Re: Ultrawarp...

[Hugh Hood <hughhood@earthlink.net>]

Jonas,

I must second what Michael said regarding power consumption and heat
generation by the card. Less is more.

My understanding (from Drew 'RamFAST' Vogan) is that a card designed for
reliable operation in all vintages of the IIe must deal with a somewhat
noisy bus, and thus can't be super low power, but I'd still prefer in a new
design something more efficient than the Titan Accelerator IIe and AE
Transwarp were. 

IIRC, those pulled 500mA on the 5 Volt line (or was it 12). They did get
pretty warm, and when used with multiple cards, could tax a power supply.

Also, (and I may be the only one who requests this), I'd like to see some
method by which the card could be made aware of the presence of a
bank-switched language card style RAM card in one of the slots (e.g. Saturn
128K Ram Card or Titan 128K Ram Card).

The (2) accelerators mentioned above supported this with a jumper block (or
was it a DIP switch) where the jumper was removed for the slot corresponding
to the slot in which the bank-switched card was installed. The accelerator
would slow down when addresses in the range $D000-$FFFF were referenced with
the slot RAM card enabled. The Titan manual phrased it as 'slowing down one
cycle', but I don't quite understand what is happening there.

Granted, not many software programs used the 128K bank-switched boards, but
I still use one, hence my selfish interest in this feature.

Remember, you asked.

Concerning price, I'd say my max would be $200.00 provided the bank-switched
RAM card recognition feature is implemented, and that the thing wouldn't fry
an egg on the IIe lid. <grin>





Hugh Hood







in article 698889947387072371.698599mjmahon-aol.com@news.giganews.com,
Michael J. Mahon at mjmahon@aol.com wrote on 4/7/13 7:08 PM:

> STYNX <stynx@gmx.de> wrote:
>> Disclaimer
>> -------------
>> Im not in any kind directly involved with the development of the
>> Ultrawarp, nor do i have anything to say regarding the pricing of
>> anything Michael might actually produce.
>> --------------
>> 
>> Since the big problem with the RamFast has been solved i can move forward
>> to test the next batch of Cards.
>> 
>> I just wanted to ask everyone how much an Apple II Accelerator should
>> cost. Im just curious what the community thinks...The last Ultrawarp
>> Michael auctioned on eBay went for >300$ and that was the older 8Mhz model.
>> 
>> My card gets to 16.667Mhz and has 128k memory. It behaves like an
>> advanced Accelerator //e. The "final" Ultrawarp might have more/better
>> features in the future.
>> 
>> 1. what should a Ultrawarp cost
>> 2. what features do you want/need
>> 
>> Thanks in advance ;-)
>> 
>> -Jonas
> 
> One of the problems of the TransWarp was that it was a power hog, and
> therefore hot. 
> 
> How does the Ultrawarp compare in power requirements?  (This is an area
> where modern technology should help.)
> 
> -michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon