yarc zuma se nubus card

#1 Wed, 21 May 2008 - 07:44 68kMLA

anyone ever heard of a card called "YARC ZUMA SE"

stumbled across this on ebay.

http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=320254694462&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT&ih=011

what does it do? is it a CPU upgrade? did never hear anything of 601 upgrades for the nubus slot before

#2 Wed, 21 May 2008 - 12:43 68kMLA

YARC made various products for the pre-press publishing market. The card you own is probably a PostScript RIP processor.

#3 Sat, 24 May 2008 - 19:11 68kMLA

Another common application for YARC's RISC co-processor cards was as a dedicated 3d-rendering accelerator. The MacRageous card is one that comes to the top of my head as going in a NuBus Mac to accelerate apps like StrataVision 3D.

Apparently this board is a general-purpose PowerPC coprocessor board; something a programmer can write code for and hand off difficult computations to the PowerPC chip on the card.

MacWeek said:
ewbury Park, Calif. - Mac in-house developers can catch the PowerPC wave with a new coprocessor board from YARC Systems Corp.

The Zuma coprocessor, which runs on any NuBus-equipped Mac, includes a PowerPC 601 RISC chip running at 50, 66 or 80 MHz with a 32-Kbyte cache and a 64-bit data bus. It comes with 16 Mbytes of high-speed dynamic RAM and supports full 32-bit access to the Mac motherboard or other NuBus-based peripherals, YARC said. The company said users can install up to four Zumas in a single Mac.

The Zuma is available stand-alone or bundled with a suite of native PowerPC development tools.

Unlike a PowerPC accelerator, Zuma speeds only applications written to take advantage of it.

The 66-MHz Zuma is $3,595, or $4,495 with the developer tools. The 80-MHz is $4,995 and sold only with the developer bundle. Pricing for the 50-MHz version has not been set.

YARC Systems Corp. is at 975 Business Center Circle, Newbury Park, Calif. 91320. Phone (805) 499-9444; fax (805) 499-4048.

#4 Sat, 24 May 2008 - 21:37 68kMLA

I think the seller ships to the US, maybe I should grab it.

Hmmm....

#5 Sun, 25 May 2008 - 05:07 68kMLA

Do drivers for those cards still exist?

#6 Sun, 25 May 2008 - 08:58 68kMLA

From the sound of it, they don't really have "drivers" per se - more a situation where you sit down and write them yourself.

#7 Sun, 25 May 2008 - 14:57 68kMLA

According to one of my better reference books, MacRenderman, Infini-D, & PresenterPro were written to take advantage of Yarc Nubus boards when installed.