Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!apple!rutgers!netnews.upenn.edu!eniac.seas.upenn.edu!jeff
From: jeff@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Jeff White)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: How do you determine which cpu upgrades are "Sys 7 compatible"
Summary: No way for sure to know
Message-ID: <25303@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 27 May 90 17:08:37 GMT
References: <628@seila.UUCP>
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Reply-To: jeff@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Jeff White)
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Lines: 35

In article <628@seila.UUCP> johnt@seila.UUCP (john grant) writes:
>
>	Most advertisers of Mac CPU upgrades now tout "makes your system
>ready for system 7" as one of the main reasons for upgrading your cpu.  Given
>that system 7 is still a long way from public release, how can you tell which.
>ones will & will not be supported.  Given that Connectix has had some 
>difficulty catering to all the different boards out there, how is Apple going
>to fare ?
>
>	I am still using my Prodigy accelerated SE, but as this is now dis-
>continued (pity, it still looks to be one of the better accelerators) I fear
>that I might lose all VM support when System 7 finally arrives;  I have been
>looking at the Dove 030 board as a replacement, it claims the Sys 7 compat-
>ibility, but already has far more hardware incompatibilities than the Levco.

  Unfortunately, as my summary line says, I doubt there's any sure way to 
know what will and will not work.  System still seems to be in early alpha
releases (from what I read) that there may be time to incorporate support for
them before the official release, while there's also enough time for them
to decide to pull it out because it is causing more problems for them.
  The Connectix issue is a different one because that's a 3rd party company
modifying their product for other 3rd party companies.  I can't see Apple
having different versions of the System and Finder (or even drivers) for 
hardware that isn't their own.  At best, they should include enough hooks so
that a 3rd party accelerator, with maybe the need of it's own init driver (like
the current accelerators use) would make it work properly.
  I'm not even sure whether Apple would want to make 3rd party support of acc.
cards available.  On the one hand, they would certainly anger a lot of people
who want to migrate to System 7.0 and not make a huge investment for it.  On the
other hand, Apple is in the business of selling hardware, and all those (angry)
people who own Pluses and SE'will be forced into buying new 030/7.0 capable
machines.

						Jeff White
						jeff@eniac.seas.upenn.edu