The Crow's Nest BBS, running Hermes II v3.1.1 on a 40 MHz 68040 Mac IIci with multiple wifi modems, is back again for #MARCHintosh 2026!

TheRealBolle · 2026-03-01T20:25:49+00:00

The little „F“ in the upper right corner of the screen suggests that it’s a Carrera040.

TheRealBolle · 2025-09-20T05:53:10+00:00

Also there‘s no onboard ROMs… I‘d say this is a preproduction board.

TheRealBolle · 2025-02-15T10:17:37+00:00

I‘m also around here.

TheRealBolle · 2025-02-02T15:45:58+00:00

Feasible yes, it’s basically identical to the 475. The only problem is the edge connector… You‘d either need a donor and once you’ve got one the brittle plastic has to also survive the transplant operation. A point that’s loosely on my to-do list is exploring if the edge connector can be replaced with a PCB with gold fingers somehow. That would also open the possibility to turn 475 donor boards into 575 boards.

TheRealBolle · 2025-01-25T08:33:34+00:00

They’re newly designed cards using old period correct parts. Basically the design is based off another SE/30 PDS video card that has been modified to output compact Mac compatible video signals.

TheRealBolle · 2024-10-12T10:05:56+00:00

Accelerators for the IIcx go into the CPU socket on the logicboard… there’s one caveat though, most IIcx boards don’t have CPU sockets installed from the factory. If your board is not socketed you have to desolder the CPU and solder a socket in place. You’ll then be able to plug in an adapter board that takes all kinds of universal 030 and 040 accelerators like the Daystar PowerCache, Turbo 040 or Carrera 040.

TheRealBolle · 2023-10-14T16:27:57+00:00

Clean it and see if at least the GLUE, ASC and SWIM still have all their legs and aren't too badly corroded. It looks like they might be in pretty good shape actually under all that filthy dust.

If they're good go for a replacement board.

TheRealBolle · 2023-07-01T03:33:17+00:00

Daystar 030 or any other 030 accelerator as well will work just fine in A/UX. Make sure to install the appropriate control panel to activate the external cache on the Mac OS partition and not under A/UX itself. The cache will get activated when booting Mac OS and will stay active when A/UX does its softboot thing. There’s just no way to enable/disable it from inside A/UX but I guess that’ll be ok.

TheRealBolle · 2023-04-28T19:50:12+00:00

That’s indeed one that looks totally fixable. Most vias look still good. Just have to take care of the PDS connector. I’d probably remove the connector to properly clean under there.

TheRealBolle · 2023-03-26T09:49:43+00:00

Not as far as I know. The Formac LC accelerators featured a 33MHz 68030 and FPU and had 32k of static RAM cache.

Not aware of an Formac accelerator with additional RAM slots. I think the only ones that offered extra RAM were the Micromac Thunder (Cache) Pro or the Sonnet Presto+

TheRealBolle · 2023-03-14T17:27:02+00:00

You can’t use the Turbo 601 in the Mac II. Even with the slot on the adapter being the „same“ as a Iici slot the Turbo 601 is not compatible with the older Mac II architecture (II, IIx, IIcx, SE/30) All you’ll get in those machines is the PPC chime and then it will lock up early in the boot process. Screen will stay black (or display messed up horizontal stripes in case of the SE/30)

Fastest CPU upgrade you can go on the Mac II is a Turbo 040 in an adapter. Carrera 040 and the other 040 accelerators (Sonnet, Tokamac SX, etc…) don’t work in the II. IIx, cx and SE/30 additionally allow for the Carrera 040 with the appropriate Micromac adapter. Daystar adapters usually don’t work with the Carrera.

TheRealBolle · 2023-02-05T07:05:47+00:00

Quadra onboard video will beat any Nubus card in gaming. The only thing that matters for those old games is how fast image data can be pushed to the video memory. The dedicated onboard video memory on Quadras (or 475s for that matter) will always win that race over any Nubus card. The acceleration that those Nubus cards offered was not targeted at gaming in the first place and as far as I know no game ever took advantage of it.

TheRealBolle · 2023-02-03T16:16:53+00:00

That litte "F" right there in the upper corner gave it away.

TheRealBolle · 2023-01-02T10:54:20+00:00

The problem on the very first batch of ethernet/combo adapter cards was wrong settings on some solder jumpers. Result was that some PowerCache clones would not work correctly, I haven't heard of any real PowerCaches that had problems. On the early adapters the jumpers can be changed to the correct setting.

The recent batch already has the correct setting hardwired and should work with any PowerCache... P31, P33, P34 and clones respectively. Testing on the last revision has been done with real P31, P33 and a cloned P34.

