ZigZagJoe's Vintage

NuCF Compactflash Adapters for Macintosh SE30, IIfx, IIsi

NuCF is a newly developed (May 2025) bootable PDS card for Macintosh SE/30, IIsi, and IIfx that completely bypasses SCSI in favor of a CompactFlash card, allowing massively increased speeds over the poor SCSI implementations on these machines. In general a minimum of 2x faster performance is expected.

Status: NuCF production is on hold due to the asinine tariff war started by the current US administration. No ETA or change expected.
There is a known issue with certain IIfx systems not working correctly with particular CF cards. Efforts are underway to determine what is going on.

In the graph above it can be seen the NuCF card has much faster random and small access speeds are much faster: This results in improved boot times and overall performance, especially with later OSes and many extensions. It's similar to how a modern NVMe SSD compares to a SATA SSD. I personally found system 7.5.5 to come up a good 20 seconds faster than it normally would, and it's within spitting distance of RAMDisk speeds!

A Type1 CompactFlash card supporting PIO-4 is required. Any card from the last 25 years ought to support this. Under System 7.1 and earlier, a maximum of 8000 MB may be utilized across 4 partitions; System 7.5+ can utilize 16000 MB. Larger cards should work but the unused space will be wasted.

I've tested with System 6.0.8 through 8.1. A/UX is not currently supported, but I may look at writing a driver in the future.

You don't need a USB-CF adapter to set this card up. I took particular pains to make it as easy as possible to get started :) Here's a quick video of what the setup process looks like.

There are 3 possibilities for the top PDS connector on these cards.

right angle connector for SE/30
straight connector for IIsi
no connector for IIfx (it serves no purpose)

The PCB is fundamentally the same so all versions will work in other machines where physically possible.
IIsi can't use the SE/30 version as the cover won't close unless used with an IIsi Booster 2.0 card.

Tested CF cards

I haven't found different kinds of CF cards to be problematic so far.

InnoDisk ICF9000 (recommended)
Sandisk Extreme
Transcend CF300
WD SiliconDrive

The firmware is field-updatable within Mac OS if I do find issues or come up with improvements down the road. SE/30 was intended to support one additional PDS card. Most systems should support two without issues. I've personally tested these to play nicely with my Boosters, 30video cards, Diimo 030, Carrera 040, SEthernet/30, Asante MacCon. That said, there's always the risk of system instability (or plain not working) as well as data corruption when you've got many cards in a system. Take care to test your setup thoroughly, and as we all know with Mac OS's propensity to corrupt disks: always take backups!

This is a newly designed card and driver, bugs are always possible though I've run a serious testing cycle in order to catch as many as I can. If you run into issues, please open an issue via github.

Stacking cards

You may stack an additional PDS card on top of NuCF cards (except in IIfx). When installing a second card, carefully bend the chassis card support tabs away from the cards so they do not make contact with any card, and cover the tabs with insulating tape. NuCF supports slots ID D, A, B, E, selectable by slide switch on the card. The default setting of D will work for all systems except IIfx which must use E.

Please note: Most systems should be able to support two add-in cards, however, any additional cards are not guaranteed to work and can cause system instability / inability to boot / data corruption.

Notes

The pre-boot format utility is written entirely by hand and is constructed out of pure quickdraw primatives, drawing lines and so on. Yes, I am a little crazy. Why do you ask?

This was necessary as Mac OS only understands partitions on SCSI devices; any other block storage device is expected to be a raw HFS volume (ala. a giant floppy). Therefore, partitioning support falls on the driver to implement. I didn't want to implement a Mac OS utility for this so instead I crafted the ROM functionality to ease setup.

Benchmarks

Complete SE30 Benchmarks, as measured by Norton System Info

IIfx benchmark

Resources
Firmware updates
Installation guide
Development log
Example Macintosh Bootable DeclROM