I don't think the upgrade board does anything but overclock the processor.
The glue chips on the board are probably just to handle the switching
between the two crystals by way of the power switch. My experience doesn't
match what you've said. I've been overclocking computers for years and you
rarely run into memory problems until you hit much higher overclock rates
than 2-5%. I remember bumping a 386 16 to 20Mhz with no problems. It would
almost run reliably at 24Mhz and I've done a lot of similar overclocks.
Years ago I doubled the speed of a Trash 80 Model 100 (I had to replace the
processor and the 600ns ROM but nothing else) and had an engineer on a
support forum for the machine kindly explain that what I had done was
impossible because of various component specs. I guess they thought I was
lying but I offered to have them see for themselves since some of them lived
within a reasonable drive but no one took me up on it. This 'impossible'
machine ran happily for many moons until it was retired to my 'museum',
though I still pull it out once in a while just to play with it. I think
you could probably just swap out the crystal in the Newt but you WOULD lose
the serial functionality (and ethernet and possibly modem, depending on the
devices used) and have squeeky sound. That's what's cool about the Pix
upgrade.
Jon.
-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Kummel [mailto:tech_ed@yahoo.com]
Sent: Saturday, April 01, 2000 12:32 AM
To: newtontalk@planetnewton.com
Subject: Re: NTLK Re : The Newton's Sucessor
I don't think that you can...I mean I don't think that
you could just "pop" in a crystal and go...the reason
is in the way that the Newt uses it's memory. If you
clock the Newt to a higher speed, you will reach a
threshold where the Newt will fail due to memory
timing anomolies...and that threshold will be quite
small, probably no greater than a 2-5% speed increase.
Not worth it. What makes the Impact 2000 upgrade work
is that it has buffer chips which aid in the memory
timing problems that you would run into. Also it seems
that the serial port is clocked to processor xtal
frequency, meaning that if you clock your Newt, you
will no longer be able to use your port for connecting
to your desktop machine. The Impact 2000 solves this
by having a second xtal on board that falls back to
the original speed in order to maintain compatibility.
ed
web/gadget guru
--- ZACINCCEO@aol.com wrote:
> How can I overclock my newton?
> -Zac
>
>
>
<snip>
=====
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