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Unknown card in PDS slot

toples50

Well-known member
In another question about the Quadra.Which OS is the best(more stable,faster) for the config(68040/33,56MB ram) 7.5.5 or 7.6.1?

 

Charlieman

Well-known member
In another question about the Quadra.Which OS is the best(more stable,faster) for the config(68040/33,56MB ram) 7.5.5 or 7.6.1?
It really depends on the software and hardware that you wish to add to the basic machine. There are many graphics cards which will work well with System 7.1.x or 7.5.x, perhaps not 7.6.x. Ditto for image grabbers, graphics accelerators etc. 7.6.1 is usually more stable, but it might be worthwhile buying a hard disk to swap in and out. Personally, I'd start out trying to run System 7.1.

Formac products were distributed in most European countries from the start of the company. I used a Formac monitor for many years and encountered many expansion cards in 68K Macs at work. It is likely that your PDS card was reviewed in at least one of the European Mac magazines in the early 1990s. Early Formac products (basic graphics cards, LC family accelerators) appear to have been designed in house, alongside rebadged/reworked CRT displays. More advanced products (3dfx graphics cards, LCD displays, G3 accelerators) were developed with partners with Formac input.

Have you had a look at Waybackmachine to see if any Formac pages have been archived?

Have you used a system utility to see how your Mac is described? A PDS accelerator often works without any drivers.

 

Macdrone

Well-known member
Depends on the software really. 7.5.5 is fun to install off floppy but after 22 disks I'd rather do 7.5 on cd then small update to 7.6.1.

 

Charlieman

Well-known member
Depends on the software really. 7.5.5 is fun to install off floppy but after 22 disks I'd rather do 7.5 on cd then small update to 7.6.1.
Install System 7.x from floppies? You only need to do this once or twice.

Copy the disk images onto a Zip drive or external hard disk. Boot the Mac from floppy disk and run MountImage. Or boot from the Network Access Disk and connect to an AppleShare volume hosting the OS disk images.

 

Macdrone

Well-known member
With fourty or so machines it's a lot lol. Machine specific I like a lot.

 
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Charlieman

Well-known member
@Macdrone: I understand that you might wish "proper builds" for some Macs. But unless I am doing something particularly stressful, I don't need it.
 
Mac System 7 onwards (before?) can be installed from AppleShare or from an external disk. You can insert Enablers into the installation package on a share or disk.
 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
IIRC, PDS Accelerators characteristically need a driver to put the CPU to sleep and boot from Mac/Onboard ROM.

The only plug and play PDS accelerator in the batch I have is the CrescendoPB G3 in Beater, that one's a processor card replacement  .  .  .  simply works  .  .  .  simply fast. OS9 on that mangled road warrior of a 1400c/G3@466MHz rocks.

 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
The perplexing thing about this card is if it actually runs the CPU at 50mhz (which would mean an external clock of 100mhz; I'm sure at least some of the people here are familiar with the 68040 "double-clock" lie that actually made it into some Apple sales literature) it's an out-of-the-box overclock; Motorola didn't sell the '040 in speed grades faster than 40mhz. (If the card *was* exploiting the lie in its name then that "50" would actually mean it's slower than the Q650's built-in CPU, so... yeah, that doesn't make any sense.)

I almost wonder if it could actually be a DSP card of some sort, not a 68040 under that heatsink. I think some of them came in ceramic packages about the same size as the '040, can you count pins (looking at the back of the board) and verify the pin grid array is actually the same?

Or maybe it's a super-secret never-released 68060 upgrade! ;)

 

Charlieman

Well-known member
IIRC, PDS Accelerators characteristically need a driver to put the CPU to sleep and boot from Mac/Onboard ROM.
No. Let's understand that we are talking about 68K accelerators. And about PDS slots, which are substitutes for the native processor.

Accelerator boards tell the on-board processor to close down. No drivers required in the 68030 world. 

 

Macdrone

Well-known member
It's not 030 to 040. It's 040 33mhz to 50 MHz 040 , it needs a driver.

It's usually an init and/or a control panel to activate all the options.

 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
No. Let's understand that we are talking about 68K accelerators. And about PDS slots, which are substitutes for the native processor.

Accelerator boards tell the on-board processor to close down. No drivers required in the 68030 world. 
I'm talking about the Radius16 I had in the SE's PDS and PowerCache Cards, all of which require drivers to tell the CPU to take a nap/control panels to turn them on and off and to tweak settings like cache and Math processes.. In the 68k World, the only processor card upgrade that would not need a driver that I can think of offhand would be for the Blackbirds. I've never gotten my BlackBird bits and pieces up running, but it appears to be the same plug-n-play deal as the G3 ProcCard Upgrade in my 1400c.

edit: PDS is not a substitute for the native processor, it's full access to that processor's I/O at the rate of the system clock for all but a couple of oddball cases like the IIfx and the Portable.

 
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Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
It's not 030 to 040. It's 040 33mhz to 50 MHz 040 , it needs a driver.
Are we still absolutely postive that's what it is? I'm serious about not being 100% sold on that. Does *anyone* have another example of a '040 "upgrade" that went into the PDS slot of a Quadra? There were PPC accellerators that fit in the PDS slot, but I haven't seen any evidence that they made 68040 cards for it, and for good reason: any such card would be *barely* faster than the built-in CPU. (And heck, even if you did think it was worth the effort, I'd think a better way to design it would be as a clock-multiplying daughterboard that plugs into the CPU socket; every desktop '040 machine has a socketed CPU and that was standard fare for 486 upgrades.) It still seems to me this *could* be some sort of math coprocessor/DSP/"Photoshop Accellerator" card.

