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Went out to pick up an old Mac Iix full of surprises ... including a Radius Rocket with SCSI Booster

Coloruser

Coloruser

6502
I went out to grab an old Mac Iix from a garage sale last weekend and when I opened it, it was full of surprises....
  • dusty but with no visible issues except of the rusted shielding on the bottom of the case (have to examine closer)
  • a nice amount of 20mb Ram
  • huge old style Network card with AUI and BNC
  • the period correct graphics card - the standard Apple 630.....
  • a Apple branded 160mb SCSi HD
But then, there are two other cards cramped into this Mac Iix....
  • A Format Pro Nitron 21 with TMS34020 GPU and what looks like G-World Ram????
  • A Radius Rocket 33 (educated guess as it has a 66Mhz chrystal) and the SCSI Booster
The booster was obviously added later in the life of this Mac as it misses the port cover/backplate while the original backplate was fixed in one of the empty Nubus slots.....

Does anyone know anything about the Formac card?

And what about the SCSI Booster? LEM writes it's only rated for 5mb/sec. That's kinda waste on a Rocket 33 as it likes doesn't offer much improvement over the Mac IIx´s internal 6mb/sec SCSI bus.....
 

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Maybe the SCSI Booster was just put in because they had it handy and it made the other card fit the geometry better? It's date stamped 1992 and Rev A, so it seems to me it's definitely the 5MB/sec version.

If it's all still functional, that's a great find, as those can be mix/matched out to other devices for a net gain :)
 
Coloruser said:
I went out to grab an old Mac Iix from a garage sale last weekend and when I opened it, it was full of surprises....
  • dusty but with no visible issues except of the rusted shielding on the bottom of the case (have to examine closer)
  • a nice amount of 20mb Ram
  • huge old style Network card with AUI and BNC
  • the period correct graphics card - the standard Apple 630.....
  • a Apple branded 160mb SCSi HD
But then, there are two other cards cramped into this Mac Iix....
  • A Format Pro Nitron 21 with TMS34020 GPU and what looks like G-World Ram????
  • A Radius Rocket 33 (educated guess as it has a 66Mhz chrystal) and the SCSI Booster
The booster was obviously added later in the life of this Mac as it misses the port cover/backplate while the original backplate was fixed in one of the empty Nubus slots.....

Does anyone know anything about the Formac card?

And what about the SCSI Booster? LEM writes it's only rated for 5mb/sec. That's kinda waste on a Rocket 33 as it likes doesn't offer much improvement over the Mac IIx´s internal 6mb/sec SCSI bus.....
Click to expand...

Despite the internal bus being rated at 5MB/s, it can only manage about 1.5MB/s due to limitations of the SCSI controller used and other factors. That and the overhead involved with providing the rocket access to those disks would make the SCSI booster worthwhile, especially if the rocket is being used as an accelerator.
 
What was the transfer rate of SCSI Slow/Narrow on Sun workstations, others? SCSI on the Mac was an abomination.

cheesestraws said:
Yes, but it's directly on the Rocket, so it isn't competing for the NuBus with other resources.
Click to expand...
Indeed, it also sits on the Rocket's 33MHz PDS. Fast/Narrow SCSI isn't 5MB/s, the spec is 10MB/s for the Rocket's SCSI II Daughtercard, no? Got a link to that LEM Gem? They got soooooooo much wrong. :rolleyes:

edit: checked it out, LEM tags it as 10MB/s. Got another reference?

www.seagate.com

SCSI Revision Levels | Seagate US

Explanation of the different generations of the SCSI interface.
www.seagate.com
 
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