The Pickle is here! This is the B.U.G. Pickles 24A+ Revision C
First impressions: the nubus connector is cracked and the steel bracket is bent.
Nothing a bit of gentle plying won't fix! With a little care I bent the bracket back into shape and eased the broken part of the connector into a position that won't intrude on the pins. After a visual inspection for any damaged traces or bent pins I decided the card was ready to install in the Quadra 650.
This hefty card completely dwarfs the VideoSpigot and my GPIB card. I plugged in my monitor and optimistically hit the power button.
Success! For some reason the card defaulted to black and white mode but otherwise everything seemed to be working as expected.
The control panel and extensions provided by
@cheesestraws loaded up perfectly and recognised the card. A few days ago I was using 256 colours on a 640x480 Performa Plus Display and now I'm looking at millions of colours on a 1024x768 LCD! I'll be trying out a 1280x1024 screen after writing this post.
I did a graphics benchmark on MacBench 3 and got some interesting results when comparing this upgraded Quadra 650 to a Power Macintosh 6100 with internal graphics. There are some areas where the Pickles 24A+ leaps ahead of the 6100 and others where it falls miserably behind.
This seems odd to me so I plan to investigate this further. The 6100 benchmarks were done at 640x480 whereas I tested at 1024x768 so that could be a factor. Perhaps I haven't installed the drivers quite right. Side note: MacBench tells me that the 24A+ has 3MB of VRAM - wowzer!
That's about all I've done so far, having received the card from Fedex just a couple of hours ago. I'll add a couple more photos of the board below.
It's a bit dusty, yes... At some point today I'll take a look at the pictures of the earlier revisions of this card further up in this thread to see if I can spot any differences. Before that it is time to go and see just how high a resolution I can get out of this card.
Thanks for reading!