Some upgrades for the Quadra 950

Thanks to the ever generous Greg, I have received several NuBus cards to my Macintosh Quadra 950. They’re provided in a “unknown” state, so it’s going to be a fun job to install some of these and see what we can get working…

So what do we have here?

First up we have a generous helping of VRAM for the 950. This will bring my screen resolution and colour depth to maximum on the built in video.

Next up we have a pair of network cards. Both have 10_T connectors, which is good. This will allow me to get the 950 on the house network.

Next up we have a Lapis PROCOLORSERVER 8 II. Yep, bit of a mouthful. It’s a video card. There are drivers available for it. It is fully populated with RAM. So far I have not been able to find much more about it. Mysteeerious! I’m hoping it will feature some QuickTime acceleration on those two FPGAs.

Next up is a RasterOps accelerator. These things act as a cache. You stick RAM in the 30 pin SIMM sockets on the end and it can accelerate performance. No idea if it’ll make much of a difference. I’ll need to benchmark beforehand and afterwards.

Here’s a pretty standard RADIUS Pivot card. (A V2.6) This is a backup card “just in case”. RADIUS cards are well supported.

Finally the DigiDesign AUDIOMEDIA. This appears to be quite a competent sound card. Check out the white Motorola 56001 DSP chip! Hope I can get that working 🙂

I plan to install these upgrades one-by-one over several days. This way I’ll be able to test the cards without having to work out what is breaking things.