Monopoly money for 1991 Nubus cards, and a v. peculiar card

[beachycove]

I have been doing bits and pieces of research on some recently acquired hardware. According to this snippet, the RasterOps 24XLI nubus card that I now have bouncing around in a cardboard box once cost $3500. And that $3500 was back in 1991.

Now I know that large screens were cutting edge and the technologies involved were of commercial importance to the burgeoning desktop publishing/ printing industry of the time, but really — $3500? How did the manufacturer get away with it?

The RasterOps 24XLI was, having said that, a rather interesting and obviously high-end video card which supported 24 bit colour on a 20" monitor without further ado, which was quite something back in 1991. The odd thing is that the 24XLI also contained 4 perfectly ordinary 30-pin SIMM slots. So once I get around to firing it up, I'm going to go with 4x 4MB SIMMS for 16MB in a video card from 1991, just to say that I'd done it.

The RAM added can apparently be used either for "Gworlds" use, which nubus video card aficianados will know all about — or, much more eccentrically ... for a RAM disk!

Why the latter functionality on a video card, do you suppose?

 

[Unknown_K]

A 16MB RAM disk (extremely expensive back then) would hold a decent amount of graphics data allowing you to make edits without using the slow hard drives of the day (scratch disk).

Those Nubus cards were not exactly super fast moving data over the Nubus BUS, so having it stored on the card would make working with big images a whole lot faster.

 

[beachycove]

This LEM article offers a rather unflattering view of the card, and of its RAM disk capability, but I wonder if this could perhaps be related to the System software (7.5) under which it was tested?

Among the distinctly odd things about these old pieces of hardware is the disconnect between price paid and longevity; a parallel to this would be a nubus card like the 8/24GC from Apple itself, which was supposedly designed specifically for the IIfx (and its little bother, the IIci), both of which machines were designed with a view for the impending release of System 7. Yet the RISC processor and (in effect) separate OS included on the 8/24GC only works properly under System 6.

So you invested heavily ("It costs the eyes out of your head," would be a suitable French idiom for it), only to have a failure of support just a year or two later.

 

[Unknown_K]

The system 7 rollout caused all kinds of hell with video card makers, most of them had to rush out new ROM chips to be compatible. And I think the newer ROM versions didn't play well with OS 6.

 

[Bunsen]

The RAM added can apparently be used either for "Gworlds" use, which nubus video card aficionados will know all about

I've heard of it, but so far, nope, no idea what it is. Anyone?

 

[Gorgonops]

What "Gworlds" is? Eh. Creative googling will sort of explain it:

http://www.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_08/095-098_Guest_column.html

http://developer.apple.com/legacy/mac/library/documentation/mac/QuickDraw/QuickDraw-2.html

... (Look at the chapter about "offscreen graphics worlds) and they're mentioned in passing in the Wikipedia article on Quickdraw. To oversimplify, it basically seems to boil down to being a form of "double-buffering" in which pointers are set so that Quickdraw, rather than drawing directly to video RAM, renders a complex image element to a RAM buffer which is copied to the display device when it's finished. Apparently it was possible with these Nubus cards with SIMM slots to set the render pointers to the RAM cache on the card so the CPU would render to the offscreen buffer there instead of system RAM, and when the image was ready to display it could be simply blitted by the video card's hardware into VRAM rather than transferred over Nubus. (Which would be comparatively slow compared to a memory-to-memory transfer on the card itself.)

An application had to specifically support doing this, so having that memory in most cases doesn't make anything faster. And apparently OS updates had a bad habit of breaking apps that did do it.

 

[beachycove]

And here 'tis.

 

[Unknown_K]

Nice card, is it raining Nubus up in Ontario?

 

[beachycove]

Sure seemed to rain them last weekend. I must have gotten 25, though many are just NICs.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Actually, I get perfect performance with my 8*24*GC under 7.1 with acceleration. Naturally it isn't happy in A/UX or 7.5, but it's perfectly stable and very speedy in 7.1.

 

[mac2geezer]

What display resolution do you get with the 8.24GC? I can't seem to get better than 640x480 in 7.6.1 on the IIfx driving a 15 inch Apple monitor. The monitor is capable of better res on other cards, so it's not likely that's the problem.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I have it set to 640x480 because that's what I use on that screen, but I'll see how high I can get. Maybe it's something about 7.6.

 

[beachycove]

I was pleased to hear that the 8 24GC works under 7.1. I have been doing some further googling in response to this piece of information, and now see that there were ROM updates for a while.

As the article referenced shows, it was quite the nubus card.

As for resolution, I think it is meant to drive a large monitor quite happily at 1024x768 or better.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I forgot that that monitor has a converter DIP box on it, so I'll have to try later (it's forcing a particular resolution) when I can find the DIP setting page again. In the meantime, though, I think it also depends greatly on how much RAM is installed. I was very fortunate to find a card with the full 8MB of option RAM installed (for a total of 10MB, including the built-in 2MB buffer). If yours is RAM impaired, maybe that explains the problem.

 

[Unknown_K]

That has 2 sockets for GWORLD RAM and not video RAM correct?

 

[beachycove]

As it has come up, could you tell us what RAM chips are in the 8 24CG that you have? There are conflicting reports concerning whether or not IIfx RAM works, and I am thinking of trying to find the chips if I can find out precisely what to look for. 8MB would be rather good in the card, I think.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

The RAM can be used for GWorlds, but I don't know if it has any other feature. Incidentally, found this rather nice article: http://www.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_03/824GC_V007.html That article simply calls it DRAM for the GC kernel, so I might be wrong about resolution depending on it. However, LEM says it can go up to 1152 x 870, though I have never tried that resolution: http://lowendmac.com/video/apple8-24gc.shtml

Anyway, they appear to be 64-pin sticks, and they do resemble the IIfx sticks I have seen. The chip code is (Samsung?) KM44C256AJ-8.

 

[Unknown_K]

The Gworld RAM for the Supermac cards are also 64pin, which is where the confusion comes in.

I don't have a 8.24GC to know what it takes, but I do have RAM in my Supermac Thunder/24 cards and it is not IIfx RAM.

 

[beachycove]

Well there are LOTS of hits from "KM44C256AJ-8" if you do a search, but I am wondering if this is the number of the chip used on the vram card or the number of the card part itself. I get mixed messages from a hit like this, which on the one hand makes the part look cheap and readily available, but which also suggests that the number refers to the SOJ used rather than to the part number of the actual vram needed.

Still, very helpful lead.