DayStar Genesis MP: The Crazy Powerful 90s Mac Clone!

hey everyone it's Colin how's it going the powerpc processor brought dramatic performance improvements to Apple's Macintosh line when it debuted in the mid 90s but interestingly the fastest Mac during that time wasn't actually made by Apple but ended up being quite influential to the platform [Music] [Music] the Genesis MP from Daystar digital was a beast of a Mac clone in more ways than one it was physically the largest and heaviest Mac ever produced with a solid metal chassis and room for seven internal scuzzy hard drives its motherboard boasted six PCI card slots and this particular machine has certainly seen its share of upgrades multiple 10 100 network cards and a scuzzy 2 controller its 12 Ram slots could support up to 1.5 gigabytes of memory a ridiculous amount for the time but these are mostly empty save for two comically big modules it features the typical complement of ports on the back scuzzy aaui and RJ45 connectors for 10 base T ethernet two serial ports ADB and audio in and out it doesn't have onboard Graphics though with the first PCI slot holding a Vision 3D Pro card that boasts 8 megabytes of video RAM keeping the internals cool are a pair of massive and in this case Dusty fans which make the computer obnoxiously loud foreign I picked up this machine from a friend who had gotten it from its original owner a print shop in St Louis that went out of business in 2020 and the printing industry is one of a few markets that the Genesis MP was targeted towards as Beyond its extreme expandability it had one killer feature that even Apple at first couldn't match Daystar digital got its start in the 1980s as a producer of Mac upgrade cards in the form of CPU accelerators through the early 90s it gained a reputation for shoehorning faster processors into max at prices much more compelling than buying a whole new computer this took some serious engineering prowess to pull off and in 1995 when Apple opened up its OS licensing program for manufacturers to make their own Mac clones Daystar decided to go for the gold Macs were used heavily in the graphic design and printing Industries and manipulating images was one of the most processor intensive tasks that one could do faster performance directly correlated to improved productivity so Daystar pulled out all the stops and produced a machine it advertised as being even faster than an expensive silicon Graphics Workstation was making steady progress in transitioning the Mac platform to the new Power PC processor architecture and the powerpc 604 was the newest chip in the series it was hotly anticipated as it promised dramatically better performance than the previous power PC 601 but just one 604 wasn't good enough for Daystar Instead The Genesis MP came with four of them multi-processing on the Mac was unheard of at that point and even in the general computing industry it was something really only seen in servers and the most powerful workstations four fast CPUs would surely fly through any task thrown at them and the machine made headlines there was just one problem though the Mac OS didn't actually support multiple processors when the Mac was originally designed in the early 80s Apple's Engineers pulled some pretty impressive technical Feats to get the OS to run on its Hardware multi-processing was the last thing on their minds and as time went on and newer Macs were introduced limitations within the OS were becoming harder to overcome moving from the Motorola 68000 series CPUs to power PC was an even bigger mess the Mac OS hadn't been Rewritten for the new architecture instead relying on a software emulator it worked very well but limited performance porting the Mac OS to be power PC native was time consuming and still wouldn't necessarily solve its architectural limitations such as the lack of protected memory or preemptive multitasking Apple decided it would be better to Simply rewrite the OS from scratch and one such project was codenamed Copeland the big improvements in Oakland are really focused on two things one is improving people's productivity we want people to be more efficient we want them to get more accomplished in less time and the second is giving them a way to take advantage of the performance of the powerpc chip with multi-processor support Copeland would have fully taken advantage of the Genesis MP's performance and yielded an overall much more stable OS than what the Mac had turned into but the mid 90s proved to be a very dysfunctional time at Apple and ultimately Copeland was never finished it was therefore Daystar that had to make things work in addition to coming up with the hardware design for multiple CPUs it also wrote the necessary software drivers for the OS to see them an unfortunate limitation Daystar couldn't overcome was that at boot the Mac OS and all applications would default to one CPU and the others remained idle unless a multi-processor capable program assigned tasks to them this meant that for most tasks the machine performed no better than a single processor Mac those synthetic benchmarks were still fairly impressive because of the powerpc 604s big speed boost but with the right software editions programs could unlock the full potential of the system and one of those key applications was Adobe Photoshop given where it came from Photoshop is likely what this particular machine ran all day every day those jumbo Ram modules total up to 512 megabytes which was a very impressive amount and the presence of a jazz Drive isn't surprising since those discs were popular for transferring large files especially in the print industry this specific model is the Genesis mp528 called as such because