Exploring the WORLD'S RAREST Macintosh SE/30 Upgrade

today i have what is quite possibly the world's rarest upgrade for the macintosh se30 not rare because it's old or hard to find but instead rare because it's new in fact this particular upgrade was hand assembled by its creator from a limited batch of just a handful of cards and it's not a single card either it's actually three cards well technically four which together can take this 16 megahertz se30 to an incredible level of performance and i was lucky enough to snag this set from its creator himself all the way from germany so today let's explore this incredible upgrade talk about how it came to be and see just what kind of a monster our cursed sc30 becomes with this thing installed so stay tuned [Music] today's curse macintosh shenanigans are brought to you by pcb way now with more extremely useful prototyping services beyond pcbs including high quality 3d printing and even rapid custom cnc machining with on-demand production it's honestly amazing that you can go from an idea in your head to a fully realized prototype all in one place i hope you give pcb ways great pricing and 24-hour turnaround a try one of the most fascinating things about vintage macintoshes at least to me is that almost from the max inception there was a huge market for upgrades and accelerators over the 80s and 90s dozens of companies popped up slinging accelerators with offerings that often gave old macs dramatically improved performance often with a reasonably painless installation and these accelerators are probably my favorite thing to collect aside from vintage macs themselves and i've accumulated quite a number of accelerators over the years which now happily live in many of my macintoshes now the se30 was no stranger to accelerators though they're a bit trickier to find one popular and powerful accelerator was the micromac carrera 040 which uses a max pds or processor direct slot to bypass the system's original processor and instead use a much more powerful processor installed on the upgrade card itself originally intended for desktop machines in the macintosh 2 series the carrera was technically compatible with the se30 which was essentially a macintosh 2x in a compact mac case the stock se30 has a 16 megahertz 68030 processor with fpu not too shabby for 1989 but the carrera absolutely blew those specs out of the water bypassing the 60 megahertz processor with the 68040 at up to 50 megahertz or 40 megahertz if using the optional 128k cash card but don't take my word for it as of this filming the micromac website is still online frozen in time in the mid 90's and faithfully forever touting the www readiness that this upgrade provides but you may have noticed that these funny blue cards don't actually say micromac on them instead they say bowl mac and that's because these cards are modern recreations reverse engineered by a german genius known as bull over on the 68k mla forums and they're not simply clones of the old cards either they're actually improvements for example this adapter which is actually a clone of the twin spark adapter meant to fit the carrera in the se30 has also added a clone of the asante maccon ethernet card right into the adapter itself which allows you to plug the ethernet board directly into the adapter leaving you an additional open pds slot that previously would have been taken up by the network card additionally the carrera card itself can accommodate all three variants of the o40 processor the full one and the two cost reduced versions with a simple jumper setting right here all of this comes together to turn what was once an extremely expensive finicky and hard to find micromac upgrade into something that's comparatively almost plug and play when i purchased this adapter from bowl he was kind enough to share some of the story behind its inception along with some photos and video of his assembly process which i think you'll find really interesting according to bol ever since he got into classic max he was fascinated by all of the silly upgrades that people did to their se30s something i can definitely empathize with in particular he found inspiration in the folks around the old gamba.org and their relentless and ultimately successful attempts to build adapters to fit daystar accelerators into the se30 in this spirit the first adapter bull built was a clone of a twin spark and a daystar card to allow an accelerator and an additional pds card to be used in this project he learned about pcb routing and design reverse engineering and gained an in-depth knowledge of the se30 and 68030 bus additionally he found methods to read code from secured gal logic chips which are found on practically all accelerators and through some trials occasionally with mixed results that ended a few rare accelerators came the success that would ultimately lead to the cards we have here today okay i think it's about time we build our own cursed macintosh se40 so let's install these cards see what they're capable of and compare some benchmarks and real world performance against the stock 16 megahertz sc30 processor okay so let's take some benchmarks with the stock processor first and i want to start with boot up time to desktop because this thing is running os 8.1 a system that the se30 was never supposed to be able to run and in fact you have to kind of hack it on there so the startup time is a bit slow even with the sd card acting as an ssd so let's turn this on start our timer and see what the startup time is all right so a minute 39 to a usable desktop that is pretty slow all right now let's run a couple of benchmarks and see how our already kind of souped up se30 does running this operating system that's way too heavy for it so we'll start with speedometer 4.02 alright and let's do run all tests all right our benchmarks have completed and it's important to note that all of the scores here are relative to the performance of a quadra 605 which is a 25 megahertz 68 lc040 the cost-reduced version without an fpu of the 68040 and our overall scores as expected are pretty decently below what a quadra 605 would have and the math score is a bit better of course because this computer has an fpu with the 68030 and now let's run macbench 3.0 and get another set of baseline comparison okay so we have our scores and our baseline comparison here is a power macintosh 6160 a power pc machines so a much harder standard for this 68030 to live up to but we scored a nine percent or 0.88 against the 6100 and we scored a 0.14 for floating point i have one more test to run here this is a sieve test which is a much more recent test actually created by the fine folks at flood gap so let's give this a run and this will test specifically the processor alright so test completed 500 runs and we have 664 the speed of a mac plus which is a 68 000 processor in this sieve test all right