Anybody have experience with Radius Rocket Stage II cards?

[schmosef]

I recently picked up two Radius Rocket Stage II cards via eBay.

One of them seems to be working. The other does not.

I'm testing them in a Mac IIfx.

The one that's working is only detecting 64MB of the 128MB RAM I installed. I have to do more testing to see if it's not detecting RAM in one of the banks. Is 64MB the max RAM it can use? I saw something that said the first gen cards could use 128MB.

The one that's not working does not detect RAM in either bank and the RocketShare program says there is a hardware problem.

Does anyone have a manual for the Stage II cards? So far, I've only found manuals for the original cards.

Does anyone have experience troubleshooting/fixing these cards? I wouldn't mind sending them off to someone with experience to diagnose and fix.

I'm in the Toronto/GTA area if anyone knows a local tech that might be interested.

I still have couple of weeks to request a return. I'm trying to decide if it's worth trying to fix the cards or just cut my losses.

 

[KennyPowers]

I don't have any experience troubleshooting or repairing mine so far (knock on wood), but I can confirm that it supports 128MB of RAM:



Is there any visible damage or corrosion on either card? I did have another accelerator where leaky caps had eaten a couple of the RAM's data lines, but I don't think the Stage II has any liquid electrolytics. Make sure you're using all matching SIMMs and that the memory speed jumpers are set correctly. Also, since each bank must either be empty or fully populated with matching SIMMs, I wonder if one or more bad SIMMs in a bank would make that bank appear empty? On the card that's only detecting 64MB, try just populating bank A and swap out SIMMs individually to verify that they're all good. Also, make sure your power supply is up to snuff, as these are power hungry. I'm using mine in a pretty loaded-up IIci with the original Antec PSU that's been recapped and haven't had any power problems. I have the Stage II in the first slot, a video card and NIC in the other two slots, and an accelerator in the cache slot. I did replace the hard drive with a BlueSCSI, so that's probably taking some load off the PSU. I imagine more than one of these in the same machine would be pretty power hungry (and warm ).

I've never found a manual for the Stage II...just the manual for the original Rockets on the IA that it sounds like you've already found.

Did either of your Rockets come with any daughterboards?

 

[schmosef]

Thanks for the tips.

I'll follow the troubleshooting steps you recommend, later this week.

The eBay seller I bought these from did have separate listings for the SCSI 2 and PhotoShop daughterboards but someone else picked them up.