NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/comp/sys/mac/hardware/21435

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-12 | 8.0 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Alan Weiss)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Review of MacProducts accelerator/large monitor for Mac SE
Keywords: Preliminary observations
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 12 Nov 92 19:21:30 GMT
Article-I.D.: alice.24165
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ
Lines: 126

Review of the ImagePro accelerator/large screen monitor for the Macintosh SE

Like many of you, I found my old home Mac SE to be getting slower and slower
as time went on...especially compared to my SE/30 at work. But with the
choices of doing nothing, taking a pitifully small trade-in on a new machine,
or upgrading with a ~$1000 accelerator/large screen monitor combo from either
Mobius or MacProducts, I chose the latter course.

After deciding that I really wanted to upgrade rather than trade in, I looked
into published reviews and I also queried the net. The reviews of Mobius were
uniformly positive, but I went for the unrated MacProducts because:
1. The accelerator board is made by the same company (Novy systems), but has
more goodies installed (full PMMU version of the 68030, and 68882 FPU).
2. From what I could tell, the monitor wouldn't be all that much different.
3. MacProducts was a few hundred dollars cheaper for the speed/screen
combination I was interested in, namely, a 25MHz 68030 with a 19" monitor.
You can get 16MHz, 25MHz, or 33MHz accelerators, and no monitor, a 15"
portrait, or a 19" 2 page display.

Ordering and Installation

One toll-free call, and I was $1060 poorer (shipping is non-negligible for a
19" monitor). The package came within a week...not on the day I expected it,
but soon enough. I had 4M of 80ns RAM installed on my SE's motherboard, so I
was planning to just put it on the accelerator board and put the old 256K
SIMMS back on the motherboard. Then I had a thought, and called MacProducts
tech support (not toll free, but friendly and helpful). Yes, I have the very
old SE where long ago I had clipped a resistor to tell it that it had 1M
SIMMS...now if I were to go back to 256K SIMMS on the motherboard, IUd have to
resolder that old resistor. Unh, unh, no way I trust myself soldering on a
motherboard. Well, maybe I would have, but my wife (who really owns this
particular computer) screamed "NO! YOU AREN'T GETTING NEAR MY MAC WITH A
SOLDERING GUN!" OK, so I call Memory Direct and get my 4M of 70ns SIMMS, which
means that the board runs faster anyhow (only 1 wait state with 70ns RAM,
otherwise 2 wait states, bringing performance down some 10-20%). Big deal,
another $165 down the drain.

The installation is easy. If you can do SIMMS, you can put this accelerator
board in. One stupid mistake I made, that I don't suppose is a very common
one, is that I thought the video port would attach to the SE's plastic body.
After quite a frustrating half hour, I noticed this beautiful mounting bracket
on the metal frame near the disk drives, right where the knockout would butt
up against it, with nice threaded places for the mounting screws to go. Then
once the computer was back together, I thought connecting the monitor to the
cable would be a snap. Nope. The cable has four connections, labeled R, G, B,
and Video (Black), but the monitor only has three sockets, labeled Video,
Horiz, and Vert. Another call to tech support and I found the correct mapping
(the cable was OK, but the instructions simply didn't cover it). Everything is
together, and even with mistakes it took less than 2 hours. A competent person
could do it in about a half an hour, I think.

[The accelerator/monitor is also available for the Classic and/or Plus for an
additional $100, and I presume these entail a more difficult installation. On
the SE it's literally a snap; the accelerator board fits into a socket on the
motherboard. The Plus and Classic don't have this socket, so some sort of clip
to the 68000 processor is probably used. Just remember, I only promise that
it's easy on an SE!]

Performance and Features

Installing the software was trivial, as it should be for Macintosh stuff.
Then, glory be, I got this HUGE monitor, and very snappy performance. Only the
monitor doesn't look so good...it has distracting "ghosting" on the left side,
the picture is so compressed vertically that a quick glance from a not-very-
critical user (me) shows instantly that there is a problem, and the distortion
(some is expected on a large screen monitor) is unacceptably large at all
edges. So once again I call tech support, and find out that these five little
unlabeled holes in the back of the monitor actually allow me to adjust the
picture quality (using a very thin screwdriver) quite easily. Voila! OK
picture (not great, not even very good, but acceptable). Finally, I can feel
that the money might have been well spent.

Speedometer 3.1 gives the following performance measures:
CPU:      6.11 where a stock SE is 1
Graphics: 6.85 where a stock SE is 1 (after copying ROM to RAM, see below)
Disk:     0.35 where a stock SE is 1 (yes, it slows your access to SCSI disks)
Math:     8.21 where a stock SE is 1
FPU:      1.35 where a stock Mac II is 1

As you can imagine, these numbers reflect gratifyingly fast performance.

One of the features of the board is that it can copy the SE's ROM to RAM,
giving a performance boost to graphics since the processor has a 32 bit path
to RAM, and only a 16 bit path to ROM. It also makes a RAM disk of any extra
memory on the motherboard, which is better than not having it accessible at
all, but I don't find it very useful yet. It's only been up and running for
less than a week, but so far I have noticed no software incompatibilities. The
only annoyances (and they are VERY minor, I'm tremendously satisfied with the
accelerator) are that bootup takes a very long time for no discernible reason,
and sounds are not quite right, even with a recent software upgrade...some
games just do not sound as smooth as they used to.

The monitor, a 19" Panasonic, is somewhat disappointing. It is very very
large, with about 84 dpi, so there are just scads of pixels (1152x896=1032192
pixels, or more than 1000 pixels/dollar, even including the price of the
accelerator), yet contrast is not very high, distortion is noticeable, and so
is "ghosting" (what I mean by ghosting is a series of vertical darkish bands
near the left edge of the screen). On the positive side, the image is stable
with no noticeable flicker (better in these respects than my SE/30 at work!)
and the monitor seems physically quite solid, is nicely adjustable, and has
basic, easy-to-use controls. No, I haven't seen the Mobius 19" screen to
compare it to MacProducts, but I have seen huge color screens at work (such as
a 21" behemoth on a IIfx) that look better than this even when used as black-
and-white monitors. Nonetheless, it's quite useable; I'll keep it and feel
that I got my money's worth.

Unlike some whizzy Mac II setups I've seen, once the 19" monitor is enabled
the built-in monitor on the SE is blank; that is, you can't use both at the
same time. You can choose to blank the big screen if you want, and just use
the board as an accelerator with the small screen, but I don't know why you'd
want to, unless you go on occasional trips where you like to bring your pal
along, but don't want to lug a huge monitor with you, too.

Summary

This is a case where I spent a good deal of money and so far feel it wasn't in
the least wasted. The accelerator really breathed new life into this old
computer...I feel that it's ready to go another 4-5 years. The monitor is just
adequate, but I'm sure that its size will quickly lead me to conclude that my
SE/30 at work is way too small, and I'll have to see if my boss will spring
for a big monitor for it, too. I don't know if the Mobius (or any other)
monitor would have been better or not; perhaps someone who has seen both could
post a followup.

Alan Weiss
[e-mail]