Troubleshooting Nubus cards

[Sideburn]

Hi, does anyone know if a Nubus card should show activity on the address/data lines if just power is applied to the card from a non working / running Mac logic board?

I have a Radius Rocket card that’s not working and I was going to try to troubleshoot it but I can’t tell if Nubus cards need a running Mac or not to talk to the card to and make it start running or not.

When I put the card in a functioning iicx, it’s dead and doesn’t show up on the Nubus using tattletech etc. all I see is the video card.

So in order to work on it on the bench all I have is a sick iicx board that powers on but it’s also not working.

I’m hoping I can just supply the 5V / 12v to the card and know that the cpu should be running. All I am seeing is a clock and no other activity.

There’s probably not much hope since I can’t find any schematics either but it would help to at least have an understanding of how Nubus works.

 

[zigzagjoe]

While I can't speak for the radius rocket specifically, it is very possible the CPU on the card is effectively disabled by holding it in reset until it is "primed" by the host system and ready to boot. AFAIK they don't boot until you elect to do so in the Radius software, and I think the host has to load a copy of a mac ROM into the card RAM anyways before there would be code for it to run. So I would not expect activity on the 68040's local bus, and there definitely should not be activity on the Nubus signals.

This is a pretty special case though given it's more or less a system on a card. Most cards don't have independent CPUs and won't do anything until the host tells it to do something. To do that, the DeclROM needs to be present and working, as otherwise Mac OS doesn't know about the card and wouldn't interact with it.

As far as troubleshooting goes, you could check the DeclROM works / is readable and valid checksum in a programmer... you could also try poking around in macsbug to see what you get with manual reads and writes to the address space the card's declrom would be expected to reside in.

 

[Melkhior]

Hi, does anyone know if a Nubus card should show activity on the address/data lines if just power is applied to the card from a non working / running Mac logic board?

Very likely not.

When designed for Mac, NuBus devices should essentially be passive at first - not mess in any way with the bus, so they won't initiate transaction (being a bus master). They will just passively answer requests from another bus master, which normally is the Mac itself (or specifically, the NuChip).

The first thing the Mac will do is 'probe' the device by reading a word at the end of the slot space, to find out how the card's ROM is wired (width 8/16/32, if not 32 on which bytes). If that returns something meaningful, it will go on with reading and checking the ROM for slot manager resources and other parameters (including a checksum) and eventually the primary INIT, and later drivers and secondary INIT. INITs and drivers should be the one creating lots of requests to the cards, and enabling the cards to do some stuff on its own (such as bus-mastering data into the Mac memory).

If anything goes wrong in that early process (such as a faulty address or data line, a dying ROM, ...), then the Slot Manager will just ignore the device. So even a minor issue will cause an apparent complete failure if that minor issue prevent the ROM to be validated early on.

You might need a logic analyzer to check what happens in the 'working' Mac, I've made some suggestions in a different thread.

EDIT:

you could also try poking around in macsbug to see what you get with manual reads and writes to the address space the card's declrom would be expected to reside in.

+1 ; also MacsBug is an option, but otherwise the Mac doesn't protect the devices, so basic stuff like

printf("0x%08x\n", *(int*)(0xFBFFFFFC));

can display data from the ROM in e.g. slot B (second hexadecimal character) when running 32-bits mode.

 

[Sideburn]

Ahh. Thanks. Good info. One thing I saw was a description from someone who sold one on eBay saying “For sale is a Radius Rocket Accelerator. I dont have a way to fully test the card with drivers, but TattleTech shows the card installed so I am very confident the card will work fine.” So apparently it does not need software to boot and show up on the Nubus.

Ok so I don’t think i have what I need to go forward yet. My only working iicx is one I recently repaired and although it is working, when I enable 32 but addressing woth Mode 32 and set it to on In the memory control panel, some software can’t write to the disk and brings up a disk full error and both the rocket card and the SuperMac spigot card don’t work in it. So I can’t yet say the cards are both bad.

I’ll have to acquire a know good Nubus Mac first in order to work on this i think.

 

[zigzagjoe]

Ahh. Thanks. Good info. One thing I saw was a description from someone who sold one on eBay saying “For sale is a Radius Rocket Accelerator. I dont have a way to fully test the card with drivers, but TattleTech shows the card installed so I am very confident the card will work fine.” So apparently it does not need software to boot and show up on the Nubus.

Ok so I don’t think i have what I need to go forward yet. My only working iicx is one I recently repaired and although it is working, when I enable 32 but addressing woth Mode 32 and set it to on In the memory control panel, some software can’t write to the disk and brings up a disk full error and both the rocket card and the SuperMac spigot card don’t work in it. So I can’t yet say the cards are both bad.

I’ll have to acquire a know good Nubus Mac first in order to work on this i think.

