Sonnet crescendo 7200 on Amiga

[Iggy]

As these cards are virtually unobtainable I still wonder where this is going.
What next, build more Sonnet 7200s?

[Iggy]

@Niding

I get where he is coming from.
Personally I think it would be a neat option.
But I cannot find ANY of these boards in working order.

For those who have working Sonnet 7200s, and are pursuing this I can see the point of getting it working from a hobbyist standpoint.

But without the Sonnet boards, those following this that
want to duplicate it may be in for a disappointment.

[Iggy]

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).

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

[Iggy]

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.

Get ready to be inundated by requests that you sell the card.

[Iggy]

@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.

You lucked out, your's works.
I can't find Mac 7200, let alone upgraded 7200s.
And the Sonnet boards I can find are all 'as is'.

[Iggy]

Funnily enough I bought one of these ages ago for two reasons. The first and silly reason was because this was the device that was used in the Shark PPC advertising. The second reason was because I could always reuse it to boost the power to a 7200 if I wanted to run BeOS on it.

The second reason was a folly for two reasons. Turns out I no longer owned a 7200. I had given it away and I mistakenly thought you could run BeOS on a 7200 when it was the 7300 it worked on (I still have one of those).

I didn't mind since I paid like $25 for it. It's been sitting on a shelf for ages gathering dust. Now maybe I could put it to good use! Except I don't have a Mediator board just a Prometheus. I seem to have very weird luck.

Now that you have brought them up, wouldn't the 7300 be a more powerful board to port something to?

[Iggy]

Sorry these are not compatible ones. You need Sonnet Crescendo 7200 models.

And those are made with unobtainium.
Now that we know these work, why isn't anyone trying to reverse engineer them?

They are obviously the fastest PPC option for legacy systems.
And if new cards could be built, there are faster G3 processors that could be used.

The only problem I see is the limited number of WarpOS titles.

But its damned cool to see a legacy system cranking away like that!

[Iggy]

Would Sonnet consider publishing the board layout? The thing is old and most likely publishing will not really harm sales of their current portfolio?

Ask them. They can reply positively, ignore you or turn you down, but it can't hurt to ask.

[Iggy]

talk to people who buy them. you think they care of your approval?

Still doesn't makes them NOT greedy f*cks. :roflmao:

overall sonnes doesnt seem to have much edge on cyberstorm, according to your tests. the one signifficant thing is video playback, which differs so much likely because cyberstorm needs to feed data via pio zorro3 to mediator pci bus rtg card while sonnet can use dma to that rtg card directly/locally on pci.

Look like a pretty significant advantage to me.
And that's just a G3 cpu, imagine what a G4 would perform like, especially since they can run 2 or 3 times faster.

Again, an updated version of this card would be SO cool.

[Iggy]

Ratte and Mastatabs from a1k.org are working on that..... it´s done, when it´s done......

VERY cool!

Imagine how that could help unify the OS3.X and OS4 communities.
WarpOS, possibly OS4, much better Linux capability.

Even with significantly less software support, I'd prefer this approach over something like the Vampire.
It appeals to the hacker in me.

Come to think of it, the two are NOT mutually exclusive and COULD be installed on the same system.

Legacy hardware add-ons that let those systems kick ass?
Why TF not?

Why don't we have people like that working over in this forum? :laughing:

They are in the community, why do they have to be part of the forum?
The problem is they aren't too into sharing.

[Iggy]

...#NoHitlerReferences  :lol:

Why NOT?
Doesn't everything derisive HAVE to degenerate into those? :hammer:

On Germans, many DO speak English (the ratio is far higher than people who's native tongue is English that speak German).
I exchange messages with Germans all the time on MorphZone.

And there IS Google Translate.

Anyway, they build these and I'LL join THEM, its more attractive to me than an A500 motherboard.

[Iggy]

They're the master race when it comes to Amiga hardware. It can't be denied
Mind you, the Poles are pretty impressive too when it comes to Amigas.

Mark "Bigfoot" Olsen is a Belgian native, although he now lives in South Africa. Frank Mariak (who I've mentioned here before) is German. And other members of the MorphOS development team live in Canada, Poland, and a multitude of other locations.

So our team (while there ARE some Germans) comes from all over the globe.

But you're right, :laugh1:, the Germans DO kind of rule Europe now.