Daystar Universal PowerCache P33 in SE/30

[ants]

Hi all, I tried adding the jumper to my Twinspark to see what effect it had on my Daystar Turbo 040 - I was blown away by the improvement!

The MacBench scores speak for themselves. Below I tested my SE/30 with a Daystar Turbo - one with the Jumper and one without:



But scores aside, the whole system feels so much faster. Thank you to everyone on this thread!

Edit: Here is my jumper, I just used the leg off a resistor lying around:

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

There are .1" pitch ribbon cables.   I don't think I've ever seen a premade cable with a Euro-DIN connector on the end.  I'm also pretty sure that the easily available ribbon cables don't go past 40 or 50 conductors.   I looked into trying to bring the SE/30 CPU socket up with ribbon or flat flex cables some years ago.

Someone used M-F breadboard wires as a Radius Color Pivot II/IIsi card riser in the SE/30 PDS. You could do the IIci Cache Slot adaptation with those I suppose.

I've picked up a few M-F NuBus length rbbon cable assemblies a while back, but never saw them again on eBay.

 

[ktkm]

There are .1" pitch ribbon cables.   I don't think I've ever seen a premade cable with a Euro-DIN connector on the end.  I'm also pretty sure that the easily available ribbon cables don't go past 40 or 50 conductors.   I looked into trying to bring the SE/30 CPU socket up with ribbon or flat flex cables some years ago.





 

Thanks for the tip and good to know!

Someone used M-F breadboard wires as a Radius Color Pivot II/IIsi card riser in the SE/30 PDS. You could do the IIci Cache Slot adaptation with those I suppose.

Something like this? 

 

[ktkm]

Hi all, I tried adding the jumper to my Twinspark to see what effect it had on my Daystar Turbo 040 - I was blown away by the improvement!

Great! What’s the spec on your Daystar Turbo 040? I was going to try it with 040 33 MHz.

But scores aside, the whole system feels so much faster. Thank you to everyone on this thread!

Memory benchmarks doubled in my SE/30—before the jumper it even scored slightly below that of a ’normal’ SE/30.

 

[K Trueno]

View attachment 28513

But scores aside, the whole system feels so much faster. Thank you to everyone on this thread!

Wow that’s awesome, so not only PowerCache but Turbo 040 too!  It does make it feel a lot faster.  Without the cache the CPU is always waiting on a 16mhz bus for memory access.

 

[K Trueno]

If you wanted you could even wire up your P33 to the SE/30 PDS using a lot of jumper wires. No magic going on here at all.

Is it possible to buy a PDS flat cable for the DIN-connector?

Judging from things it ought to be possible, but it doesn’t look like it’s 1:1.

Here is a thread by @Von that shows how he did it, so cool.  

 

[ants]

Great! What’s the spec on your Daystar Turbo 040? I was going to try it with 040 33 MHz.

Mine's a 40mhz with the 128kb cache card.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Judging from things it ought to be possible, but it doesn’t look like it’s 1:1.

It is absolutely POSITIVELY NOT 1:1 and you'd need to do the IIci Cache Slot adaptation in cable. Bolle's only saying you don't need the GAL.

Von's cable extender hack is exactly what I was talking about, you'd need to switch almost every (every?) wire around from motherboard connector to PowerCache/Turbo 040 connector.

@Bolle If you wire up one of your adapters to bypass the logic and its latency, will more of your SE/30 boards support multiple cards?

 

[Bolle]

Gotta do some testing on that...

I will have to modify all my SE/30s anyways so that the cache on all those P33s actually works.

Most of the SE/30s have two PDS cards so we are going to find out how the most commonly used PDS card combos behave.

 

[ktkm]

Here is a thread by @Von that shows how he did it, so cool.  

Now, that is almost precisely the thing I was looking for to build!

Thanks for the tip @K Trueno.

 

[Bolle]

GAL-less adapter here we go...



Made a prototype out of one of my existing adapters:



This will run the P33 just fine in the SE/30 with all dual PDS card (MacCon always in the bottom) combinations I could test so far:

-Radius IIsi Pivot

-Radius SE/30 Pivot (not color Pivot)

-Shiva Ethernet card (dual ethernet SE/30 anyone?)

-Formac ProNitron80

-Micron Xceed Color30

Nearly all signals are connected straight through. Only the 16MHz clock gets buffered by the 74ACT86. This is needed for some PDS cards, otherwise the logicboard video signal will drop out because the clock line gets too much load from all the cards and the video logic will fail to pick up the low signal.

The Turbo040 still won't work as well as the P33.

I noticed that the GAL-based T040 I got from @Udo.Keller is even worse than my later ASIC revision. Different firmware versions on the T040 do not seem to change anything either.