I don't want to suggest prying the heat sink off to see what that chip really is, but I'm still saying it would be a worthwhile exercise to count pins on the socket (it looks like it's through-hole so the pincount should be visible from the back) and verify that it's at least the same socket as a 68040.

 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
No need for drivers to find out what it might be. Download and run TattleTech, the PDS/NuBus report should give you the information about the class of the card and maybe the Rev.Level of the firmware right from from ROM on board. Don't know that I've ever checked out an Accelerator with TattleTech, but it's a good bet.

PPC is a possibility, but I've never even seen a heat sink on a DSP, much less active cooling. Proc card upgrades for the 486 didn't entail overclocking the crap out of a standard part. Powering the fan from the PDS power budget makes sense to me, those wires look fairly hefty. Running a 25% overclocked 68040 (RTFM skipping bozo field installation) without the fan hooked up =  imminent catastrophic failure.

Running the 40MHz part at 50MHz would be a 25% speed bump for the 840AV and a 51.5% bump for the stock Q650's 33MHz clock and 100% for the Centris version, IIRC. Overall system performance ought to be very noticeable even though system performance/clock bump is never proportional, even on an 840AV.

Just sayin' ::)

 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
Proc card upgrades for the 486 didn't entail overclocking the crap out of a standard part. Powering the fan from the PDS power budget makes sense to me, those wires look fairly hefty. Running a 25% overclocked 68040 (RTFM skipping bozo field installation) without the fan hooked up =  imminent catastrophic failure.
The Sonnet Quaddoubler was an overclocked 50mhz upgrade that stuck into the CPU socket, so if you're going to do something stupid like this you don't *need* to use the PDS slot...

Actually, interesting point here: I don't see a crystal on that board, and the board was in a Q650. The PDS slot in that machine is going to be running at 33mhz. The QuadDoubler doesn't need a crystal because it derives its clock from the system clock simply enough by being phased 2:1 with it (which is why it only works in 25mhz '040s), if this runs at 50mhz it's going to have a much rougher time deriving the clock from the 33mhz signal it's getting from the motherboard. And... on top of that, the performance is going to be *lousy* because there would be a non-integer relationship between the card CPU's bus cycles and the memory bus, meaning you're going to be getting a buttload of wait states. (Unless the card magically switches to 33mhz when doing external bus cycles and only runs at 50mhz when it's not doing anything external... which I think is going to be "never" on an '040 because of the onboard cache doing line fills all the time?)

Again, totally not going to rule out it being an '040 acellerator, but it's a very weird one if that's what it is.

 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
Just wondering about the release/ship date comparison between the 40MHz part and the 25/50MHz part. The latter makes sense in a Centris.68LC040 limited system's PDS, especially if the former was released before the clock doubled latter. Twice the clock and full '040/CoPro makes a world of sense as a Centris->Quadra upgrade card. Dunno, gotta find the Accelerator Reviews.

Just finished doing a space saving installation of the wall hanging shop vac and overall cubic use efficiency upgrade in my Delta14 garage/apartment kitchen pantry. Time to look for the ScanDump box as a reward! [:D] ]'>

 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
Just wondering about the release/ship date comparison between the 40MHz part and the 25/50MHz part.
SUCKER! There's no such thing as a "25/50mhz" part. ;)

The 25/50:33/66:40/80:50/100 "thing" as applied to Motorola's 68040 CPUs was entirely sleezy marketing, as I mentioned above. One technical difference between the 80486 and 68040 CPUs is the Intel CPUs clocked their internal bits at the same rate as the input clock, while the Motorola CPUs internal cadence required a clock input 2x the desired speed. Therefore a "33mhz" 80486 uses a 33Mhz input clock while the equivalent 68040 uses a 66mhz clock. This doesn't mean squat in terms of performance as no part of a 68040 that actually performs calculations "runs" at the double speed; in fact, Intel's *previous* design, the 80386, also had a 2x relationship between the input clock and the effective ALU speed. So...

When Intel came out with the *genuine* clock-multiplying parts, IE, the "DX2" CPUs, Apple had nothing to counter that with because, again, Motorola NEVER MADE AN EQUIVALENT PART. However, some sleezy marketing guy happened to notice that "double-speed" input clock and decided to start pasting it into advertising literature, and likewise of course the upgrade makers latched onto it as well. IT'S PURE HOKUM, and everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves. A "25/50mhz" 68040 is just a 25mhz 68040, period, and is *not* anything like a 50mhz DX2, which *legitimately* runs important parts of the chip, IE, the ALU/FPU/cache/etc, faster than other parts, IE, the bus drivers.

If Motorola *had* made real double-clocked 68040s then the "Quad Doubler" wouldn't exist; note that it has circuitry between the CPU and the socket that supplies the clock-doubling and bus arbitration functions. Similar socket upgrades for Intel 486s usually had nothing on them but voltage regulators, and that was only necessary if the upgrade incorporated something like a clock-tripling DX4 CPU. (Which used a 3.3v line for internal logic instead of 5v.)

 
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Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
HEH! :lol: Ancient history, but sleaze still oozes out of marketing groups wherever they can be found!

P.T.Barnum's spirit is alive, well, hiding under rocks everywhere and nigh on inexterminable  .  .  .

.  .  .  now if we could just set the nails in Murphy's coffin. }:)

 
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