Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 14:15:22 -0400 From: "Byron Q. Desnoyers Winmill" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
On Fri, Apr 16, 2004 at 01:57:41AM +0800, John Niven wrote:The IIsi NuBus Adapter has an FPU built in (soldered, not socketed IIRC). That at least would have to go, presumably in the same way that you have to remove the FPU on the Asante IIsi/SE/30 NIC.
Interesting thought though. NuBus Video card in an SE/30 :-)
Would the FPU have to be removed, or could it be switched off? It looks like the IIsi PDS slot has an /FPU enable line. Tie that to +5 V, and the computer may not even know it is there. (I'm speculating here.)
My thoughts were leaning towards a NuBus video card in an SE/30 too. Unfortunately, the cards I know of are about as long as the SE/30 is tall.
Video cards to consider for such a lark would be the Precision Color Pro series from Radius which included the XP, XK and something else. Also the E-Machines Futura II SX. These are all 6.75" cards.
Note the "Pro" in the Radius cards' names and the "II" in the E-Machine card's name. There were earlier non-Pro and non-II versions of these cards which were loooonnnngggg.
However, I think that the IIsi NuBus adapter would probably need to be rebuilt in order to get it into an SE/30. That is, one would want to pull the three main chips off and build a new circuit board fitted to the SE/30 for them to live on. The bin of the Computer Works (Goodwill Computer store) in Austin, Tx has(had) a number of IIsi adapters for $5 each.
Also, there is a piggyback board for the Futura II SX/DSP which adds ethernet, though it tends to be rare and hard to find. Unfortunately, the piggy back e-net board does not work with Open Transport. Actually, it locks up the Mac while extensions are loading if OT tries to load. So it's Classic Networking only for that combo. But with an SE/30 NuBus adapter, and the Futura II SX and Enet combo one would have 24 bit color video and ethernet. It still wouldn't give you gray scale on the internal CRT.
What we really need to do is to design a dual video (internal CRT and external video port), USB, Enet, IDE card to plug into the PDS slot. Then we could replace the internal hard drive with a 2.5" IDE model for notebooks, and have all those ports. We might need to have a power port on the back into which one would plug an external 5V adapter, though.
SMSC sells USB and Enet controllers for embedded applications, which a PDS to a 68030 more or less is these days. So the main issues with those two functions would be interfacing the PDS slot to the premade chip and writing drivers. One wouldn't have to reinvent an Enet nor USB controller.
Video and IDE would be a bit more challenging. But way back around 1990 the Outbound Laptop based on a Plus or SE had an internal IDE interface. So it's been done almost 15 years ago, when electronic resources were fewer and more expensive.
Jeff Walther
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