Thread
Unknown card in PDS slot
Recently purchased a Quadra 650(68040/33) and today I opened and discovered a mystery card in the PDS slot.The card is Formac ProQuadra 50 v1.8.Any idea what this card does?
Can you take pics?
I'll try asap.
A guess without anything else is a 50 MHz upgrade card.
With pictures should give it away if it is something else.
With pictures should give it away if it is something else.
That's a CPU upgrade card, looks like an '040 still.
Yep, Formac was an acceerator company. Fab find, me has jealous! 8-o
I agree.
But I get a "You do not have permission to view this pic" error when clicking on the images.
But I get a "You do not have permission to view this pic" error when clicking on the images.
I think I fix the problem with pics.Whats the point to have an '040 card inside an '040 machine?Also I don't have the drivers so the card its unusable...
It's a faster clock speed. And check the Mac Driver Museum for it.
At the moment I haven't found anything about this card in the Internet.I guess it's very rare card...
I'm sure formac got bought out and was long since gone on the Internet by being badged as something else.
Look for an extension of the hard drive still boots as you may already have a driver installed.
Look for an extension of the hard drive still boots as you may already have a driver installed.
Unfortunately I formatted the machine...Today I've discovered the card.
Ugh darn then defiantly use the ideas listed. Maybe do a search for formac and see if they were bought out , if so the new company may be on the internet and the drivers they have would work.
Formac sold the PCI Proformance III video card which was a contemporary with such cards as the ixMicro Ultimate Res and the ATI Rage. Early 3D support.
So they were still around for a few years after the age of the Quadras.
I used to keep up with the upgrade market pretty well, and I don't remember such a Quadra upgrade, but that's certainly what it looks like. It must have been kind of obscure. Perhaps only sold in the European market?
So they were still around for a few years after the age of the Quadras.
I used to keep up with the upgrade market pretty well, and I don't remember such a Quadra upgrade, but that's certainly what it looks like. It must have been kind of obscure. Perhaps only sold in the European market?
it looks like a pretty sweet card.
Maybe someone from German can answer the question because Formac was Germany company.
Yep, faster clock as TWF said. From the looks of that very high surface area heat sink/active cooling fan setup and the name on the sticker, I'm guessing 50MHz. That'd be quite the kick in the pants. Gotta find my ScanDUMP files for the rest of the Accelerator review pages. An earlier review that doesn't mention your next gen card in this thread:
June, 1992_MacUser_Accelerators_Compared
edit:
@oP: schweet!!!!! [
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In another question about the Quadra.Which OS is the best(more stable,faster) for the config(68040/33,56MB ram) 7.5.5 or 7.6.1?
Pretty sure 7.5.5 is generally recommended over 7.6.1
It really depends on the software and hardware that you wish to add to the basic machine. There are many graphics cards which will work well with System 7.1.x or 7.5.x, perhaps not 7.6.x. Ditto for image grabbers, graphics accelerators etc. 7.6.1 is usually more stable, but it might be worthwhile buying a hard disk to swap in and out. Personally, I'd start out trying to run System 7.1.
Formac products were distributed in most European countries from the start of the company. I used a Formac monitor for many years and encountered many expansion cards in 68K Macs at work. It is likely that your PDS card was reviewed in at least one of the European Mac magazines in the early 1990s. Early Formac products (basic graphics cards, LC family accelerators) appear to have been designed in house, alongside rebadged/reworked CRT displays. More advanced products (3dfx graphics cards, LCD displays, G3 accelerators) were developed with partners with Formac input.
Have you had a look at Waybackmachine to see if any Formac pages have been archived?
Have you used a system utility to see how your Mac is described? A PDS accelerator often works without any drivers.
I'm a big fan 7.1.1 Pro.
Depends on the software really. 7.5.5 is fun to install off floppy but after 22 disks I'd rather do 7.5 on cd then small update to 7.6.1.
Install System 7.x from floppies? You only need to do this once or twice.
Copy the disk images onto a Zip drive or external hard disk. Boot the Mac from floppy disk and run MountImage. Or boot from the Network Access Disk and connect to an AppleShare volume hosting the OS disk images.
With fourty or so machines it's a lot lol. Machine specific I like a lot.
@Macdrone: I understand that you might wish "proper builds" for some Macs. But unless I am doing something particularly stressful, I don't need it.
Mac System 7 onwards (before?) can be installed from AppleShare or from an external disk. You can insert Enablers into the installation package on a share or disk.
Mac System 7 onwards (before?) can be installed from AppleShare or from an external disk. You can insert Enablers into the installation package on a share or disk.
IIRC, PDS Accelerators characteristically need a driver to put the CPU to sleep and boot from Mac/Onboard ROM.
The only plug and play PDS accelerator in the batch I have is the CrescendoPB G3 in Beater, that one's a processor card replacement . . . simply works . . . simply fast. OS9 on that mangled road warrior of a 1400c/G3@466MHz rocks.
The only plug and play PDS accelerator in the batch I have is the CrescendoPB G3 in Beater, that one's a processor card replacement . . . simply works . . . simply fast. OS9 on that mangled road warrior of a 1400c/G3@466MHz rocks.
The perplexing thing about this card is if it actually runs the CPU at 50mhz (which would mean an external clock of 100mhz; I'm sure at least some of the people here are familiar with the 68040 "double-clock" lie that actually made it into some Apple sales literature) it's an out-of-the-box overclock; Motorola didn't sell the '040 in speed grades faster than 40mhz. (If the card *was* exploiting the lie in its name then that "50" would actually mean it's slower than the Q650's built-in CPU, so... yeah, that doesn't make any sense.)
I almost wonder if it could actually be a DSP card of some sort, not a 68040 under that heatsink. I think some of them came in ceramic packages about the same size as the '040, can you count pins (looking at the back of the board) and verify the pin grid array is actually the same?
Or maybe it's a super-secret never-released 68060 upgrade!
I almost wonder if it could actually be a DSP card of some sort, not a 68040 under that heatsink. I think some of them came in ceramic packages about the same size as the '040, can you count pins (looking at the back of the board) and verify the pin grid array is actually the same?
Or maybe it's a super-secret never-released 68060 upgrade!
No. Let's understand that we are talking about 68K accelerators. And about PDS slots, which are substitutes for the native processor.
Accelerator boards tell the on-board processor to close down. No drivers required in the 68030 world.