nubus who dis?

[Jamieson]

I realize this isn't much to go on, but any ideas on what this Nubus card might be? Looks like a 9 pin mini-DIN and DB-25 connectors. Searching for images and descriptions of Nubus cards with these kind of connectors hasn't turned up anything.

It's installed in a IIci currently headed my way.

 

[RetroViator]

Curious. The first thought that popped in my head was wondering if it’s a customized scanner card of some sort (perhaps one with a document feeder).

I’ll interested in seeing a photo of the card when you get the IIci (and congratulations for scoring a IIci!).

 

[Jamieson]

Well OK, my IIci with the nubus mystery card just arrived. Turns out there is a 486 hiding in there! OK what's this thing do?!?

Also there's a cache card. Nice.

First thing I did is get the drives out and take a look at that battery. Thankfully the battery bomb has not yet detonated. August of 1991. I can see some evidence of capacitor leakage elsewhere on the board, but at first glance doesn't appear to be too bad and I didn't see any obvious corrosion on the pins.

RAM appears to be 4 x 1M and 4 x 4MB for a total of 20MB:

The floppy is filthy of course, and there's also a 160MB hard drive. The outside of the power supply looks pretty clean, no evidence of leaking or discoloration on the power connector.

 

[Jamieson]

Here's a better picture of the Orange Micro card. Looks to be a 25MHz Cyrix Cy486SLC CPU with 2 x 1MB and 2 x 4MB SIMMs installed. I've not yet found much info on this, other than it is basically a PC on a card that runs DOS or Windows. Maybe Win95. Supposedly it runs this environment within a window on the Macintosh desktop, and one can copy and paste betwen Mac applications and Windows applications. Check out the backwards facing ISA slot, maybe to hide a graphics card on there.

I'm not sure what it books from through. There's a WDC chip on there, which looks like perhaps an IDE controller, but there's no header from an IDE drive. Does it require an external hard drive, or does it somehow share space on the Mac SCSI drive?

edit: this card boots DOS from a hard drive image file on the SCSI drive. crazy!

 

[Patrick]

some of us collect those cards. They are pretty crazy...

The ports on it are a little weird. usually the ports are PC style ports (joystick ports, VGA, parallel ... ) sometimes they also have a breakout cable that goes with it. so i don't know whats going on with your particular card.

they are very fun to play with.

 

[Jamieson]

I've found some documentation for similar OrangePC NuBus cards, but so far I've not seen anything like this one with that miniDIN 9 pin on the back. What is that usually used for on the Mac? A serial port? I think the DB25 goes to some type of breakout cable for parallel/serial/floppy etc. (was not included)

I thought that WDC chip was for a hard drive controller, but some other posters IDed it as a fairly decent VGA graphics chip. So maybe this card is sending VGA signals out that DB25 port as well.

 

[Patrick]

at first i thought that little serial looked like the printer / modem port on macs. but its the wrong pinout.

I wonder if both need special breakout cables to actually get all the ports you would normally have on a 486 ?
I bet there are websites that have already figured out how to make your own breakout cables.

at least you can run the 486 in a window. I have some where it ONLY works from the video out on the card it self. So you HAVE to have the breakout cable for it to be useful.

 

[Jockelill]

Did you get the card running? Really cool thing!!

 

[Jamieson]

Yes, eventually got it working on my IIci. And recently sold it to finance my other retro machines!

 

[Jockelill]

Really cool!! Was that the only dos card made for the IIci?
I recently got a (battery bombed…) 6100 that came with dos card that I’m currently restoring. Needs a new board, but otherwise I should get it running again. I assume that dos card cannot be used In the IIci?