RocketShare use on earlier generation Rockets might not be entirely unreasonable as it was a copyrighted option/upgrade. But licensing isn't an issue for the Stage II as RocketShare was included as standard equipment, being its only "operating system."

I haven't seen this come up in discussion yet: what screen resolution are you running? If you haven't got a fairly high end video card running at high resolution (16" at the minimum) or you won't be sharing two screens between the IIfx and the Rocket you could be a bit disappointed in the way RocketShare works out for the time being. What screens are the rest of you running under RocketShare? Is anyone sharing two or more displays? Does this quirk bother anyone else or is it just me and my 21" CRT addiction?

My IIsi/Rocket hack is on hold because it's incompatible with RocketWare. So I'm stuck with running RocketShare windows in 640x480 off its accursed vampire video for the time being. Full screen in accelerator mode would be much better as far as I'm concerned. NOT happy about that, but not enough to be moving the Portrait over from the DuoDock+ as yet, that would be my last resort.

 

[pgreffet]

Hi 

thanks for the tip : the picture once zoomed  helped so much !

I am using a quite decent config at the time /

- Mac IIfx with 20mb RAM

- system 7.6.1

- radius rocket stage II with modded cooling  system (active fan) but without daughter boards (which I am actively looking for)

- Radius 8.24 GC

- seagate HD 15K

- dell 21 4:3 screen

i also have a rocket 33 not tested yet. 

my screen resolution is 832x624 for now. 

I will give RocketShare a try and keep you informed about it. 

 

[olePigeon]

Heck of a setup.  I have picture somewhere when I briefly had 3 RadiusRockets all running inside a IIci.   Sold the other 2, but I still have my boxed one in there with 128MBs of RAM. 8)

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I wonder if the IIfx can run your Rocket 33 in accelerator mode under RocketWare? I've never tried mine. The pet IIfx will remain stock  in terms of CPU and maxed out with six killer cards in its slots.

 

[IIfx]

Officially the IIfx is not supported under RocketWare. Note I have not tried to force it to run RocketWare with my Rocket 33mhz. It's supposedly the same issue with the underlying system I/O bus architecture that blocks RocketWare from running on a Q900/950 and Q700. Both Quadras are a lot like an extended, modernized, and simplified IIfx. The I/O architecture is in common across the three machines per Apple's devnotes.

One of us with a Rocket 33 should try and see what happens with RocketWare on a IIfx.

 

[Unknown_K]

I know bus mastering is fubar on the IIfx so that is probably why you can't run a Rocket as the main CPU on it.

 

[pgreffet]

Hi

i only have tested the Rocket stage II in my IIfx with RocketShare and it works fine. 

When I am back home (holidays in Maui right now :ii: ) I will give RocketWare a try. 

Thanks

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Don't bother, your Stage II requires RocketShare to function. I may have opened that can of worms when I mentioned wanting to have my IIsi/Rocket 33 run under RocketWare because of the low resolution limitations.

I'm still curious about what resolutions you folks are running using RocketShare. Until I hacked the Rocket/IIsi setup incompatibility, I'd never had mine running at anything less than 21" TPD. RocketShare at 640x480 I found insufferable.