Two years ago I was walking around and found a PowerMac 8100 on the sidewalk. Once I got home with it I was psyched to see that it had 100 MB of RAM and a Sonnet G3 processor. My first NuBus mac! Was a long time before I used it, though.
Lately I have been tinkering with machine and a SampleCell2 card, and enjoying it quite a bit. The display size of the original Apple video card is small, and I am tired of losing and reconfiguring the VGA adaptor as I move this machine around to various monitors in my setup.
Are there any high-end NuBus video cards with more sizes and good picture quality, perhaps with VGA/SVGA connector? The last of my old Apple (Hitachi) CRT's died years ago. Also, I want to put together a NuBus 68k machine sometime, so I am interested in cards for 68k and / or PPC.
I'd be psyched to hear from the NuBus experts!
CJ
was the bestest overall at the time, though the RasterOps Prism GT card was pretty snazzy too. The RasterOps cards seem to play best with later OSes, better written declrom and drivers I guess.
AFAIK, there was never a nubus display card with a HD15 VGA-style connector on it.
The PDS display cards are actually quite fast, faster for some things than even the T IV 16K. The key is its direct access to the PDS (!), which could move data faster than can the nubus bus.
Have you got all 4 megs of vram on the card? That helps get those millions of colors at higher resolutions. Also, maybe you just need to play around with your adapter(s), the PDS card can do 1152x IIRC. Not super-hi-rez, but not too shabby either.
dan k - Snif, snif, I must have $50K worth of highend nubus crap laying about, worth now all of maybe $50 if I got lucky.
The G3 card is currently in the PDS, there is a pass-through connector - but I can't quite see how a video card would affix to it. Sonnet said that such video cards will work with the accelerator, but I'd need to learn more. If I happen upon a PDS solution, I will definately try it.
Speed is not too crucial for editing audio, usually. Fast enough to refresh on time in 2D is good enough. Thanks for the tips on NuBus cards! I am running OS 8.6 on here for now, I guess that's recent for a NuBus. Is all 4MB of RAM on there? I should check! So used to recent cards using funky RAM which I don't have.
What the NuBus cards are worth does tend towards the subjective! Since I have been without money for most of my years, I am happy to be building decent computers and music studio on the cheap. I'm not going to offer you $50 for your lot of NuBus stuff, since it sounds like you have mixed feelings about it. Trying to get rid of any Symbolics, Inc MacIvoryIII LISP machines? I'm interested! More video card research!
M
I have three old NuBus Video Cards lying around from the Mac II era, but I'm not sure how to tell what they are, as I have no machines from that era to try them in (or even confirm if they are still working). You can have them if you want them.
If you are prepared to look them up, I can find the model numbers on them.
Actually there was a nubus card with a VGA connector on it. I think Village Tronic originally made it, but Sonnet later picked it up and marketed towards those with G3 upgraded nubus powermacs.
It was originally called the MacPicasso 320 and came with 2MB of VRAM and both Mac and VGA connections. I think the one Sonnet marketed came with 4MB of VRAM, as opposed to 2MB. I'm pretty sure that they were reasonably fast cards. I don't remember how they stacked up to other nubus video cards.
http://www.splashofcolor.com/products/deals/macpicasso/320.html, this is a link to some misc. business selling one. Just to let you know that they do exist.
OK.... I took a look at them.
Two of them are Apple branded NuBus video cards. One is marked Apple Display and the other is marked Apple High Resolution. One has room for an extra pair of optional SIMMs. The third is a Mass Micro Color Space video card with a special cable that has a CGA connector on the opposite end. All of them are from around 1989-1990 time frame.
I used to have a couple of MicroConversions 2124NB II Nubus video cards that worked really well for me in a IIfx and a PM6100. They gave me better quality on my 21" monitor than the three or four other video cards I had which included a couple of the midrange Radius cards, but if you can get ahold of a Radius Thunder you'd probably be at the top of the line. I believe the Sonnet card was supposed to be pretty good too.