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Re-conquest! Power Macintosh 5200CD

Been doing research on the 5200 series Performas, and I came by a startling realization. They're basically based off of a modified Quadra 630 board with a 603 Power PC inside right? Wouldn't that mean that if I get my hands on an Apple Power PC upgrade card for my Performa 631CD, it'll effectively turn it into a pseudo-Performa 6310 and doom it to be a Road Apple? I mean, it wouldn't be the same as one, but logically-speaking it makes sense.

 
Exactly, that's why I had said it didn't make much sense for Apple to have produced such a card for the 6xx series. The upgrade path could well have been a MoBo swap, like it was for the Mac II series and others. But the upgrade card would be a user installation and the MoBo swap would be an authorized dealer only kinda deal.

Your upgrade path for the 631 to anything but a RoadApple would be the 5500 MoBo swap or 6500 with a single height PCI riser replacement. ;)

 
Just turned my 5400 into a 6500/250 with a G3/500 upgrade card, with TV tuner and video inputs. Some guy on craigslist had it in a closet and gave it to me for twenty bucks. It works pretty well but the 1.4.5 sonnet driver errors out on startup sometimes so I have to look for a newer version somewhere.

 
@Macdrone: If you find someone who has a copy available, let me know. I need the latest driver for my G3 card in my Power Macintosh 6500.

 
I've got several different NIB packages for the L2/G3 Crescendos, I'll look to see which drivers I have. They don't appear to be on Sonnet's site, that's surprising, but they still have the manual up.

@ macdrone: out of curiosity, did you mean 5400->5500 (I can edit your post, BTW) and if so, does your CRT now display the higher resolutions available with the increased VRAM on the new MoBo?

 
Well I guess it would literally be a 5500 but its a 6500 motherboard. Are the L2's you have just for collecting purposes?

 
Yes it does show 1024 x 768 but its in italics, looks fine when I choose it just too small on the screen so I went to the lower res and thousands of colors as the TV video can not use millions of colors.

 
Interesting, does 1280 x 1024 show up? I've got to check that out, never heard about it until I pulled those everymac links.

Has anyone got a 5500 to check if it will run at 1280 x 1024? Far better in the 6500 with a real (15" doesn't really count) monitor.

Are the L2's you have just for collecting purposes?
Click to expand...
Make that hacking purposes and you're spot-on, I've got several 6400/6500 boards and machines. I like to base hacks on these twp series because of the AppleTV/Video System and L2/G3 angle. That's the semi-practical side, the nostalgic side is due to the 630->6290 setup in the rug rat's room and the refurb 6360 I bought specifically to Sonnetize, That was my main production machine, hacked with a full length Radius VidCard. It hit the price/performance sweet spot and lasted well enough until the DA came out with an additional PCI slot.

 
For the record, its actually the analog board that limits the 5260, not the logic board. Even if you were to put a 5500 board in there, it would still top out at 640x480. On the other hand, my 5260's logic board has quite happily run at 832x624 in a 6200 case in the past. :)

 
yup, my 5400 board was stuck at 640x480 in that 5260 case, as to why they made a turd worse beats the heck outta me.

the only thing worse then a turd is Hershey squirts, thats the 5260.

 
@Trash80: Like always, you are an asset to the Army. If you could find the latest Sonnet Driver for my Cresendo G3 card, I'd be ever so greatful. I can't reinstall OS9 without it as (at the moment) I can't find the original card that went into the L2 slot... Or I just might be dumb, and it turns out you can re-install OS9 without the original L2 card, and I'm just being a wuss worrying that I might bork the system. I've never owned a Crescendo Card before coius kindly dontated his pre-installed G3 Power Macintosh 6500 to me. I've wanted to clear the OS on it and start fresh, but I've been worried to do it w/o that driver.

 
Dont need any card in the L2 slot. Just pull it, reinstall the OS then install driver and then reinstall card. No luck on the newer driver yet. I am using 7.6.1 so I dont really need it, but might clear up my boot issue.

 
All 5xxx series are supported to run up to 9.1 by Apple, G3 or no G3. You'll have no trouble reinstalling OS 9 on the machine, however until you get the Sonnet drivers, it won't recognise/use the G3, you'll be stuck with the onboard 603e.

 
In the Sonnet Crescendo/L2 G3 400MHz/512 box, I've got: Crescendo/Encore Install Diskette 1.4.5

Has anyone got anything more recent than 1.4.5?

 
In that case, I'll keep looking! ;)

However, the Copyright date on diskette and manual is 2000 and the "learning about the software" page is mostly about the patches necessary to run their G4 cards under OS9 in G3 (iMac?) systems. The

Be that as it may, simple solution:

Copy "Sonnet Processor Upgrade Extension" and the folder with "Metronome" in it as backup for re-installation after the OS9 install and that should be that.

My 6360/Crescendo L2/400/1MB has been running underOS9 with the 1.4.4 drivers (Metronome Copyright 1998-2000) since I bought 9.0 off the shelf. My guess is that there's no change to the L2 drivers to be had in any later release than 1.4.5, if that even changed for the 1.4.5 release.

Nonvolatile RAM Patch allows a Power Macintosh 73/75/76/85/86/95/9600 to use a G3 or G4 upgrade card.
Click to expand...
Sonnet seems to have added the drivers/utilities for newer generations of their accelerators to a standardized installer disk. Hence, the Manual and Label designation of the 2000 release of 1.4.5 for the Crescendo L2 being spec's as Crescendo/Encore.

Depending upon your software and Macintosh model, Sonnet's software installer may perform the following software installation on your computer.
Click to expand...
The quotes explain thing like why the G3/G4 system patches for Encore upgrades shouldn't be installed manually for an L2 upgrade.

That's a guess, not a WAG, probably a good one. :beige:

 
In the CrescendoPCI G4 800MHz/1M box, I found the ©2002 Crescendo/Encore Install Diskette 2.0 and I'll bet if it's on there, it'll put the same drivers for a Crescendo L2 into a System Folder as my 1.4.4 installer. If it's not on there, I'll bet this is the cause of any confusion about there being later Crescendo L2 Drivers. Those were as mature as they were likely to get in the 1998-2000 1.4.4 release.

I've got the PCI X Installer CD that came with it too. That's for Crescendo/PCI and MAXpowr PCI accelerators.

 
the only thing worse then a turd is Hershey squirts, thats the 5260.
Click to expand...
For what it's worth, the target market for the entire 5x00 family was education, and at the time, you really didn't need much more than an LC III or so computationally to run *all* of the edutainment games or do the level of productivity that happened in most K12 schools and even in many higher ed labs for tasks like writing or general network computing tasks. (checking "web mail" for example.)

In service of this particular context, the 5260 was probably a heck of a lot cheaper than its stablemates at the time. I'd be unsurprised to discover that like its distant predecessor the LC520, the 5260 was available in lab packs as a further cost savings technique.

Woefully, probably because it was targeted primarily at the education market (*and may not even have been available at retail or via catalogs) I can't seem to find any references to the price.

Ultimately, I don't know why they'd do it, other than to have an excuse to price it lower, and I think this is what leads to Steve Jobs' mantra for modern Apple-- it's not in their DNA to build really budget-focused machines that aren't objectively bad computers.

 
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