I have questions regarding 2 Wallstreet Crescendo G4 500 upgrade cards that I have. They both refuse to work in a number of Wallstreets that I have. Hopefully someone might be able to help me get some more life out of them.
Card #1 - makes the crashing glass sound. I have tried it in multiple Wallstreets that run with their original processors, swapped out the ram for the ram that was in each machine plus fresh ram, triple checked each time to make sure it was seated correctly, zapped the pram, done special Apple dance around the room wearing one sock, etc. Each time same result - crashing glass.
Card #2 - wouldn't boot in multiple machines. Just nothing. Same process usually as the one above, give or take a sock. Swapped it into a 250mhz machine about 4 weeks ago and it booted. Once. I did a double take, checked the system profiler and decided I finally found a match for it. Pulled the card, upgraded the ram, and it never booted again. Not the card, not the machine switching it back to its original configuration - I added it to my doorstop collection. It was the only 250 mhz machine that I had, so I can't repeat it. My thoughts on this are that it may be flashed for a particular bus speed - 83mhz instead of 66mhz.
I contacted Sonnet Technologies and they no longer have any technicians or equipment to handle such old technology. I was hoping they might be able to reset the cards.
Suggestions would be helpful and appreciated. Hopefully someone is still left here to give some meaningful advice.

Thermal paste? Reseat ZIF proc? Pray?

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Sometimes it is what it is...
and then there's times when it's really better.



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The original installation of the crescendo cards did involve flashing them with information from the cpu of the target machine. So a card configured for a Wallstreet generation I would be different than one configured for a Wallstreet generation II. Therefore a card flashed for one generation might not work for the other generation. I don't remember if this had to do with bus speed or something else, or if the incompatibility ran both ways.

Are you sure that your collection of machines represent machines from both generations? The 250 would be first generation, and so would a 292. The 300 and 266 would be second generation. The 233 could be either. Once upon a time, sonnet would reset the cards but that was a long time ago.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/19/2013 03:21PM by Janit.

I just took a look at our sponsors site under "accelerators", and it looks like they're no longer in the business of selling processor upgrades.

I wonder what they did with all of their remaining stock?

i'd check out lowendmac.com - you might find someone who has useful info.

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Yes, it's the flashing. Basically the accellerator companies figured out a process whereby they could copy the Apple ROMs from the OEM processor daughtercard into their own cards and thereby allow the device to operate properly.

Back in those days the Apple ROMs contained some of the low level boot code necessary to access various hardware components and the like. Open Firmware on later model PowerPC systems allowed this to be entirely software and ROM free but the Wallstreets were amongst the last generation of systems (along with the beige G3s) where the Open Firmware implementation was still incomplete and legacy hardware not to dissimilar from BIOS was required.

Or something like that.
g=