Second Wave"s PCI -> NuBus Expansion Box & Others

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Very interesting peripheral hardware solution for the mixed use of Cards, Cards & Older Cards!

 

[CJ_Miller]

Yeah, these are cool. They don't turn up often, and are often obscenely expensive when they do. What do I mean by "obscene"? There is an Xpanse PN200 on ebay now for $800 or so... for that price I could buy a pile of NuBus AND PCI Macs, with accelerators, accessories, etc. Some liquidator of industrial computanium probably looks up a list price and figures they can charge more than it is worth in the real world, or an original owner who imagines they can recoup their investment in long-obsolete technologies.

 

Second Wave also supposedly offered a NuBus expension chassis for the SE/30, which sounds extremely cool.

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Not so bad a price as compared to the earlier NuBus Expansion Boxes, when PCI rolled around, there were enough high end, content production, NuBus Cards in use that they probably sold a lot more of these than they did NuBus-NuBus Boxes back in the early nineties.

 

 

Thanks for nudging me into looking more closely at the mailer, the specs and pricing are good info, but the inner foldout is just an intro to the 9500 as "The foundation of high-end personal computing."

 

I'll bet Apple paid for the mailing!

[Unknown_K]

The SE/30 expansion one would be cool, but in a found it at a garage sale for cheap way not the paid $500 for it on ebay way.

 

I just can't see spending $800 for a Nubus expansion on a PCI Powermac.

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I wouldn't pay much for any one of these, anywhere today, and I've got a boatload (OK, a small dinghy that's only about 1/8 full even when you count the various PDS cards, adapters and the PC stuff as well. ) of NuBus Cards after nine years of collecting on top of the ones I had in real time. But If I made my living off media creation and had some of these cards back in that day, the list price for these expansion boxes would have been small change to pay, even for just the period it took to buy newer PCI Cards & Drivers for them when released.

 

I've got more Second Wave info to find, scan & post when I can. :b&w:

[Dennis Nedry]

So could you get any use out of hooking one of these PCI to NuBus bridges up to a PC? That could get interesting.

[noidentity]

Reminds me of the TI 99/4A peripheral expansion box. Seems questionable to have the NuBus run over a long cable like that.

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Might be able to use a PC running a Mac Emulator, but I doubt they support the low level code that would likely be necessary to get it to work.

 

With the proper cable driver chips & digital glue tacked onto each end of the cable's interface, you can run just about anything for any distance. NuBus is way slower than PCI.

[ClassicHasClass]

noidentity, I had the exact same thought -- it's a dead ringer for the old PEB.

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The 2 Card Box reminds me of the two slot expansion box that I was looking for (to trick it out to the max) to use with my Laser 128. I just wound up hanging a card off the side to play around with, never got the box, then I lost the 128 in the great storage room fiasco. It was a great little machine, I had it's video output setup to feed into the Apple TV Tuner in a Q630 or the P6360 back in the day.

Such is life . . . toys come and sometimes they go away (in mass quantity) too!

[Bunsen]

I just can't see spending $800 for a Nubus expansion on a PCI Powermac.

 

Even back in the day, it'd be a tough call to justify that against just ... keeping your old Mac alongside your new PCI machine. Especially given that in a professional situation, you don't want to tear down and rebuild a (presumably) working and stable system that you've already worked out the glitches and niggles on, for something that looks (and possibly acts) like a kludge. Lost time is lost income, yo.

 

Seems questionable to have the NuBus run over a long cable like that.

 

Well, Digidesign & Avid had been doing that for years already with their Nubus-Nubus expansion chassis. 10MHz isn't that tricky, apparently.

 

Might be able to use a PC running a Mac Emulator, but I doubt they support the low level code that would likely be necessary to get it to work.

 

The first test would be, can the emulated Mac see and use *any* Mac-only PCI card, sitting in the PC?

[LCGuy]

I doubt it - no emulator has the smarts to work directly with cards installed inside a PC - just like how you can't use Windows only PCI cards in Virtual PC on a Mac.

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I always thought of Mac emulators as mid-level "shell" software. I know they're a lot more complicated than the old DOS GUIs, back in the day, but AFAIK or understand them, they go just deep enough into the machine level code to run a non-native OS & its software apps.

 

Interesting question, does anyone know of any 8 bit + software emulators that can do hardware calls across the host's expansion bus?

[Charlieman]

For the record, Second Wave made other expansion boxes. There was definitely one for the SE and Portable (two types of PDS card but one box). There was definitely a NuBus to NuBus box too. I've seen press material about an SE/30 box but I don't recall whether it shipped from memory.

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Yep, I'll add info for the ones I have when/if I find the literature and ads in my files or the old mags. ]'>

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Found the Laser 128 & 128EX brochure first, hence, the name change to the thread.

 

 

I've got the manual, but the computer was lost in the great storage room disaster . . . . . . alas, another one may cross my path . . . one day!

[Cosmo]

I got the 4-bay expansion-box (Xpanse PN400) yesterday and wondering as the original manual did not come with it, what OS's that supports?

Anyone have this?

 

The card itself, have funny named chips on it, designers must have been Simpsons fans

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

PICCIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Most especially, very high res pics of that controller board, please. I'll assume the Simpson ICs are either ASICs or unreadable FPGAs, but maybe we can puzzle out the Slot Identifier Hack . . . gotta be multiplexed addressing . . . but it sure would be nice to see the exposed plumbing and figure out a flow diagram. ]'>

 

Congrats on an awesome conquest, Cosmo.

[Cosmo]

Here some pictures of it. I find out it's compatible with 8500,7200 etc but hey, so far there's an PCI, one can try.

No idea what OS the driver might support as of yet. Lots of suggestions already from Mr.Trash!

 

Take a look of the interface card ships. Somebody have been quite a simpsons fan

[CelGen]

Sure isn't a lot happening in the box. Looks like the PCI card decided to hog all the GLUE.

[bbraun]

I've got the digidesign 12port nubus-nubus expander. The expansion slots' standard slot space shows up in the expander card's superslot space. 24 bit mode obviously isn't supported because of this. Basically none of the cards in the expansion chassis work without special software that knows where to look, like the digidesign software knows to look for digidesign cards there.

I still have dreams of modifying slot manager to handle this config.

 

Come to think of it, what other cards use superslot space?

[trag]

The last Apple NuBus controller (in the 8100) was named Bart. So it probably followed that Second Wave would name their chips after other Simpson's characters. However, I'm not sure that Apple's "Bart" was a Simpson's reference.

[mcdermd]

Yeah, it's more likely to be a Bay Area Rapid Transit reference (what with all those fast Nubus cards and all).

[Cosmo]

I might not have use for the unit now, so if anybody's interested, i'm willing to consider an trade for something (anything Apple II, IIgs -releated) ?

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I'm interested in doing that hack we discussed!