Thread
128K/512K Supermac Enhance Upgrade Board
Here's an auction for a Supermac expansion board for the 128K/512K Mac. It appears to have a connector which the seller describes as an expansion slot, however, it appears to be more of a SCSI hard drive connector. The copyright on the board is 1986 after the introduction of the Plus ROMs. Since the board appears to require a CPU socket to be attached to the motherboard, this upgrade likely required professional installation. However, did this upgrade board require the ROMs be upgraded too? Or did it use the original 64K ROMs (in which case the board implements its own SCSI compatible with the old ROMs)? Anybody know anything about these boards?
First of all, thank you Mac128 for continuing to spot these most interesting items on EBAY for us. I view EBAY daily for old Mac stuff, but I don't often see the goodies you dig up for us. Keep it coming!
I have a stack of old MacUser magazines at my parent's home in California that date back to 1986. If I had them here in Japan, I could quickly flip through them and find out more information. No doubt there was an article about it in MacUser and/or MacWorld, and possibly in an issue of Byte. Am I the lone soul on this site with old Mac magazines? Surely there must be someone else who has some and could take a peek for us.
I have a stack of old MacUser magazines at my parent's home in California that date back to 1986. If I had them here in Japan, I could quickly flip through them and find out more information. No doubt there was an article about it in MacUser and/or MacWorld, and possibly in an issue of Byte. Am I the lone soul on this site with old Mac magazines? Surely there must be someone else who has some and could take a peek for us.
I threw most of mine out many years ago. Too much stuff. Of course, now I have a new pile of old stuff which is too much.Am I the lone soul on this site with old Mac magazines? Surely there must be someone else who has some and could take a peek for us.
That looks like a fairly standard implementation for the day. Replacement 68000 running at the regular old 8 MHz, memory decoder logic, SIMM sockets for memory expansion, and a SCSI controller chip and SCSI connector. So you'd need the newer ROMs in order to get the benefit of the SCSI port.
That's actually quite similar to the NewBridge/NewLife upgrade for the same machine. The NewLife upgrade had eight SIMM sockets, IIRC and could use the on-board 512K of RAM ( couldn't use the 128K in a 128K machien) so one could install a pair of 1 MB SIMMs and six much more affordable 256KB SIMMs and have 4 MB of RAM.
There was a point where 1 MB SIMMs were over $100 each but 256KB SIMMs were about $5 or free depending on how hard you looked.
I've searched and search for information, but I'm not much farther along than when I started. I found one thread on the CCTALK Mailing List that talks about this exact card. See that post in this Google Search. But alas, Google has no cache of it and the CCTALK archives are offline!
So I set about to find old SuperMac Technology employees and write to them individually. I got two responses, one from Peter Glaskowsky and the other from Dr. Doug Gilbert. Dr. Gilbert was a design engineer at SuperMac from 1986. He told me the "that card doesn't look familiar to me at all." He then suggested I speak with David Silon via Linkedin, so I created a Linkedin account only to find that I have to upgrade to an outlandish fee-based system to simply email members! Mr. Glaskowsky worked at SuperMac in the early 1990's, so I was not surprised when he told me "I don;t know anything about that device." He then suggested I sign up for the CCTALK mailing list, which apparently he reads every day. I tried and failed to do that via the website, but Mr. Glaskowsky then wrote me back to say that I can subscribe via cctalk-request@classiccmp.org. Even so, I had to send a confirmation email instead of clicking on the link that came back in the response, as clicking on the link results in an error. But doing a manual confirm worked. However, the server then told me that a moderator has to approve me, and after 48 hours, this still has not happened. I wrote the moderator but he has not replied. I then told Peter Glaskowsky that Dr. Gilbert had mentioned David Silon, so he promised to forward my email query to Mr. Silon, but so far I've not heard anything from him.
All this work and still nothing!
It has been many years, but I still would have thought Dr. Gilbert would have known something in light of the fact this SuperMac board copyright is 1986 and he worked for SuperMac from that year. Perhaps SuperMac Technology OEM'd the board to another Mac upgrade supplier? But then, Dr. Gilbert should have known about that if such was true, I would think.
If only I was back in the US. Not only could I reference my MacWorld's at home, I could go to look them up at just about any library too. What conveniences you folks have there in North America!