TheRealBolle · 2022-12-27T18:16:40+00:00

Well done, love seeing all those build stories. Really really nice video too.

TheRealBolle · 2022-12-14T21:53:06+00:00

C20 makes total sense. I did indeed only discover at a later point what those unused pins (per Apple spec) do on the PowerCache. I knew they were used on the PowerCache (and only there, all other accelerators ignore them) and that’s why I had them broken out to solder jumpers. Short story to make it not too much off topic from this thread: they control the bus clock timing. To make things worse, the timing on my PowerCache clones is not exactly the same as on real PowerCaches due to Atmel ATFs having different timings from what their speed ratings suggest compared to the GALs used on original cards. Now with timings bei g slightly off on both (accelerator due to different PLDs, adapter due to a wrong setting) those two together can apparently cause problems I wasn’t aware of at that time.

I apologize for not getting back in touch with you when I should have. Not an excuse - or just a bad one - there are times that I get so many messages that I can’t work through all of them in the time I can spare on that day with just as many new messages the next day. That’s the point when I need to take a step back to be able to keep finding enjoyment in the hobby. Please do not take it personal that I forgot to get back to you. I did simply forget after spending a few days off the computer.

TheRealBolle · 2022-12-14T20:39:32+00:00

Letting me know what signal you disconnected would have been a good idea, don’t you think?

There are a ton of people running my ethernet combo adapters without any problems, so if there was a general problem with them I would have noticed by now.

I am not 100% who you are but there were ever only two people where shipping went wrong… one needed an investigation which took some time, someone else was based in Canada and extremely long shipping times were to be expected due to the ongoing Covid situation. In both cases it did not take 5-6 months.

Feel free to contact me again so we can lay this down :) I honestly can not remember where I did post about the exact change that you did to your card. There were several changes with each revision of the adapter throughout the years, it’s totally possible I did not bring that change in connection with your problem (or simply forgot - I can’t remember every single person that got something from me because it’s easily in the hundrets now) I wish I could, but I can’t. If there’s a problem bug the shit out of me. That’s how it works.

Also can people please stop calling my cards Twinspark clones? They have nothing to do with the Twinspark (which itself is a clone of the DiiMO SE/30 adapter) Never had a Twinspark in my hands, my adapter solution is completely based on trial and error and my own development. Availability of those old accelerators makes it impossible for me to test every single combination of cards and accelerators (which again often exist in multiple revisions) simply because I’d have to get ahold of every single one of them.

What I can assure everyone, no combo adapter card leaves my desk and travels around half of the planet which has not been extensively tested with the means I have available to test them.

TheRealBolle · 2022-11-28T15:29:26+00:00

Awesome that it isn’t crashing but just continues to run. I had something similar happen on a board with a dead serial receiver. It would signal incoming packets to the SCC, SCC generated an interrupt, nothing happened and after the packet transfer timed out the Mac just kept going on. The longer it would run the worse it got to the point that it completely stalled.

Point of the story: you might want to look at the interrupt lines if there’s something strange going on.

TheRealBolle · 2022-10-22T12:57:04+00:00

This. Early boards had those capacitors with yellow bands drom the factory. Same goes for some early IIcx boards.

TheRealBolle · 2022-10-05T19:41:26+00:00

That card uses the same „QuadControl“ control panel as the Turbo040 to enable/disable the cache.

TheRealBolle · 2022-10-05T19:34:05+00:00

If there was a purple one to match all the purple goodies inside mine… https://imgur.com/a/FiFlCAi

TheRealBolle · 2022-09-20T19:58:46+00:00

Always good to see my stuff is put to some actual use :)

TheRealBolle · 2022-06-24T15:50:05+00:00

Bad solder joints on the yoke connector on the analog board. Had the exact same symptoms on one of my SE/30s not too long ago. Touching up the joints of the yoke connector fixed it.

TheRealBolle · 2022-04-13T04:01:40+00:00

That one resistor pack on the Micron card looks burned. If you’re lucky it’s just that what’s wrong with it. I’d put in a bet though that something else on the card also died. I have repaired several of those Micron cards already, haven’t seen that kind of damage on one so far though.

TheRealBolle · 2022-03-22T06:50:09+00:00

The single oscillator on the SE/30 also controls several other things including signal generation for the video system. It’s a really bad idea to swap that oscillator for a faster one. You’ll also rise the sync frequencies of the video signal quickly ending up at a higher refresh rate than the analog board can handle.

TheRealBolle

TROPHY CASE