Right, the DeclROM working is required to show in tattletech and is the bare minimum requirement for MacOS to interact with the card. Devils' advocate, note that showing in tattletech for a rocket means very little in terms of functionality given the card doesn't do anything without the control panel/extensions/etc to initialize the card.

That does sound like you have some other issues in play still.

 

[Sideburn]

The DeclROM is not working then for sure. I’ve also installed the rocket software. I wonder what the lowest cost and closest to a IIcx model Mac there is that I could use as a bench testing device. Was thinking an LC or LC II maybe. It has one Nubus slot on it. Yet another Mac board to find, re-cap and cross fingers lol

 

[zigzagjoe]

The DeclROM is not working then for sure. I’ve also installed the rocket software. I wonder what the lowest cost and closest to a IIcx model Mac there is that I could use as a bench testing device. Was thinking an LC or LC II maybe. It has one Nubus slot on it. Yet another Mac board to find, re-cap and cross fingers lol

LC does not have Nubus. Those are PDS slots and they are not compatible. Only Mac II series (exc IIsi), some Quadras, Centris, Performas and mid-size sedans have Nubus. And some first gen power macs.

 

[Phipli]

Only Mac II series (exc IIsi) and some Quadras have Nubus

Phipli quietly mutters "and, some Centris, Performas, and first gen PPC"

 

[zigzagjoe]

Phipli quietly mutters "and first gen PPC"

Haha, you got me just before I remembered and added that to the post. First gen PPC may be more available and cheaper too.

 

[Phipli]

Haha, you got me just before I remembered and added that to the post. First gen PPC may be more available and cheaper too.

I edited it to add more

 

[Sideburn]

LC does not have Nubus. Those are PDS slots and they are not compatible. Only Mac II series (exc IIsi), some Quadras, Centris, Performas and mid-size sedans have Nubus. And some first gen power macs.

oh wow, I looked at a board and thought the connector was a Nubus.

 

[Sideburn]

oh wow, I looked at a board and thought the connector was a Nubus.

Looks just like Nubus!

 

[Phipli]

Looks just like Nubus!

DIN 41612 connectors are common in that era.

It's the same connector on the SE too. All different.

The Acorn A5000 has two on its board, one for expansion cards, the other for memory expansion, both 96 pin.

 

[Sideburn]

DIN 41612 connectors are common in that era.

It's the same connector on the SE too. All different.

The Acorn A5000 has two on its board, one for expansion cards, the other for memory expansion, both 96 pin.

Wow, ok I learned something today... Whenever I saw that connector my brain said "Nubus".

 

[joshc]

Also bear in mind, not all NuBus cards are compatible with all Macs that have NuBus. There are exceptions. Some early NuBus cards don't work well in Quadras, for example.

https://everymac.com/ is a useful website for looking up the specs of a Mac, so you can tell what kinds of expansion slots a given model has. MacTracker is another good one for this type of info.

 

[Melkhior]

Wow, ok I learned something today... Whenever I saw that connector my brain said "Nubus".

DIN 41612 were, and still are, very common. There's still widely available from electronics reseller. MIT (which invented NuBus) probably had that in mind when they selected it, it was already widely used due to the success of Eurocard and even more so VME with the same 96-pins (3 rows of 32) configuration.

As @Phipli mentioned, Apple used them for the SE PDS and LC PDS in addition to NuBus (all different pinouts, of course). They also used the less common 120-pins (3 rows of 40) for the SE/30 & IIsi PDS, and for the LC/030 PDS (different from the SE/30 & IIsi PDS, as well).

For instance, in addition to VME, Sun used it for their so-called 'P4' connector on some sun3x workstation (3/460, 3/60, 3/80), which is essentially the same as an apple PDS slot.

It's one of the most common connector for stuff designed in the late 70s/80s, so one has to be careful about what is plugged in them.

 

[Unknown_K]

Also bear in mind, not all NuBus cards are compatible with all Macs that have NuBus. There are exceptions. Some early NuBus cards don't work well in Quadras, for example.

https://everymac.com/ is a useful website for looking up the specs of a Mac, so you can tell what kinds of expansion slots a given model has. MacTracker is another good one for this type of info.

Which cards are you talking about? Is it a hardware issue or just a control panel that won't work with a newer version of Mac OS found in Quadras or PPC Nubus machines?

There are plenty of older Nubus cards that won't work with Mac OS 7.5x or newer because of their old ROMs, some video capture cards are tied to specific versions of Apples QuickTime.

 

[joshc]

Which cards are you talking about?

The Mac286 is one example, I think (not sure it's been tested in later machines/systems though). I also thought it applies to some of the earliest Ethernet cards, though I may be wrong about that. But yeah, I think because of combinations of software / ROM versions as well, you shouldn't always expect a card to 'just work' in any machine.