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Need info about Newlife Computer Corp CD306C expansion card

S

Sedorikku-taouno

6502
It's a Newlife Computer Corp CD306C expansion card for the Macintosh Se.
I don't know how much, but it adds more RAM, I'm unsure if it's an actual accelerator card with a 68030 processor. Also it has an empty socket.

Does anyone have any information on this?
I would really appreciate this. :)

s-l1601.jpg

s-l1600.jpg

 
Realitystorm said:
https://archive.org/details/macworld00unse_68/page/118/mode/2up/search/Newlife+computer?q=Newlife+computer

I've started putting together links to info in old books and magazines about these types of add-ons 

https://www.savagetaylor.com/collecting/macintosh-upgrades/
Click to expand...


Oh thank you! :)

Judging from one of the picture on the magazine, I seem to be missing a chip which may be a FPU since on the site it says it was optional.

So that's fun! My card is an actual accelerator.

 
However, I have never as of yet been able to get it to recognize more than 4mb of RAM. I actually have three different accelerators for the SE that can accept (theoretically) up to 16mb of RAM, but I've never been able to get any of them to recognize more than 4mb, no matter what type of RAM chips I use.

I wonder what the secret is......
 
@MOS8_030: I've seen other who have gotten 16mb of RAM to work with their SE's. My guess is that the firmware on the accelerator card make the machine 32-bit clean, thus giving it the ability to use more RAM....but I'm not sure.
 
MOS8_030 said:
Even though the accelerator uses an '030 the SE can only support 4mb of ram as it is only a 16 bit machine.
Click to expand...
This is wrong on a few levels. There is no correlation between 16 bits and 4MB. Beyond that, the 68000 had a 24 bit address width which would translate into 16mb of addressable memory space. Indeed, the Mac portable which was also a 68000 machine and supported 8MB. The limitation is ROM based

The SE isnt really a 16 bit machine either.

I am pretty sure there were some accelerators that supported additional addressable RAM for 68000 Macs. They likely required an INIT or CDEV of some sort.
 
The secret to addressing more than 4MB on SE accelerators would be a bit of sorcery from the Mode32 magicians at Connectix: Compact Virtual.

edit: from the ad linked above.
• Optional video adapter
• Optional “VIRTUAL 3.0” from Connectix
Click to expand...
There's your formula. I had a a wonderful NewLife accelerator for 128K-512K that had the video output feature built in. So WAG would be that it's also built into the SE version with the optional adapter being the Battery compartment door/connector and cable for the male edge card connector on your card. IIRC it was for a TTL monitor, so the pin count would support that DE9 output, but not a daughtercard. AFAIK they went out of business before completing drivers to implement that function on my simple non-accelerated board.

128K boards were very inexpensive in the early 90s, so I got one from Shreve to adapt to Killy Klip interface with soldered on headers rather than put my 512K's board at risk. I had Tekserve test the ugly soldering job for me, David saying it was a very interesting board, threw some keychain SIMMs on it so it came back to me with 2.5MB of RAM.

Don't recall what year that was, maybe they did implement the drivers later on as implied in that ad?
 
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Edit time window ran out:

WAG here would be that video out's also built into your SE Accelerator version. Optional adapter would have likely have been implemented as battery compartment door/connector and cable for that male edge card connector on your card as was the SCSI connector implemented in that manner on my 128K/512K expansion card. Such would not be needed for your SE card or a Plus version of same. IIRC it was for a TTL monitor, so the pin count would support that DE9 interface, but definitely not a daughtercard.

Don't recall what year I played with that, maybe they did implement drivers later on as implied in the ad? It was listed as "in development" at the time of my purchase. Comparison of PCB copyright/build/inspection dates of the variants pictured should yield some clues as would be driver comparisons. @JT737 your card lacks the edge card connector for video output, so that's what makes this thread very interesting.

@Sedorikku-taouno hopefully we'll see enough schematic development of your card to check that out. That's a higher capacity ROM than needed for accelerator function I think, so the video drivers are likely there on the 030 bus? Run Tattletech to see if it shows up as the equivalent of a DeclROM in the PDS/NuBus report?
 
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superjer2000 said:
This is wrong on a few levels. There is no correlation between 16 bits and 4MB. Beyond that, the 68000 had a 24 bit address width which would translate into 16mb of addressable memory space. Indeed, the Mac portable which was also a 68000 machine and supported 8MB. The limitation is ROM based

The SE isnt really a 16 bit machine either.

I am pretty sure there were some accelerators that supported additional addressable RAM for 68000 Macs. They likely required an INIT or CDEV of some sort.
Click to expand...
You are correct.
However, if there are accelerators for 68000 Macs that support more than 4mb of ram I haven't seen one.
But I have not seen everything. :)
And I had forgotten about the Portable, which iirc supports 9MB but it's kinda unique in many ways.
 
They support only 4MB of RAM directly, but address SIMMs on accelerators as virtual memory using Connectix' Virtual 3.0 as indicated in the linked MacWorld Advert.
 
Interesting point on Accelerator SIMMs. I've seen several configurations of expanded memory, but some, like this one, do not appear to make use of the logic board's SIMMs. That makes a lot of sense as the Accelerator's SIMMs would be accessed at the clock rate of the 68030.

Wondering if the entirety of the 16MB is accessed as Virtual Memory or if Compact Virtual addresses the lower 4MB on accelerators the standard manner on this or other Accelerators?
 
When I first posted, I had very little knowledge about this card and its components. Right now it's in my Mac SE working okay with a co-processor, but I think the biggest problem that I encountered afterwards was the driver. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find that damn NewLife accelerator card driver for the Macintosh SE. I actually found a NewLife Driver for the Mac Classic NewLife accelerator, but it did little on my SE.

The thing is that the accelerator card worked perfectly out of the box, but the sound sounded corrupted. What I ended up doing is using Gemstart 2.1 alongside with VIRTUAL 3.0 (That I got from here https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/accelerator-card-drivers ) on Mac OS 7.1 .

I was able to fix the distorted sound and the accelerator works well, but there are some programs that used to work that are now crashing.
@JT737 I wonder what did you do for the driver/INIT files


Btw, I also couldn't have more than 4MB of RAM.

@Trash80toHP_Mini Alright! I'll run TattleTech and some time this week I'll post the results!
 
Hey @Sedorikku-taouno -Well, for just a little bit, I was able to get 16mb of RAM working on my NewLife accelerator! And now when I try to use it, every time I boot the computer in gives me a finder error. Go figure.....

The good news is that I was able to get one of my other accelerators to both work properly and address 16Mb of RAM: my MicroMac Multispeed Accelerator:

DSCN7301.JPG
 
Here's a screen shot of the information from Snooper, although it is erroneously reporting that the card is running at 43Mhz (it isn't, just 16Mhz):
DSCN7300.JPG
System Info:

DSCN7299.JPG

And yes, the sound works great, tested with a round of "Creepy Castle!":DSCN7302.JPG


Oddly enough, the MicroMac uses a driver that was made my Newlife....however, this driver doesn't seem to work with the actual Newlife card that I have.
 
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