Byrd
Well-known member
Hi,
I treated my SE/30 to a Sonnet Allegro "doubler" accelerator, boosting it to 33Mhz '030 off the socketed board. It installed easily bar having to lengthen the legs on a replacement capacitor nearby to make it fit. It has 80MB RAM, 1GB HD, with a PDS network card, so fairly stock apart from the CPU upgrade (all caps replaced too). The literature the card came with suggested issues with booting from 1.44MB floppy drives in a Mac IIx, which the upgrade also works in, but does not mention this being an issue on the SE/30. Specifically, when the upgrade is installed on the IIx it cannot boot off 1.44MB boot disks any more, only 800K. With the extension loaded however it reduces the speed of the CPU when a 1.44MB disk is inserted to be read. Very strange workaround (I wonder if the system runs at stock speed whenever a 1.44MB disk is mounted on the desktop)!
The SE/30 booted up fine without the extension and everything was detected @ 33Mhz, I installed the v1.1 extension on the disk anyhow and it performs well, a nice boost in performance overall.
However I'm having issues with sound, particularly digitised system sounds - the startup chime + system sounds are partially corrupt, making them sound either too fast or choppy. Sound and music in most games is fine, except maybe 25% that heavily use digitised sounds which sound muddy/murky but not fast or chopped up like with the system sounds. I'm running System 7.1.
Reverting back to the stock 16Mhz '030 and all is well, and removing the Sonnet extention with the upgrade installed does nothing, same with enabling 32-bit addressing, MODE32, etc.
Vaguely recalling quirks with other SE/30 accelerators (Diimo, Daystar), what's to blame here - wrong OS, need Sound Manager installed, anyone else have one of these upgrades installed in their SE/30?
Thanks
JB
I treated my SE/30 to a Sonnet Allegro "doubler" accelerator, boosting it to 33Mhz '030 off the socketed board. It installed easily bar having to lengthen the legs on a replacement capacitor nearby to make it fit. It has 80MB RAM, 1GB HD, with a PDS network card, so fairly stock apart from the CPU upgrade (all caps replaced too). The literature the card came with suggested issues with booting from 1.44MB floppy drives in a Mac IIx, which the upgrade also works in, but does not mention this being an issue on the SE/30. Specifically, when the upgrade is installed on the IIx it cannot boot off 1.44MB boot disks any more, only 800K. With the extension loaded however it reduces the speed of the CPU when a 1.44MB disk is inserted to be read. Very strange workaround (I wonder if the system runs at stock speed whenever a 1.44MB disk is mounted on the desktop)!
The SE/30 booted up fine without the extension and everything was detected @ 33Mhz, I installed the v1.1 extension on the disk anyhow and it performs well, a nice boost in performance overall.
However I'm having issues with sound, particularly digitised system sounds - the startup chime + system sounds are partially corrupt, making them sound either too fast or choppy. Sound and music in most games is fine, except maybe 25% that heavily use digitised sounds which sound muddy/murky but not fast or chopped up like with the system sounds. I'm running System 7.1.
Reverting back to the stock 16Mhz '030 and all is well, and removing the Sonnet extention with the upgrade installed does nothing, same with enabling 32-bit addressing, MODE32, etc.
Vaguely recalling quirks with other SE/30 accelerators (Diimo, Daystar), what's to blame here - wrong OS, need Sound Manager installed, anyone else have one of these upgrades installed in their SE/30?
Thanks
JB
