[rescue] what can you do with an Apple Quadro 840AV

[Mark Benson]

The AV in 840av Stands for 'Audio Vusual'. The line was intended as an
early Apple stab at the sound and video editting market. It is a nice piece
if architecture, and showed what could be done with a 68040 and some Fu.

The DSP3210 does indeed work (somewhat) for video acceleration, principly
because that couldn't be done with a 68k aline at the time. If you throw in
8MB of VRAM and a Spigot PowerAV card in the DSP expansion slot it'll just
about handle standard definition at 24fps in and out. It's biggest flaw is,
however, the onboard narrow SCSI II is way to slow to handle the IO
throughput of the video, so to do anything meaningful you need a FWB
Jackhammer Wide SCSI card some fast 68-pin disks, and RAID 0.

If you're interested in upspeccing it let me know, I have all the cards and
software (mine died last year, I'd had it since Uni days) but honestly it's
probably better donated to someone more interested in it's kudos as a Mac,
because it's just a bog basic 68040 Mac in a badly designed case in most
other senses.

-- 

Mark Benson

On 24 Mar 2018 11:47, <luigi30 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, it had an AT&T DSP3210. I donb t think it was used for very much other
> than video decoding.
>
> As usual, it was offered to Commodore by AT&T for the Amiga 3000 but they
> fucked it up somehow and Apple ended up with it.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Mar 24, 2018, at 2:44 AM, Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at zill.net>
> wrote:
> >
> > didn't the 840AV have some onboard DSPs or something? They were used to
> accelerate... something?
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Steve Rikli" <sr at genyosha.net>
> > To: "The Rescue List" <rescue at sunhelp.org>
> > Sent: Friday, March 23, 2018 6:49:27 PM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain
> > Subject: Re: [rescue] what can you do with an Apple Quadro 840AV
> >
> >> On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 07:42:07PM -0500, William Barnett-Lewis wrote:
> >>> On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 7:23 PM, Patrick Giagnocavo <xemacs5 at gmail.com
> >
> wrote:
> >>> One of these sort of dropped into my lap (figuratively speaking).
> >>
> >> I was going to suggest A/UX but I see that model is not compatible.
> >> Incompatible with the MacIvory Symbolics Lisp Machine too.
> >>
> >> Mach Ten or find a copy of Macintosh Common Lisp for 68k?
> >>
> >> Play obscure old games?
> >>
> >> Donate to a Macintosh museum?
> >>
> >> It was the fastest 68k machine Apple made but there's really nothing
> >> all that special anymore that can only be done with them.
> >
> > NetBSD is a possibility if you're looking for a Unix-like OS, and
> > the 840AV is listed as a supported model:
> >
> > http://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/
> > _______________________________________________
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