ZigZagJoe's Vintage

One-off Special Cards & Prototypes

These are silly things and prototypes I made to tickle particular whims of mine. I usually only made one of these for my personal use and don't plan to make more.

At top is a socketed version of the DiimoCache 030 I created as I liked the form-factor of the socketed DayStar PowerCache. However it proved impossible to find one of these cards, so as a sensible person does I instead took Bolle's schematics of the Diimo, redrew them, and created a board in that form factor (June 2023). This was the first PCB I made for vintage computers, and it shows, but it did work. I was even able to upgrade it to 128KB of cache and 58mhz operation. It positively screams!

At bottom is a socketed version of the Carrera 040. A similar story to the Diimo; I wanted it, so I made it. This one runs at 45mhz.

I decided to eat my own dogfood and put one of my 30Video GS cards into my machine with a socketed carrera. However, when combined with the accelerated Interware GrandVimage 21s card, it was too tall for the case. So the obvious rational solution here was to create a combination card with Halkyardo's SEthernet/30 design. Works perfectly!

With the new Booster 2.0 design, it was possible to make the most compact accelerator for SE/30 by dropping the FPU. The booster can just use the logicboard FPU and little enough uses the FPU anyways. It's adorable! On top of that I decided to try making an ultracompact NuCF with a passthrough socket, making a cute little sandwich that improves CPU and storage performance notably.

A prototype clock-doubler bodged together with a 128K cache test board to create a single assembly which doubles CPU speed to 50mhz as well as adding a 128K 0-wait-state cache. Fast! Precursor to 040 HyperDrive accelerator.

040HyperDrive. Similar to the prototype above, designed with bus buffers for higher speed operation. I expect this will lead to a cached accelerator for NeXT and 25mhz Macintoshes. Already tested to work reliably up to 57mhz in a Mac.

Development log #1
Development log #2

This is a modernized version of the DiimoCache design which moves all the logic (12 GALs worth!) into a single ATF1508 CPLD and also incorporates 128K cache. It's partially functional but there are timing issues currently which are causing deadlocks. Unfortunately, the Atmel fitter software is literal trash making this extremely frustrating to troubleshoot further. So, it's on hold...

Black hardware needs a black scsi emulator, right? Derivative of the ZuluSCSI Pico OSHW design.