For those of you reading this thread silently, who might think Mac128 and I are wasting our time on all this, you perhaps have not read old threads where we talk about 64k ROMs versus 128k ROMs. Most all cards that we have seen use the newer 128k ROMs in them. But the fact remains that some software is only compatible with the older 64k ROMs. Hence would be a truly "rare" and glorious find to discover an upgrade for the Mac 128k that retains use of the stock 64k ROMs. This has been the basis for all the work I've done thus far to discover more about this unusual SuperMac card.
So I set about to find old SuperMac Technology employees and write to them individually. I got two responses, one from Peter Glaskowsky and the other from Dr. Doug Gilbert. Dr. Gilbert was a design engineer at SuperMac from 1986. He told me the "that card doesn't look familiar to me at all." He then suggested I speak with David Silon via Linkedin, so I created a Linkedin account only to find that I have to upgrade to an outlandish fee-based system to simply email members! Mr. Glaskowsky worked at SuperMac in the early 1990's, so I was not surprised when he told me "I don;t know anything about that device." He then suggested I sign up for the CCTALK mailing list, which apparently he reads every day. I tried and failed to do that via the website, but Mr. Glaskowsky then wrote me back to say that I can subscribe via cctalk-request@classiccmp.org. Even so, I had to send a confirmation email instead of clicking on the link that came back in the response, as clicking on the link results in an error. But doing a manual confirm worked. However, the server then told me that a moderator has to approve me, and after 48 hours, this still has not happened. I wrote the moderator but he has not replied. I then told Peter Glaskowsky that Dr. Gilbert had mentioned David Silon, so he promised to forward my email query to Mr. Silon, but so far I've not heard anything from him.
All this work and still nothing!
It has been many years, but I still would have thought Dr. Gilbert would have known something in light of the fact this SuperMac board copyright is 1986 and he worked for SuperMac from that year. Perhaps SuperMac Technology OEM'd the board to another Mac upgrade supplier? But then, Dr. Gilbert should have known about that if such was true, I would think.
If only I was back in the US. Not only could I reference my MacWorld's at home, I could go to look them up at just about any library too. What conveniences you folks have there in North America!
For those of you reading this thread silently, who might think Mac128 and I are wasting our time on all this, you perhaps have not read old threads where we talk about 64k ROMs versus 128k ROMs. Most all cards that we have seen use the newer 128k ROMs in them. But the fact remains that some software is only compatible with the older 64k ROMs. Hence would be a truly "rare" and glorious find to discover an upgrade for the Mac 128k that retains use of the stock 64k ROMs. This has been the basis for all the work I've done thus far to discover more about this unusual SuperMac card.
I couldn't find any info in the handful of copies of US Macworld magazine that I own for 1986. SuperMac do mention their separate SCSI adapter for the 512K but not the Enhance. Below is what I found elsewhere, but I'd take the description with a pinch of salt
Australian Macworld magazine, April/May 1986 issue. Advert on back cover for SuperMac products by their local distributor Deermont Designs. The advert shows a photo of the back of a Mac 512K with a SCSI port emerging from the battery cage.
"ENHANCE
SuperMac Technologies now give you all the power of a MacPlus in your existing Mac. The Enhance board clips directly to your 68000 microprocessor, giving you two full megabytes of contiguous RAM. Because we use the same SIMM memory modules that are incorporated in the MacPlus, Enhance can be expanded to more than six megabytes of RAM!!
Compare this with only one meg of memory of the Mac, and we would be a winner, but that's not all... Because we use a twelve and a half megahertz chip to power our board it runs at an amazing twice the speed of the already speeded up MacPlus.
To all this we give you a completely Mac compatible SCSI port. Our unique cable assembly mounts the SCSI port connector to the rear of your Mac without modifying your existing cabinet."
Australian Macworld magazine, April/May 1986 issue. Advert on back cover for SuperMac products by their local distributor Deermont Designs. The advert shows a photo of the back of a Mac 512K with a SCSI port emerging from the battery cage.
"ENHANCE
SuperMac Technologies now give you all the power of a MacPlus in your existing Mac. The Enhance board clips directly to your 68000 microprocessor, giving you two full megabytes of contiguous RAM. Because we use the same SIMM memory modules that are incorporated in the MacPlus, Enhance can be expanded to more than six megabytes of RAM!!
Compare this with only one meg of memory of the Mac, and we would be a winner, but that's not all... Because we use a twelve and a half megahertz chip to power our board it runs at an amazing twice the speed of the already speeded up MacPlus.
To all this we give you a completely Mac compatible SCSI port. Our unique cable assembly mounts the SCSI port connector to the rear of your Mac without modifying your existing cabinet."