Re: Looking for Info on this Accelerator Card

["Roger Johnstone" <bhmhome@es.co.nz>]

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In article <190819991716045820%news001@macgeek.org>, Alan Tuttle
<news001@macgeek.org> wrote:


>Hi, guys!
>
>I just purchased a Bell & Howell Apple II+. Inside of the computer has
>the following card:
>
>http://www.macgeek.org/identify/accelerator01.jpg (278KB file)
>
>Does anyone have any information about it? I found it sitting in slot
>4. How fast is it supposed to make the II+? I noticed there's a 65C02
>chip on the far right of the card, and the initials M.C.T on it. One of
>the ROMs has the sticker "MCT SpeedDemon".
>
>Thanks!

Hmm, I thought that looked familiar. I was looking through an old issue of
inCider (December 86) and they had a review of Apple II accelerators. The
SpeedDemon (version 3.03 anyway) cost US$189 in 1986. It was considered
cheap; the others in the review, the Titan Accelerator //e and Applied
Engineering Transwarp, were both $279. The reason it was cheaper (and
slower) was that it used cache RAM on the card to accelerate access to the
computer's slow memory. The other two used shadow RAM, where the memory
contents are copied to fast RAM on the accelerator's board, essentialy
replacing the Apple's memory with their own faster chips. Still the
SpeedDemon was supposed to speed up an Apple II by 2.2 times.

Roger Johnstone.