Looks like it helps a bit with timing when inverting the 16MHz signal that goes to the accelerator slot. That way the T040 will work but the P33 won't. Easy to fix that though with a jumper switching between VCC and GND on the ACT86 to invert the clock or not.

The PSU in my barebones testbed SE/30 is getting weak, I'll have to get another one for further testing with the 040 and multiple PDS cards.

Good news for PowerCache users, still somewhat bad news for T040 users. I have heard a few reports of the GAL version performing really bad in the SE/30 (or even other machines it's supposed to work in just fine)

 

[Bolle]

Success... suddenly my board wouldn't boot at all anymore. It was having issues before but was good then again. Looks like the CPU died. Removed it and tested it in another board and it is dead as a doornail.

However upon removing it the full stack of PDS cards started to work with the Turbo040:

The T040 even works with the MacCon stuck under it. I could never get this to work reliably up to now. If I knew it would have been as simple as inverting that one clock signal.

It is running rock solid for an hour now. Downside is that the P33 won't work with the clock inverted but I might be able to solve that and go completely jumperless on the adapter.

Another mystery solved.

 

[ktkm]

The T040 even works with the MacCon stuck under it. I could never get this to work reliably up to now. If I knew it would have been as simple as inverting that one clock signal.

It is running rock solid for an hour now. Downside is that the P33 won't work with the clock inverted but I might be able to solve that and go completely jumperless on the adapter.

Another mystery solved.




2

WOW! Super! Great News! 

 

[K Trueno]

Success... suddenly my board wouldn't boot at all anymore. It was having issues before but was good then again. Looks like the CPU died. Removed it and tested it in another board and it is dead as a doornail.

However upon removing it the full stack of PDS cards started to work with the Turbo040:



The T040 even works with the MacCon stuck under it. I could never get this to work reliably up to now. If I knew it would have been as simple as inverting that one clock signal.

It is running rock solid for an hour now. Downside is that the P33 won't work with the clock inverted but I might be able to solve that and go completely jumperless on the adapter.

Another mystery solved.

If I am interpreting this correctly, does this mean we can run a Turbo 040, MacCon AND a Radius Pivot which wasn't possible before??  Wow!  I thought I was at endgame for SE/30 (3 stack), this might have me looking for a Turbo 040...

 

[pcamen]

Do you have the original documentation for it?  I'm curious if Daystar officially says it will work properly in the SE/30, or if it is intended only for the IIci.

I just got the rather thick Daystar PowerCache documentation.  I will scan it today and post it here. 

 

[JDW]

I just got the rather thick Daystar PowerCache documentation.  I will scan it today and post it here. 

This is on archive.org...

https://archive.org/details/DayStarCacheCardManual/page/n33

By the way, if any of you are able to answer my question in the following thread, please do!

 

[pcamen]

The one I just scanned appears to be different than the one on Archive.org.  That one specifies that it is for the IIsi and IIci, whereas mine says it is for the SE/30, LC, LCII, II, IIx, IIcx, IIsi, and IIci. The one on Archive.org is 52 pages; mine is 112.  

This system isn't letting me add attachments; I just get a constant Queued.  Anyone else having this problem?  

Here it is on dropbox:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/41w6nrd55idorlu/DayStar Digital Universal PowerCache 1992 (ocr).pdf?dl=0

 

[JDW]

The one I just scanned appears to be different than the one on Archive.org.  That one specifies that it is for the IIsi and IIci, whereas mine says it is for the SE/30, LC, LCII, II, IIx, IIcx, IIsi, and IIci. 

Great!  I look forward to seeing it.

By the way, you can see the Micron Xceed MacroColor30 manual I scanned here (OCR’d to be keyword searchable):

https://macintoshgarden.org/sites/macintoshgarden.org/files/manuals/Micron_Xceed_MacroColor30_InstallGuide.pdf

 

[omidimo]

The one on Archive.org is 52 pages; mine is 112. 

The one I posted on Archive is from August 1991, and the one you just scanned is from April 1992. The most up-to-date Universal Manual I have is from March 1993 that covers IIvx, IIvi, Performa 400 & 600 as well. I plan to scan that one too for Archive soon. I also got a Cache exclusive manual dated from November 1992 that covers all the non PowerCache cards. 

 

[Von]

Success... suddenly my board wouldn't boot at all anymore. It was having issues before but was good then again. Looks like the CPU died. Removed it and tested it in another board and it is dead as a doornail.

However upon removing it the full stack of PDS cards started to work with the Turbo040:



The T040 even works with the MacCon stuck under it. I could never get this to work reliably up to now. If I knew it would have been as simple as inverting that one clock signal.

It is running rock solid for an hour now. Downside is that the P33 won't work with the clock inverted but I might be able to solve that and go completely jumperless on the adapter.

Another mystery solved.

Very interesting. Were you able to get the Turbo 040 to run with the Micron Xceed card?