let's shut this thing down for the last time as an se30 and install that 68040 upgrade okay so before we install this into the cursed mac we obviously need a processor which this did not come with but fortunately i have right here a 68040 rc40 which is a 40 megahertz rated processor which is what we're gonna run this card at so we just have to align the missing pin here with the missing pin here and we just push in to the slot and here's our 68040 processor that's going to be the brains of the cursed mac okay and now for the part i'm a little bit concerned about you see in the se30 here the connector for the pds slot is down in here and the card is meant to come up through kind of this slot area here and you can attach with screws onto this bracket here which is nice but we've got all of this other stuff crammed in here the scuzzy sd the jazz drive and the cd-rom drive so i'm a little bit worried we're not going to have enough room and in fact i think we aren't going to have enough room just looking at how this card fits because the accelerator has to plug into this slot here it cannot plug into this slot this slot is a se30 pds passthrough whereas this is the actual slot for the accelerator because this is a cache slot accelerator meant to go into mac 2 cache slot not an se30 pds slot okay so here is our processor and our kind of l shape and we need to figure out how to install it here and definitely this is going to be in the way of where the scuzzy sd is right now so i'm just going to go ahead and make some room here and then let's see what we have to work with okay so there's our card installed and we'll get some screws for this in a bit but actually there's more space than i was expecting so our accelerator now plugs here processor facing up and yeah there is a surprising amount of room under it i was worried for nothing so we had the scuzzy sd in this bracket right now all we need to do i think is just take the bracket off and it's going to fit underneath there just fine all right we've got the scuzzy sd crammed in there and without the case and i've got some double-sided tape and electrical tape to make sure it's not going to short out and we have our ethernet installed here and the bracket is in place and now let's slide our 68040 carrera right on top there we go all right everything is installed and this thing is packed tighter than my g4 cube now there is just no space at all this is a solid dense block of different cards and the only two casualties here one is i want to put a heatsink here but this one that i salvaged from who knows where is just a hair too tall to fit under the crt so i've got another one coming and uh i'll mount that when it gets here but it's not going to stop us from making sure this thing works the other casualty is our speaker so our speaker if you remember was mounted there and now our cards are completely in the way of where we had that mounted so for now i'm just gonna leave this out and i'll just have it connected and kind of dangling out here so we can make sure this thing chimes and we can hear it all right here we go first boot of the sc40 fingers crossed well that's certainly a good sign all right well thankfully we are booted let's take a look at title tech and see what it thinks our processor is all right it thinks that we're a quadra 700 still and we are booted off the 68030 so i think what we need to do is go into wish i were and change what our operating system thinks our system is alright so in the wish i were control panel here let's try changing this back to se30 and see if we can even boot oh my god i think it worked so like an idiot i had both the original carrera 040 extension and the carrera se30 which is the modded extension from bowl i had them both installed but obviously that is not necessary we only need the modded one and now look there's a little f up here i'm pretty sure that we're running on the o40 so let's go into tattletech and see what it says cpus oh my god look look it says it 68040 we did it this is a 68040 sc30 so we now have an se40 oh my god honestly this feels much snappier i mean much snappier is an understatement this is absolutely flying yeah so windows just fly around redraw takes no time at all look at that that's absolutely incredible okay let's restart this and let's time how long it takes to boot all right it already feels much faster and this right here that's the extension loading the o4o processor and once that kicks in all the rest of the extensions load super fast alright so we've cut about 30 seconds probably off of the boot time but i think what's happening is that for much of the boot time it's still using the 68 or 30 it doesn't actually start using the 40 until that extension kicks in but once it does man it is smoking fast okay let's take a look at the software side of this accelerator because there's actually some interesting trickery going on if you'll notice there's now a little letter f in a circle kind of haphazardly squeezed between the finder and the edge of the screen and that's actually our gear if we go into control panel we now have a new control panel called carrera se30 which is a hacked version of the actual carrera control panel that would have come with the original unit and this has just been modded to work with an se30 and here we have talk about skeuomorphism this is the original skeuomorphism here because we have two big old chunky switches and an actual gear lever so what this stuff does is actually pretty interesting the gear lever lets us select actual speeds of the processor so i just clicked on o30 slow and we are now in the o30 processor we have kind of shut off the 68040 and if we open tattletek we can confirm that and you see it's loading pretty slowly it already feels much slower so if we go down to cpus and give it a minute to catch up we can see look at that 68030 at 15.67 megahertz we're now running off of the original processor and this was included as a feature in case some of your old software that worked fine on the 6830 didn't work with the accelerator or didn't work with the 68040 sometimes old software was coded in such a way where it made use of the timing of the old processor and thus would run way too fast if you try to run it on a brand new processor so now we can go into our control panel again and we can go to o4o medium and well this is a good point to show you this don't try to switch the processor while an application is running so i forgot to close title tech and now i switched the processor and uh the software had no idea what was going on and hard crashed the system okay i restarted the system and you can see we're back in fast mode so full speed 68040 let's go back into control panel open our carrera control panel and now let's go to the medium setting and see what title tech says we're running already opened up a whole lot faster than on the 6830 look