g556871349ea@deneb.ucdavis.edu (G556871349ea) (12/14/89)
There were quite a few recommendations when I last asked about favorite accelerator boards for the SE but no one really knew what was the difference between the various brands. Anyway, I took the plunge and went for the (least expensive) Dove accelerator. Just want to post some views on it and a quick comparison to the Radius boards at work. The Dove board was easy to install...the instructions were pitiful however. On the bright side, I got through to technical support several times easily and got my questions answered on the spot. Good show. The Dove board however does not work as seamlessly as the Radius board which indicates to me that less research has been done on it than at Radius. The FPU cache has to be off and it takes a few mouseclicks to set this right. Also, the CDEV has problems with older versions of Suitcase II. Also, on startup, the init has to load and the machine reboots itself, then starts up normally...wierd! A major drawback is that the 68020 has to be turned off every time a disk is formatted...there must be a solution to this! Also on the positive side is that I loaded my 4 M of RAM onto the Dove board so that the 68020 has direct access to it. I replaced the 256 K RAMS onto the Mac board and it is used as a ROM cache (I think). Anyway, the performance in Excel, LSC and Word are excellent and I can't tell if it's any faster or slower than the Radius I use at work. For $200 less, I can live with the Dove board. Oh yes, there is also a set of pins on the side of the board which are identical to those which the Dove board used on the Mac board. I believe this is for an additional card...maybe when I can afford the DisplayServer SE! Anyway, just passing on some recent experience for those interested in perking up the old 68000's. Colin Ong UC Davis cgong@ucdavis.edu
ins_apw@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Philip Wong) (12/14/89)
As an answer to the question about booting floppies, all you need to do is turn off the 68020 cache before inserting the uninitializing floppy (or selecting erase disk). I think that the 256K RAM's on the mac board aren't used for anything. In the four megabyte config, if you set your RAM cache to 256K, what the board does is use the cache to make a copy of the Apple ROM chip into RAM, technically speeding up your computer a tiny tiny bit. The original 256K RAM chips are just used to boot up your comput er. One problem I found tiresome was that everytime you want to select something on the CDEV, you can't just close the Control Panel window from there....that would elicit a crash. You need to select some other CDEV before closing---wierd huh?Other than that, though, I have had no complaints. If something doesn't run, turning off the 68020 cache (through CDEV) will fix it right up...no reboot needed. Hope this helps... ins_apw@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU Philip Wong