WarpSE: 25 MHz 68HC000-based accelerator for Mac SE

[Kay K.M.Mods]

I normally use this 100% (not 99.9%) version sold on Amazon Japan:

Amazon.co.jp: 100% Isopropyl Alcohol 500ml IPA 2-Propanol : Industrial & Scientific

Amazon.co.jp: 100% Isopropyl Alcohol 500ml IPA 2-Propanol : Industrial & Scientific

www.amazon.co.jp

But for the bathroom dunking shown in my Part III video, I did use this 99.9% stuff:

https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/gp/product/B0B1M8SK8N/

No, there's no noticeable difference once you get past 99%. Just don't use the 70% rubbing alcohol because that has a fair amount of water in it.

In the past, I used Anhydrous Ethanol, but it tended to leave a film, so I switched to IPA.

I'm not sure if this discussion helps Zane, or not, but I just wanted to clarify.

Zane, your work on this accelerator is amazing. If it works without distorting the sound, you will have done better than Levco SuperMac! Honestly, I don't know how they released a product with distorted sound though. I can't remember if there was customer outcry over that back in the day. I do know that @Kay K.M.Mods is not a happy camper about the distorted sound when using his Carerra040 on his SE/30. A big part of the Mac experience is sound, so it's important to get that part right, in my opinion.

No worry James, Now I have Satanic SE/30
The Turbo 040 I bought the other day is also broken, and any further investment in the SE/30 seems wasteful.

Instead, I would like to support Zane's project It's completely different from other clones. If there is a pre-sale, I will buy it, and I think there are many people who donate if the funds are tight. Of course I too.

 

[Bolle]

The Turbo 040 I bought the other day is also broken

What's wrong with it? Did it get SE/30 PDS'd like the one I once repaired for @JDW?

 

[JDW]

What's wrong with it? Did it get SE/30 PDS'd like the one I once repaired for @JDW?

For those of you who don't know, I accidentally put my beloved Daystar Turbo040 into the topmost PDS slot of the TS Adapter instead of the Cache slot on the side. That caused a short in at least one place and fried a chip. Amazingly, Joethezombie was able to source that chip, shipped some to Bolle in Germany, and Bolle was able to repair the card. Simply amazing! Read the whole saga here.

The good news is that such cannot happen with Zane's accelerator -- no TS adapter required!

 

[Kay K.M.Mods]

What's wrong with it? Did it get SE/30 PDS'd like the one I once repaired for @JDW?

I bought this at a Yahoo auction in Japan, but it was quite expensive. When this is stabbed, it becomes Simashimac (a composite pattern that adds horizontal stripes instead of the usual vertical stripe pattern).

Here's what I did:
-The ROM was replaced by flashing 4.1.1 and 4.0.1.
-Cleaned contacts
-Replaced the CPU with another one that works
None of them worked.

I'm guessing that GAL is bad, I can't do a reverse engineer, so repairs are impossible! But if you can repair it, I think there is also a chance for this. @Bolle Would you like to have this repaired?

Thanks for the details @JDW

And I know this post belongs to @Zane Kaminski . Sorry for my personal writing! If the Zane card is complete, I will definitely buy it.

 

[alxlab]

It’s the HP L2335. 1920x1200 resolution. I like it a lot not just because our lab is HP themed but also because it’s an alright display. I believe it has the same panel as the old 23” Apple Cinema Display. These two were the first IPS displays to come to market. Nowadays there are screens with better viewing angles but it’s nevertheless acceptable to put Windows up on and it syncs to basically anything.

That's interesting since the spec sheet seems to imply the hsync goes nowhere near the frequency of the compact macs.

Guess it goes to show you that it doesn't hurt to try and see if a screen will work. Maybe any LCD wit the Pixelworks PW172 will work with a compact Mac then.

My newer HP e190i is speced to go down to a hsync of 24kHz and just says signal out of range when I tried to hook up the SE's video signal.

 

[BFEXTU]

Just to reiterate, here is a scope trace showing the probable reason that the monitor won’t sync correctly:

Good job on getting it to work.