we're already into our system go down to cpus and we're now running actually we're now running the full cpu speed 40 megahertz 68040 so i'm actually not sure then what the medium setting does i thought it would run at 20 megahertz but yeah let's close out of tattletech and then switch back to full speed there we go no crash from the drive shifter there and then the other setting we have here is auto i almost forgot to close title tech again close tattletech now if we go to auto this is going to try to intelligently switch between different processor speeds depending on what software we launch so if we launch a program that won't work on a 68040 it's going to launch it and crank this down to 030 speed for the entire system and honestly i'm not quite sure how that works i don't know how it figures out that it should run on a 030 and 7040 but let's see what happens if we open title tech now i'm assuming nothing it looks like it launched at full speed yep that opened right up so we're on the 6840. yep 40 megahertz 68040 all right quit title tech and let's go back to the o40 okay and then the other two switches on here we have the menu bar icon which we can switch on and off with this interesting chunky switch and then we have the whole main power which we can switch on and off which i don't actually know if that does anything because it still says we're at the fast speed so the 68040 appears to still be on i don't know if that requires a restart or what but this kind of gear shift lever here is actually pretty helpful because there is software that has problems running on this card and for an example of that let's try to open up a video and i'm going to put it in 68030 mode and i have a whole cache of video files right here my favorite is this simpsons newton clip from the simpsons all right quicktime launched painfully slowly but we now have our one bit rendition of this scene from the simpsons which i'll play now and you can watch the slideshow but listen to the pretty good audio all right that clip is funny every time but let's see if we can make it a little funnier and launch it in our o4o accelerator and now let's watch and listen but we're not going to listen for that long and you'll see why as soon as i load the file yeah so as you heard and i'm gonna have to tone that down and post because that's a horrible sound there is that weird kind of whistling freaky sound i don't know beepy sound coming out of it that is not there when we played under the 6830 but as soon as we crank up the accelerator to full speed the audio gets all sort of wonky but so far that's the only thing i've found that has thrown some sort of weird behavior under the 68040 carrera upgrade okay and the other thing i want to show off here is just how much of a difference this accelerator makes for web browsing and i know you're thinking web browsing on an se30 why would you even attempt such a thing but it is something that i'm fascinated with so much so that i built a site that we can use as an example and i'm just going to open up icab which i conveniently have right on the desktop here and we're opening this up on the 68040 and we'll see it loads relatively quickly even though icab is the most modern browser at least that i know of for 68k so we're already loaded up into the browser and we can start typing and autocomplete works just fine and we can load up 68k dot news which is a site i built to kind of funnel google news and articles into a format that old machines can handle so it loads pretty quickly here even on this comparatively bloated web browser and it scrolls just fine and if we click on links they load relatively quickly certainly not unusable we can go into an article and read an article just fine view an image image loads nice and fast look at that big killer asteroid okay let's quit this and try the same experiment in 6830 mode and see what a difference it makes all right so it loaded but compared to the 60 to 40 it was painfully slow now let's start typing and we get our autocomplete which does work but it's just that bit slower and let's load our page and see what it's like yeah it's loading still loading yeah i mean it's working but it's again compared to the 68040 it is painfully slow on the 16 megahertz o30 processor so it's not just that megahertz jump from 16 to 40 but the o30 to the o40 processor makes a huge difference and if we click on links now everything works but it's painfully slow alright well let's run our benchmarks we'll start with speedometer wow it is just so unbelievably snappy applications load instantly where they took many seconds before all right let's do run all tests all right those tests completed in like half the time and man my heart is like racing looking at this look at that so compared to a quadra 605 our cpu is now 1.4 so like 50 faster and look how much faster the math score is that's incredible for some reason our disk score went down i don't know what that's about i'm gonna write that off as a fluke because this was just incredibly fast yeah that is an extreme difference from what we had back on the 68030 so we are now almost half the performance of a powermax 6160 whereas we were literally in the single digits on most of these tests before all right one more benchmark to run our sieve test and there we go so before it was like 600 something speed increase over mac plus and now we're 3954 the speed of a mac plus okay that'll do it for this video i hope you enjoyed seeing this crazy accelerator and watching me put it through its paces here honestly i never in a million years thought i would ever find something like this for the longest time i was obsessed with finding a macintosh se30 and then we found this crazy sc30 on craigslist but now we've made it probably one of the most modified se30s ever technically an se40 after this processor upgrade and then the only other real upgrade that we could put in here is a video card now there is the micron exceed video card which not only allowed for video out but it came with a special card for the back of the crt that actually gave you grayscale on the crt internally and that would open up stuff i think like maybe you could even play wolfenstein on here and that would be pretty pretty amazing but anyway if you enjoyed this video i'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more macintosh shenanigans like this please subscribe down below and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to dirk justin chris greg from rutg mods sorta eclectic spike and connor who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters who helped make these videos possible [Music] you

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 42,166

Rating: 4.9441862 out of 5

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: b8RFHY-CrTE

Length: 29min 45sec (1785 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 03 2021