Installation was a breeze, helped by the fact that the Color Classic’s motherboard slides right out the back door. One complaint about Sonnet’s discontinued Presto accelerator card was that it wouldn’t work with extra VRAM in a Color Classic, so if you had upgraded from 256 KB to 512 KB (no Rage 128 Pro here!) to get 16-bit color on the 512 x 384 screen, it would cut you back to 8 bits however, this problem is fixed with the new card, and it also has no trouble with my enhanced-resolution 640 x 480 screen (hacked by MicroMac), though of course the extra VRAM gives me only 8-bit color (instead of 4-bit) at this higher resolution. I had understood that the 32 MB SIMM would be soldered to the expansion card, but to my relatively unsophisticated eye it looks like it is in a perfectly normal slot and could be swapped for a bigger one. The Presto Plus is an upgrade for a variety of 6800 machines with LC Processor Direct Slots (PDS) on their motherboards it adds a 66/0 with or without a floating-point unit (I bought the version with one), 32 MB of memory, and 10Base-T Ethernet.įor machines like my Color Classic that have a built-in restriction on the amount of memory the computer can use (10 MB, in my case – even if you install 12 MB and have 32-bit addressing turned on), the extra memory and the hacks Sonnet came up with that enable the machine to use it are especially welcome.
It’s a winner in my book, well worth the wait (it was announced in July 1998 for May 1999 delivery, but the first production run is just now shipping). Yesterday I received my eagerly-awaited Presto Plus from Sonnet I promptly canceled my other plans for the evening and started playing with it in my Color Classic.
0 kommentar(er)