 

[JDW]

Garrett just fixed the video gizmo with a new bodge circuit:
View attachment 6244

And now the video is working on the multisync LCD:
View attachment 6242

Sort of. Guess this Mac SE board is messed up. Gotta fix that and then we can continue.


Edit: That was easy. Just had to jiggle the SIMMs a bit.
View attachment 6243

@Zane Kaminski , what is the current stage of testing? Is it fully working now, or still being debugged? Any distorted sound issues when you boot into Systems 6 or 7?

 

[jasonbuchwald]

@Zane Kaminski , what is the current stage of testing? Is it fully working now, or still being debugged? Any distorted sound issues when you boot into Systems 6 or 7?

I am interested in this too! I would love to get one of these, and maybe several! I’d be happy to be a beta tester too, if needed

 

[winters]

How am I just noticing this thread now?! As stated above by others, I am very interested in this as well, even if it is to be a beta tester

 

[Zane Kaminski]

@Zane Kaminski , what is the current stage of testing? Is it fully working now, or still being debugged? Any distorted sound issues when you boot into Systems 6 or 7?

I will be doing the bringup soon. Other stuff is ahead of the WarpSE in the pipeline at the moment.

 

[Lovemyclassicmacs]

Afternoon all
I’m interested in the card also when ready. I have a few SE being a collector and would like to see how it goes. So far very impressive

 

[Zane Kaminski]

Yeah we will be doing the bringup soon... just have to do a laundry list of things that make a bit of money sooner:

• Release first ~50 units of Mac Classic RAM (production just finished)
• Produce ~150 more 512 kB 70ns RAM SIMMs (they're running out)
• Produce and rerelease ~300 RAM2GS II and RAM2E II RAM cards for Apple II (both have been out of stock for over a year)
• Release ~50 "GR8RAM" RAM cards for Apple II (has been almost done for a year with boards already assembled...)
• Produce and release ~50 "Time Machine" RAM and clock cards for Apple II (product finished but cancelled before release many years ago, then some people really wanted us to make a handful)
• Release ~100 Mac II & SE/30 ROM SIMMs (again, 100 boards done, just not released)

Then we will be getting on to the WarpSE bringup which should not take long. Gotta refill the company bank account first so we can purchase adequately many of the remaining parts we need for the first 100-200 units.

 

[JDW]

Yeah we will be doing the bringup soon... just have to do a laundry list of things that make a bit of money sooner:

• Release first ~50 units of Mac Classic RAM (production just finished)
• Produce ~150 more 512 kB 70ns RAM SIMMs (they're running out)
• Produce and rerelease ~300 RAM2GS II and RAM2E II RAM cards for Apple II (both have been out of stock for over a year)
• Release ~50 "GR8RAM" RAM cards for Apple II (has been almost done for a year with boards already assembled...)
• Produce and release ~50 "Time Machine" RAM and clock cards for Apple II (product finished but cancelled before release many years ago, then some people really wanted us to make a handful)
• Release ~100 Mac II & SE/30 ROM SIMMs (again, 100 boards done, just not released)

Then we will be getting on to the WarpSE bringup which should not take long. Gotta refill the company bank account first so we can purchase adequately many of the remaining parts we need for the first 100-200 units.

Meaning, if you do one of those releases per month and add 2 months for added development work on the accelerator, we should be able to see the WarpSE debut around March 2023.

 

[Zane Kaminski]

Meaning, if you do one of those releases per month and add 2 months for added development work on the accelerator, we should be able to see the WarpSE debut around March 2023.

Should be sooner than that lol. I can do the Classic RAM once I take the pictures, make the manual, and make the listings on the various ecommerce sites. So a few days; it's basically a function of the weather since I usually take them outside. Producing all the VRAM SIMMs will take many hours but we should be able to knock it out in a few days of hard work. Should be done in the next week. GR8RAM is done, pictures taken, listings made, etc. Just have to program the boards, package them in ESD bags, etc. Basically just the specific stuff required to complete the release. Same with the ROM SIMM. Time Machine has actual production work to do but it's easier than the RAM SIMMs. RAM2GS and RAM2E... that's complicated, might actually be a month, long story short.