it has four 132 megahertz processors though Daystar also sold at two CPU version to those a bit more strapped for cash Adobe offered its own multi-processing plug-in for Photoshop but Daystar wrote One optimized for the Genesis and an included readme file gives examples of specific operations that would perform better with it but this Hit or Miss speed increase was confusing to potential buyers to the point where Mac magazines ran articles showing a variety of Graphics editing tests sometimes the Genesis was the fastest and other times it wasn't around the same time the powermac 9500 was Apple's most powerful offering it also used the powerpc 604 albeit a single one which connected to the motherboard through a similar looking daughter card the 9500 had the same port selection featured six PCI slots and 12 Ram slots and wait a minute these boards look awfully similar that's because they're pretty much the same thing as it turns out Daystar had worked with apple on the design ensuring it would be compatible with its CPU cards Apple contracted with Daystar they have purchased the rights to this but we still retain the development and the evangelism and we'll be continuing to work with apple in the future the so-called tsunami architecture both machines shared was a big deal when it launched as it brought PCI slots to the Mac platform and removed a lot of the performance bottlenecks that hobbled the first generation of PowerMax interestingly Daystar offered an upgrade kit to 9 500 owners to convert their machines into Genesis MPS in addition to the CPU card it included the entire chassis and power supply for two reasons first the 9500 was a nightmare to work on as it was very cramped inside things as simple as a ram upgrade required removing the motherboard which was annoying back then and downright risky to do these days Apple had built most of the enclosure out of plastic which has since turned very brittle daystar's metal case as big and heavy as it was proved much easier to work inside and offered better expansion second and more importantly though the quad processor card simply wouldn't fit inside the 9500 and required a dedicated power cable that the machine couldn't support high demand for the new powerpc 604 CPUs from Apple and Mac clone makers alike caused part shortages and the Genesis MP's introduction was delayed several months into late 1995. but when it did ship its price tag was breathtaking over fourteen thousand dollars U.S for a base model with 16 megabytes of RAM and a one gigabyte hard drive it probably comes as no surprise that the Genesis MP became a pretty Niche machine the fact that only certain applications could take advantage of its power primarily Adobe Premiere and after effects in addition to photoshop really limited its audience and its high price tag narrowed it further I can't say for sure when this specific machine was sold but based on the serial number it appears to have been only the 23rd unit produced but even though the Genesis received good reviews in general most users got by just fine with single processor systems and machines from rival clone maker power Computing which eventually got into multi-processing itself proved very popular and a better value in August 1996 Apple produced its own high-end version of the 9500 featuring two CPUs clocked at 180 megahertz yet despite the market pressure Daystar seemingly managed to sell enough Genesis MPS to justify continued development and over the next two years it introduced even faster models the powerpc 604e processor brought better performance than the original and the Genesis MP plus line took advantage of it the first of these models launched in late 1996 with several more arriving in mid 97. the fastest model included four 233 megahertz CPUs but was incredibly short-lived as it was discontinued just two weeks later at the end of August Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and was known to not be keen on the Mac licensing program so Daystar saw the writing on the wall and got out of Matt clones entirely remaining stock of Genesis systems were resold by Mac Works which painted them black and renamed them the Millennium these ended up being unauthorized clones as by the time they made it to market the Mac licensing program was dead for good foreign avoided having the rug pulled out from under it the company still ended up not faring well the max CPU upgrade Market it had continued to serve saw increasingly Fierce competition but overall declining sales as Apple made the shift to the powerpc G3 processor and new technologies like USB and firewire users preferred to buy new machines instead of upgrading their old ones with no viable path forward Daystar filed for bankruptcy in July of 1999. in many ways the Genesis MP is a perfect example of the perils and promise of the Mac platform in the 90s the Clone program brought competition and excitement to the ecosystem and users benefited from lower prices and increasingly better features but it all hinged on Apple which at that time couldn't get out of its own way the Genesis MP showed exactly what the powerpc was capable of and while the classic Mac OS was never able to fully take advantage of it there was one other operating system that absolutely could but that's a story for another time if you liked the video I'd appreciate a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe you can follow me on social media at this does not come and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: This Does Not Compute

Views: 80,646

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Id: RX_LqLhL-YI

Length: 14min 21sec (861 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 30 2022