This Apple Accelerator is INSANE

this is an apple this is also an apple i may not be a very good apple squeezer but this thing sure is who's writing these jokes anyway this is the apple squeezer apple 2gs accelerator and it is no joke it's brand new almost unbelievably powerful and today we're gonna check it out together so stay tuned [Music] and if you enjoy retro tech youtubers asking you to subscribe before even showing you the fruits of their labor really i hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel we do a lot of apple and macintosh shenanigans around here so it's definitely worth sticking around the apple squeezer gs is a brand new accelerator built by nick van sukdelin from the wonderful land of the netherlands using the power of fpga along with a real 14 megahertz 65816 processor the apple squeezer accelerates in apple 2gs way faster than any period accelerators ever did nearly as fast as the fastest overclocked accelerators and modern recreations of the transworp gs oh i guess we'll need an actual apple 2gs to test this thing out on and this is an apple 2e now there we go this is the transparent stealth 2gs that we built a little while ago if this is your first time seeing this behemoth check out the build video right here now i first found out about the apple squeezer thanks to nick's post on the apple fritter forums back in december of 2021 and basically i've been trying to get my hands on one ever since then which has been basically impossible thanks to the global component shortage nick has been releasing them in well pretty small batches every couple of months imagine my absolute surprise when just a few weeks ago nick reached out to me and asked me if i've heard about his project oh have i he generously offered to set one aside for me from the next batch and uh here it is i can hardly believe it i've lusted after this thing for months now he didn't send this to me for free or even in exchange for any kind of review so any awards that we run into while playing with this thing and i fully expect some we'll discover together so what i'd like to do today is first we'll take a closer look at the apple squeezer itself we'll crack it open and uh see how it works and hopefully not destroy it in the process and uh then i want to compare it first to the stock 2gs at a paltry 2.8 megahertz and then against my zip gs upgrade running at 7 point something megahertz and then the most important thing of all just how much better will this thing run wolfenstein 3d okay so the apple squeezer is a cool little sandwich of two different boards here with sockets that hold it together on either side and i'm going to leave this little height extender socket on here so i don't accidentally bend any of the pins on the apple squeezer itself but yeah this should ply apart pretty easily so let's try to open this up without breaking it no i'm just kidding i'm just kidding plastic spudger and uh just make sure there's nothing in the middle here that i'm going to hit with the spudger i should probably also take note of the orientation of the two boards here so we've got four dots here corresponding to the front notch of this socket here so four dots front notch don't let me forget it all right crack the old apple in half so the blackboard here is the fpga board it's the xilinx spartan 6 and according to my expert googling it's optimized for automotive applications which is pretty cool because when this thing is together and sticking out of your computer it kind of looks like a carburetor pretty neat and here is the apple squeezer itself with just a few chips on here including the most important right here the 65 c18 chip the actual same processor that's in the apple 2gs just this is a different package surface mount package and uh yeah rated to go quite a bit faster and i really like the apple squeezer logo it looks quite nice on this board uh shame it's hidden on the other side but you know it's probably pretty expensive to print on this side of the board for just that one thing okay so i have the 2gs running some benchmarks now on the stock processor and uh we've run into the first kind of limitation of the apple squeezer unfortunately due to dma issues and as we all know dma stands for direct memory access it won't work with my beloved micro drive turbo so we have to switch to something different uh like the wonderful but very expensive cffa 3000 but unfortunately mine doesn't work it never worked it just started crashing right out of the gate in the menu system so yeah unfortunately we are now booted off of the floppy emu which you know this is the handiest device on the face of the planet i'm worried it's a little bit slow maybe slowing down the system here but at least it'll be consistent so we can see the percent improvement of the zip gs and the apple squeezer over the stock 2.8 megahertz cpu and of course let's get a feel for wolfenstein at 2.8 megahertz this is gonna be pretty brutal i suspect all right ooh that is that is not fast i do like to play with the trackball actually it's a lot of fun this way and i mean it's not too bad calling it frames per second is maybe a little bit generous but it does work and then another quirk of wolfenstein on the apple ii gs and i don't really understand why this is the case the regular apple 2gs used adb just like the macintosh but on the stealth 2gs and on a lot of the early 2gs motherboards there are header pins to use your apple ii style keyboard and yeah these buttons don't work in the game i don't understand why the keyboard doesn't work a couple of the keys do work but yeah the playing the game keys do not can't open doors you can't shoot so yeah have to resort to plugging in the adb keyboard here all right let's pop in zip gs so we just have to carefully pry out the original processor which i am terrible at doing and we install the original 65816 on the zip gs board here just like that and now we get to use the super fancy 65 c816 running at 7.0 megahertz 7.2 i forget we'll find out in a second all right according to zip gs control we're running at a hundred percent speed at eight megahertz so first let's run those benchmarks okay so the benchmarks are complete and it's interesting a lot of these scores show actual megahertz of under eight megahertz except for a floating point test which is over eight megahertz and uh yeah we'll save these scores here and let's check out some wolfenstein 3d yeah we loaded into the level at least twice as fast if not faster and oh yeah the game is much more playable here at probably eight megahertz oh yeah i mean the animations were just comically slow before the doors still feel a bit slow and oops i almost died but yeah this is now what i would call a playable game all right let's squeeze this apple alright it's time for the most exciting part except there's problems yeah right as i was uh fixing to do this i get an email from nick about the apple squeezer and he lets me know that unfortunately he's gotten a couple of reports of people with very early apple 2gs motherboards having some issues with their accelerators either not running at all or giving them funky errors and not being stable and crashing so he re-watched my video and very kindly discovered that my board is one of the ones he's had a report about so yeah this might not work at all and if it doesn't then uh i guess this video will be filled