So I think all this stuff but for the RAM2GS and RAM2E will be done within a month. Then RAM2E and RAM2GS, then I can do the WarpSE bringup.

 

[retr01]

Yeah we will be doing the bringup soon... just have to do a laundry list of things that make a bit of money sooner:

• Release ~100 Mac II & SE/30 ROM SIMMs (again, 100 boards done, just not released)

Oh boy! I want the 8 MB SE/30 ROM SIMM! Please reserve me one. PM'ed you, @Zane Kaminski.

 

[retr01]

Should be sooner than that lol.

I better hurry and get my hands on a SE. I missed out on a super nice dual 800k SE, dang. I will keep my eye out for a nice one.

 

[retr01]

The idiocy of Apple for not connecting 24 lines out of the 68000 to address 2 to the 24th bytes, which translates to 16 MB, drives me crazy. @Zane Kaminski, I am sure you are aware of this already.

Would it be possible doing better than what Apple and many of the accelerator companies did back in the day and connect the complete address lines so that the 68000 can address the maximum 16 MB of RAM as it was designed to?

 

[Crutch]

I’m not sure it’s really fair to describe it as idiocy … in 1984 surely nobody was thinking anyone would desire to upgrade their 512k Mac to 8MB! Perhaps it was a different story by 1986 …

Anyway I don’t think it’s just a matter of connecting address lines. Making the full theoretically-addressable 16MB available to RAM would preclude memory-mapped device access, which is a concept deeply baked into the operating system.

 

[JDW]

I've been exchanging PM's with a former SuperMac engineer. He mentioned to me today that the ProdigySE could support 8MB, thanks to its 68851 PMMU chip, which is shown in the following control panel...



So merely, connecting address lines alone is not something that would enable more than 4MB of RAM on an SE. The PMMU pages RAM in 4mb chunks. So if any new accelerator like WarpSE were to add RAM as a daughter card (like the ProdigySE did), it would most likely need similar RAM paging via the 68851 or similar chip.

That's really the big benefit of the SE/30. We can finally break past the 4MB RAM limit. And while I've never found the need for the 128MB RAM that the SE/30 offers, I do find 32MB of RAM on my SE/30 to be enough most of the time. The only app that would really need more is Photoshop, but who wants to use an SE/30 as their main Photoshop machine? Now, in the case of an SE, 8MB would probably be adequate to run most programs the SE is otherwise capable of running. 4MB is just too limiting once the OS is loaded. Even so, if you run System 6 on your SE most of the time, 4MB of RAM is not an issue.

Even without the added RAM, a faster CPU is really a big help. In my tests using the 16MB SuperMac SpeedCard, which uses a 68000 CPU, it really makes the machine much more usable. The major downside is the distorted sound. And while the cure for that is disabling the SpeedCard, it also kills the benefit of the card too. Have speed and great sound is ideal. 8MB of RAM, while not absolutely necessary, would be icing on an otherwise very delicious cake.

 

[Zane Kaminski]

Yes, it’s not as simple as just decoding the rest of the address lines. Nor is the 68851 or paging MMU in general really the secret sauce. It would be easy to make a circuit with a PAL or something that could re-map the addresses of the I/O chips and ROM, moving them out of the way so as to make room for 8 contiguous megabytes of RAM. The difficult part is booting up the Mac with all of those devices and ROM memory at the wrong addresses.

James, maybe your friend from Supermac can shed some light on how exactly the card software worked with the Mac OS. My impression is that the extension which enables 8 MB of RAM must modify the low memory global variables which point to the various I/O devices and RAM (SCSIBase, ROMBase, etc.), enable the 8 MB address mapping, then do a partial reboot of the system which basically consists of jumping to a specific point in the boot routine. Anyone have any thoughts about how to overcome this I/O device address issue?