Sonnet crescendo 7200 on Amiga

[Motormouth]

I saw mention that sonnet crescendo 7200 were being used in amiga's with mediators in the "....crazy ebay postings" thread.

Is it this true!!!  Was this not what SharkPPC was going to be?

Did anyone here try this!

Did anyone attempt something similar with Prometheus?

Here is more information:
https://github.com/Sakura-IT/SonnetAmiga

[Motormouth]

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=76633

@JJ  This is a great thread.........

eab has kept its technical edge.

[Motormouth]

The reason I am interested is I happen to have a PowerMac 7200 with a Sonnet crescendo 7200 fully populated with ram (if you think the sonnet is rare the ram for the sonnet and the 7200 is also very uncommon).

[Motormouth]

It was only luck.  I just picked the old powermac to play with MacOS and to network with my Amiga with Fusion and Emplant.  I was not thinking of the of the card.

The problem  is that I don't have a mediator.

[Motormouth]

on the contrary. that is fortunate. because you can now buy yourself a current mediator model with extended voltage supply (i think it is an additional 3,3 volt rail) which is necessary for the sonnet. an old mediator like mine is not suitable for this without modifications.

Actually I have a Prometheus.  It has three problems with the sonnet amiga project:
1)  it would need the 3.3V hack
2)  it would need a hardware upgrade for busmastering
3)  It lags behind the mediator in the sonnet amiga project.

It looks like from the EAB thread that the project creators wanted to use Prometheus originally.....

[Motormouth]

That make you one of the lucky few that can consider this.
Cool.

@Iggy  Instead of looking for a Sonnet Crescendo 7200, maybe look for a powermac 7200 that has been "upgraded" maybe on Craigslist or equivalent.  That is how I got mine.

[Motormouth]

afaik the hardware upgrade for busmastering was available from eab 's m.boehmer. i think it was tersters release. would have to look up a1k for this. 3.3 hack might be realized with some voltage converter or something, but then who knows if its wort the hassle. not for me, i must admit.

@wawrzon   Thanks for the info  very useful!
The 3.3 hack can be performed on the sonnet directly rather than trying to mod the PCI slots from PCI 2.1 to PCI 2.2.  That info was on the EAB thread and the Github link.

Always wanted to play with the big boys and have a G3 or G4 in my amiga, the fastest Amiga I have is a 68040 25 mhz,  I know a lot of you have 68060 and G4 on this site.

[Motormouth]

OWC sells 128 meg FPM DIMMs which are compatible with the Crescendo 7200 for $7.50 USD apiece.

That is good that some one sells them.

These modules are doubly odd, first they are FPM (or Fast Page mode), which was not rare but was a little less common than standard DIMMs

What makes these a bit wacky is the fact they were 5V.  By that time 3.3V was common.

This is a bit interesting because the 3.3V rail is what the sonnet needs to work

[Motormouth]

All the Power Macs of the time after the first generation NuBus Power Macs before the G3 (except the Power Mac 4400) used 5 volt FPM DIMMs. All the PowerPC CPUs of the time before the G3 took 3.3 or 2.5 volts. It's not surprising that an accelerator card for a Power Mac 7200 would take the same kind of memory as the Power Mac itself. Sonnet even advertised that you could take the memory from the motherboard and use it on the accelerator card.

I get the FPM (reminds me of the A3000).   But why mac uses the less common 5v than 3.3v.  If these were EDO they would be what servers used during that generation.
It is like they go out of way to be different just to be different.

Indeed, checked the PowerMac lot but nada

I did however get reminded of my http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_wgs/specs/mac_wgs_9650_350.html that I should give a better spot in my workroom :cool:

@DutchinUSA

Nice Machine!!!  I know this is an Amiga web site but you have to admire some high end macs builds from the 90s.

[Motormouth]

Nice site, @jack-3d!

+1

@jack-3D!
after seeing your site, I got a mediator a4000 MKIII V3.3.   I am going to try to get the Sonnet Crescendo 7200 PCI  from an old Mac 7200 (I guess that was obvious) working in the a4000.  I was opposite of most of you, I had the Crescendo but not the mediator.