Ultra RARE! X-Calibur accelerator for Amiga 4000, pre-production unit #5!

[JimDrew]

I am selling my nearly one of kind (well one of five, and only one known left in existence) pre-production X-Calibur board.  eBay link:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/130786217816?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

[JimDrew]

Actually, it is an accelerator because you can run a 33MHz 040 in the board instead of the stock 25Mhz version.

[JimDrew]

@zac67

Yes i read it in the pic of the box but... without cpu isnt an accelerator at all.

They typically came without a CPU, and people just removed the CPU from the A3640 board.  But, RCS Management also offered them with a XC68040RC33 for about $300 more.  This let you increase the speed to 33MHz.  These are about $50 now on eBay (http://www.ebay.com/itm/CPU-Chip-Motorola-68040-33-XC68040RC33M-33MHz-w-FPU-Math-LC475-/130750621324?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1e7158268c).

So, yes, it can be an accelerator.  I got this one from RCS about 6 months before they were finally released.  This one had many jumper wires (as you can see from the pictures) and an all gold pin interface connector.  The production models used tin pins, not gold.  The memory speed difference was amazing because it uses 64 bit interleaved memory access.

My BUY IT NOW was $200, so I am curious what will happen now that people have bid on it.

[JimDrew]

@JimDrew

FYI the Cyberstorm MK1 you are selling seems to be the 040 model as it lacks the 060 eeprom/firmware chip(s). CSMK1 requires a 060 firmware to work as 060. In addition to that the cpu daughterboard will probably lack a voltage regulator so if somebody plugs-in a 060 he'll probably fry it in a second. If I were you I would update the add with the right information. Upgrading a CSMK1/040 to a 060 is no easy without a real 060 daughterboard, you can check out www.a1k.org to see some pics of the process.

I looked at the link you provided and found nothing about the MKI (other than the SCSI).  The manuals that came with my boards (I bought two complete setups at the same time from Phase 5, one with the 060 installed and one without the 060) talks only about the 060.  The CPU board has the 50MHz oscillator, which is used by the 060 (not the 040).  Several people have PM'd me about the oscillator confirming that is the version for the 060.

I am selling it exactly how I bought it, which is suppose to be compatible with either an 040 or 060.  But I did order it specifically for the 060, as a backup board in case any of the original boards (which also had a sequential serial numbers) were to die.  That never happened, and I sold that system back in the late 90's.

[JimDrew]

For all which ask, how fast is this compo, here are my test results:

http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=6971&highlight=x-calibur

But my card only works to 27,5MHZ, 33MHZ not possible with my card.

With the addition of the X-Calibur boards we were able to help a couple of Hollywood production studios (Amblin Entertainment being one of them) blaze through post production using our Mac emulation with the Avid hardware/software.  We could run the editing suite about 4 times faster than a real Mac, thanks to our replacement floating point math packages and the X-Calibur's super fast memory access.

[JimDrew]

My Mk1 CS (which is an 060) looks exactly like the one in your pictures, ROM included.

Ok, thanks for confirming that.  It's been a lot of years since I bought this, but there is no way I would ever need an 040 version of anything... we had the X-Calibur, Warp Engine, PPI, etc. 040 boards already in our development machines.  We needed the magical 060 to continue development.  

[JimDrew]

LOL!  I am doing a variety of things, but I mostly design flight and guidance control systems for UAVs, ROVs, R/C aircraft, etc.  Earlier this year I designed and built the flight control system for James Cameron's ROV used on the Mariana Trench dive.

I have been getting back into the Commodore thing though.  I attended in the 8th annual CommVex convention in Las Vegas a couple of months ago.  That was fun.  I brought my wife and son to see how real computers worked and played.  

I am developing a few little products for the C64, and a hardware disk duplicator that uses PC 8", 5.25" or 3.5" disk drives to duplicate all disk formats ever created.  Somewhat like KryoFlux and Catweasel, but much higher resolution and it can operate as a stand alone unit or be driven by anything that has a CPU (C64, Mac, PC, or even a simple microcontroller).

I am just now really digging out my Amiga stuff.  I still have my last development machine (A3000/040, Picasso IV, EMPLANT, etc.)  It fired right up.  All of the source code to everything I ever made is still there.  Kind of fun to see that old stuff.  I have been selling off all of the various extra boards I had on eBay, and will continue to do so until they are all gone.

[JimDrew]

Wow! Good to see an Amiga legend still keeping busy (and seems to be having tons of fun!).

If you don't mind me asking, what do you think of the new fangled Amiga stuff, the X1000 for instance? Anything that piques your interest?

Well, it's good to see something carrying on, but I miss the 68K and original Amiga OS.   I miss fast booting and small programs!

[JimDrew]

I have everything backed up and fully operational in WinUAE!

[JimDrew]

I thought about making a mini history movie for Wiki.

Yeah, I thought it was odd that nobody used the buy it now option for all of my items.

[JimDrew]

Well, good thing eBay won't let me!  

[JimDrew]

Of course, most Europeans don't believe it.  When it happened I had several respected Amiga programmers take a look at the Resource dumps of the code for comparison and post their findings on Aminet and other places.  When things like deliberately placed EOR'd text strings appeared in some of the Mac patches, it was pretty obvious what was going on.  I had already sued (and won) a company in England for ripping off my disk copier, SuperCard Ami II.  But that cost me over $10,000 and yielded me a box of ripped off product and no awarded damages or attorney fees.  I didn't want to go through that whole thing again.  Now days, it is much easier to sue companies overseas as the U.S. government has a department setup just to handle those issues.

[JimDrew]

No worries!  My pics came out funny for that one.  I am not sure what happened with eBay's picture converter.  Everything got a green tint and really washed out look to it.

[JimDrew]

Well, both of course!  

[JimDrew]

LOL!  Well, let's see... from a uniqueness point of view...  This board was used to demonstrate EMPLANT's Mac emulation to Amblin Entertainment studios that the Mac emulation was up to 4 times faster than a real equiv. speed Mac.  This meant that the Avid video system used in post production work of movies like "Cybertracker" (where I actually have a movie credit at the very end) could be sped up, saving the studio tens of thousands of dollars in studio time.

This board was also the only one that left the RCS Management's facility, being one of the five pre-production prototypes.  I do not know what happened to the other four.  Because of a few trace errors, the production model is a bit different (but still has some trace corrections).  This board has all gold pins for the CPU connection, whereas the production model used tin.  It was used by *me* for development and testing of the Mac emulation until the Cyberstorm 060 arrived.  

From a utility point of view... that thing was great!