with click bait and disappointment but we're going to give it a try now and we're going to see if it works yeah i am really grateful that nick took the time to check my previous video on this machine to see if i had one of the affected boards and you know unfortunately i do but at least we're going into this and i'm not going to be you know banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why it's not working if indeed it doesn't work but we're going to install this and uh we have to clear one other hurdle and by clear i mean literally clear this header and ribbon cable is right in the way of where the apple squeezer has to go so i'm going to add some risers to it and uh nick sent this one socket along with it which i think he intends you to replace the socket that's on the motherboard here which is kind of a cheap socket but instead i'm gonna use it as a riser there we go and uh yeah still not enough to clear it so i have some of this style of break off riser here there we go totally professional job let's see if we clear it now yeah we're in there but yeah i guess let's just power this on and see if it boots all right no sound all right well after some light trial and error with the riser it works and it turns out i think that this kind of riser with the round pins here wasn't making good contact to the oem apple socket in there but when i tried a riser with these chunky little flat pins on it well here we go we're booted into gsos let's run the benchmark to see what our megahertz is all right option number one accelerator is the base speed yep do one set of tests i feel like this is going way faster than it did before look at these scores look at that uh our fastest actual megahertz is 15.87 and then everything else is in the 12s and 13s ah but that is way faster than these six to eight megahertz that we got with the zip gs yes yes i want to save this all right so now we can take a look at these against one another call this one squeeze dot dot wow these windows feel buttery smooth look there is no redraw hardly any redraw at least you know on the stock processor dragging a window you drag it and then it would slowly redraw itself so this is pretty incredible wow can i just open these as text files yes all right here are the stock scores here is the zip gs which is yeah quite an improvement and here is the apple squeezer and just look how much faster that is 500 iteration integer math 281.83 that is like what half oh man this is unbelievably fast oh and then of course the other thing to check which i forgot for a second about this apple 2gs oh look at that we have 14 megs of ram on an apple 2gs that might as well be 14 gigs of ram that's just a ridiculous amount of memory all right well you know what we have to try next the most important test of all all right whoa look at this keyboard control that is quite a nice frame rate on using the trackball even better [Music] oh yeah look at that this is how this game is meant to be played oh it's so fast oh look at it look at it it's so fast whoa oh no slow down no jankiness it's buttery smooth oh my goodness oh this is worth it this is worth every penny oh my goodness oh it's so fast wow i could just sit and play this game it is amazing to play this on an apple 2gs all right well i played through an entire level and uh yeah didn't crash played extremely smoothly and super fast amazing but let's try some other games and software to see if we run into any of these bugs that nick was talking about hey look how fast it's extracting this shrink it archive okay so this is the independently built super mario brothers for the apple 2gs and this game runs very slow on the stock machine and still kind of slow on the zip gs let's see what the apple squeezer does for this unofficial mario game awesome it's like full speed [Music] oh look at it [Music] all right i beat it the first level i wonder how much of this game is actually in here i usually give up by this point because it's so slow but look how fast it is on this machine okay you know we have to try good oldfrogfind.com search for apple squeezer gs i really need to work on a version of frog find that works well on weber because yeah a lot of this text is almost unreadable because it's trying to do some kind of dithering so yeah maybe i just need to go with a more solid color that's apple 2gs friendly yeah check it out we can technically browse the web on the 2gs let's try a site that'll work a little bit better here retro.mac you know i should use this font color this is much much more readable look how fast this scrolling is on this fully rendered html page i have computers in the gigahertz that are much worse with well modern web browsers but still this is rendered html okay so that'll do it for today's video and uh wow i'm just i'm so incredibly excited and i just i just can't believe it i've had this stealth apple 2gs project in mind since like 2013 and this motherboard i bought by itself probably in 2015 and it's been sitting around since then as i was trying to figure out how to get the rest of the parts that i need to do this build and really it's thanks to all of you that i'm able to get this to this level of bonkers with this clear case and this amazing apple squeezer accelerator and just the keyboard and everything it's amazing uh i'm i'm so grateful to all of you for watching all of these videos and uh enjoying this stuff right along with me because i love it i love these old computers and just taking them to the most extreme level that they can go yeah and this apple squeezer is amazing i haven't run into a single issue in the hours now that i've been playing with it the one thing i noticed is that if i bump the computer it can freeze but that's because i'm using a pretty janky riser in there to raise up the apple squeezer over the keyboard header so maybe those issues that some people had with early revision apple 2gs motherboards are just flukes of those specific boards and i don't think anyone else has put an apple squeezer into a stealth 2gs so this might just be the fastest stealth apple 2gs in the world currently and that's pretty darn cool and of course now i have some pretty awesome accelerators and cards that i'm not using in this dell 2gs anymore including the amazing zip gs upgrade which is super rare and was donated by a very kind viewer of the channel so what i think i want to do is put together a normal looking apple 2gs with a bunch of these components and kind of have both available that i can show off together at say vcf east but that's it for this week thank you nick again so much for setting one of these apple squeezers aside for me ah man this thing is just awesome but if you enjoyed the video i'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more apple shenanigans like this please subscribe down below and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to alberto guiller camila nosada chris alegretta chris biggs chris calderon chris nelson cobalt retro tech control alt reese daniel hubbard greg from rutgmods ryan and scott thompson who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping to make these videos possible [Music] you

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 35,511

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

Id: yzDwnR7yAeM

Length: 22min 15sec (1335 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2022