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| Daystar Genesis MP (again!) | |
| Posted by: Compgeke on 2021-09-18 20:02:48 Somehow I have insane luck, because I've picked up another Quad CPU Daystar. This one's a Quad 132! Here's a link to the first one: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?thr...f-pci-macs-daystar-millennium-quad-604.31811/  This machine is a Daystar Genesis MP. It's a Quad CPU Macintosh clone from 1995.  Basically it's a Powermac 9500 in a fancy case with a giant CPU board. The logic board is actually an Apple produced Tsunami board. Some ugly is starting to show here, though.  This machine has suffered a battery leak! That's a big shame. This machine isn't too common. [img]https://i.imgur.com/t9Rol1l.jpg[/img] Yuck.  But wait, hold up. What's that? Another board? Remember what I said earlier about this being basically a 9500? Yup!  I just happened to have a CPUless and broken case 9500 in storage. It's a great donor to fix the Daystar.  With a new board in, here's what we've got. Much better.  The video card it came with is an ATI Mach 64. Kind of a meh card, but whatever, it's a framebuffer.  It also has an ATTO Fibre Channel attachment card. I bet this was used for video or something and needed fast disks. Unfortunately it came without a hard drive so no idea for sure.  Currently I'm formatting a new drive for the machine. One of the drive blanks has a broken tab and wobbles around so I'll throw this cool drive caddy with SCSI ID indicator in. It also means I don't have to drag rails out of the other one 🙂  Ultimately I want to try and run BeOS on this one. The first has the board that's specifically noted in the BeOS readme to not be supported. Being as this has a literal 9500 Tsunami board, it should work I hope. | |
| Posted by: Nathan_A on 2021-09-18 21:00:56 There aren't enough shades of green to capture my degrees of envy. | |
| Posted by: ScutBoy on 2021-09-19 07:43:42 I run BeOS on my Daystar Quad and it rocks! | |
| Posted by: herd on 2021-09-19 07:51:27 That's pretty neat; I've never heard of a quad before. What does the CPU board look like? | |
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2021-09-19 08:20:07I run BeOS on my Daystar Quad and it rocks! What version and how did you get it installed? I had a brief go at installing off the media I have here on mine, but I couldn't get anywhere. (Admittedly, I didn't spend very long on it) | |
| Posted by: Compgeke on 2021-09-19 13:42:41 I managed to get R5 installed on mine no issues. I believe the usual issue is there's an R5 .iso floating around that isn't multisession, so parts go missing. the .ccd/.img image works fine.  | |
| Posted by: cheesestraws on 2021-09-19 13:47:47 Ahhhh. I was trying 4.5, as that's what I have a "real" boxed copy of and I thought it might save a certain amount of mucking about. | |
| Posted by: Nathan_A on 2021-09-19 14:39:34 I just scored a weird CPU upgrade card I came across that's a dual 200 Mhz 604e CPUs for PCI Power Macs. The Interware Booster MP 400. I originally got it just because it was so novel, but now I want to see if I can get it into a machine and run BeOS on it! | |
| Posted by: Compgeke on 2021-09-19 18:47:27 Oh man, I would do things for one of those or one of the Daystar nPower Dual CPU cards (or a 9500/9600 MP). I have a thing for these terrible machines. Speaking of terrible things, I've gotten it working pretty well.  | |
| Posted by: olePigeon on 2021-09-19 18:50:21 I miss BeOS. NO, Haiku is not the same. | |
| Posted by: olePigeon on 2021-09-19 18:50:55 Is the CPU card from the Apple-manufactured board hot swappable into a 8500/9500? | |
| Posted by: Compgeke on 2021-09-19 18:54:04 The Dual CPU, yes. The Quad CPU? No. The Quad needs an additional 3.3V power connector not present on the factory PSUs. | |
Posted by: Nathan_A on 2021-09-19 20:16:30The Dual CPU, yes. The Quad CPU? No. The Quad needs an additional 3.3V power connector not present on the factory PSUs.That seems like that could be remedied. I need to find a machine for the card to go in. I have a PowerTower Pro 250, but it already has an 800 Mhz G4 in it, and I have a PowerCenter 150 that's been upgraded to a 400 Mhz G3. The PowerCenter will only take low-profile cards, so it's out regardless. I was thinking about trying to put together a little 7500/7600 or something. I could put the Booster MP 200, the 1M L2 cache from the PTPro in there, and maybe toss in a Radius ThunderColor 30/1152 I have laying around to make a nice little BeOS and Classic Mac Photoshop plaything. | |
Posted by: CC_333 on 2021-09-19 20:38:38Oh man, I would do things for one of those or one of the Daystar nPower Dual CPU cards (or a 9500/9600 MP). I have a thing for these terrible machines.So it looks like it's running BeOS running Mac OS running Windows 3.1. Do they all run well? c | |
| Posted by: trag on 2021-09-20 08:18:57 Interesting to note that the original Daystar-shipped 9500 board lacks on-board ROMs. It looks like it has a ROM DIMM installed though. | |
| Posted by: IIfx on 2021-09-26 20:06:29 W3.1 under Mac OS under BeOS - some serious layer cake computing going on there! BeOS is SMP aware right? So it should be running quite well with that load. Reminds me of my SPARCStation 20 running MAE and SunPC (WfW3.11) at the same time with dual HyperSPARC's - same kind of layer cake computing, only SunPC is on a real 486 chip, but MAE is emulated. I miss my PM9500 - the horrible case was the cause of it's demise. The GenesisMP has no such issue and looks like a really nice machine overall. | |
| Posted by: olePigeon on 2021-09-29 11:07:41 9600 had one of the best cases. 6 slots, plenty of drive bays, easy access. | |
| Posted by: zackl on 2021-10-01 13:40:00 Love this thread - your photos from your thread on the 1st one are gone 🙁 - would you be able to re-up? | |
| Posted by: Angelgreat on 2021-10-01 14:21:25 Hey, for the battery-damaged motherboard, I'm sure that Mac84 can fix it. He can clean and fix any Mac motherboard. Also, I think Action Retro is looking for a Daystar Genesis MP, so maybe give one to him. | |
| Posted by: cheesestraws on 2021-10-01 15:05:54 Yes, mine will not boot BeOS even from that media. It's also got the Daystar silkscreened LB, so looks like I'm out of luck. Bum. :-( | |
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