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hyteckit · Dec 4, 2007, 04:18 AM

Dude, you guys are killing me with the RAM doubler and shufflepuck. Shufflepuck is awesome! I meant was. Sweet battlechest.

Kevin · Dec 4, 2007, 06:52 AM

Originally Posted by hyteckit

Dude, you guys are killing me with the RAM doubler and shufflepuck. Shufflepuck is awesome! I meant was. Sweet battlechest.

RAM doubler and Speed doubler actually worked though. Modem Doubler was a hoax.

I knew the guy that wrote it.

Mastrap · Dec 4, 2007, 07:47 AM

Originally Posted by Kevin

RAM doubler and Speed doubler actually worked though.

Heh. A review from 1996 agrees with you:

The prices of RAM have been greatly reduced in recent months. They have come down so much, that for many machines, RAM Doubler costs the same as 8MB of real RAM. If you have 8MB or less of RAM, and there is space in your Mac, it is probably better to buy more real RAM than to invest in RAM Doubler, as you most likely want to allocate more memory to one application. The same advice holds true for PowerPC Macs that have less than 16 MB of RAM. However, if you already have enough memory to allocate to a single RAM hungry application, RAM Doubler 2 is your best choice for increasing your memory. It will seamlessly allow you to run additional applications, and is much more cost effective than investing in real memory.

RAM Doubler 2 is clearly the next best thing to real RAM. It seems very stable — even more so than the previous version. In fact, I have not crashed since installing it two weeks ago. While in certain situations with a small amount of real RAM, it isn't as useful as real memory, it is an indispensable utility in most other situations. If you want to run more programs simultaneously, or to reduce the RAM requirements of native applications without using hard disk space, you won't find a better buy than RAM Doubler 2.

I was thinking about that when I was installing 3GB of RAM (cost me under $100) into the iMac last week.

moonmonkey · Dec 4, 2007, 08:34 AM

Try this
TaskMaker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kevin · Dec 4, 2007, 06:24 PM

Originally Posted by Mastrap

Heh. A review from 1996 agrees with you:

I had them installed on a old Performa that would TOP OUT at 64megs. And RAM wasn't nearly as CHEAP as it in now when those products was out.

RAM doubler used some kind of virtual memory magic, and I have no idea how speed doubler made things faster, but it did.

nonhuman · Dec 4, 2007, 06:31 PM

Originally Posted by Kevin

I have no idea how speed doubler made things faster, but it did.

It turned off the debug code.

Gankdawg · Dec 4, 2007, 08:23 PM

I forgot about another Doubler: Startup.

- - e r i k - - · Dec 5, 2007, 03:28 AM

Speed doubler did some cache-magic. Not far from what OS X does now

hyteckit · Dec 5, 2007, 04:18 AM

A lot of the tricks of RAM doubler and Speed doubler was made obsolete with OS 9.

Person Man · Dec 5, 2007, 10:33 AM

Originally Posted by Kevin

I had them installed on a old Performa that would TOP OUT at 64megs. And RAM wasn't nearly as CHEAP as it in now when those products was out.

RAM doubler used some kind of virtual memory magic, and I have no idea how speed doubler made things faster, but it did.

RAM Doubler was a better implementation of virtual memory than what Apple had at the time. For instance, turning on virtual memory in the operating system reserved a (what was at the time) huge chunk of the hard drive for the swap file. The file was there whether it was used or not. So if you had a 1 Gig hard drive and 128 MB of RAM, turning on Apple's VM meant that at least 129 MB of the hard drive was eaten up. That was 1/8 of the available space. Increase the VM to 256 MB and 1/4 of your hard drive was taken. And PowerPC applications ran more efficiently (and took less memory) when VM was on, so you were damned if you did and damned if you didn't. Enter RAM Doubler. RAM Doubler did not allocate an always there swap file. And when it did need to use the hard drive, it only took what it needed. So you got the best of both worlds.

Speed Doubler, along with caching frequently used files (again replacing Apple's less efficient disk cache system), also had a much faster file copy routine (Copy Doubler, anyone?) that was much better than the Finder of its era.

Kevin · Dec 5, 2007, 10:42 AM

Yeah I had both programs running on my old performa. It was 75mhz? and had 64m of RAM TOPPED out.

Not to mention a 1g hard drive.

Person Man · Dec 5, 2007, 12:12 PM

Originally Posted by Kevin

Yeah I had both programs running on my old performa. It was 75mhz? and had 64m of RAM TOPPED out.

Not to mention a 1g hard drive.

Yep. I had a Power Macintosh 7600/120 back in 1996. At the time it had a 1.25 GB hard drive and 32 MB of RAM. Over the 5 years that it was my main machine I had changed the processor to a 300 MHz G3, increased the RAM to 128 MB, added a Zip Drive and an external 6 GB hard drive. Then when I got my QuickSilver Power Mac G4 867 MHz in 2001 the 7600 went to my parents, until early 2004 when I got my Power Mac G5. Then my brother got my G4, and our parents got his Blue and White 350 MHz G3. And the 7600 came back to me.

Today the 7600 has the 300 MHz G3 card, the original 1.25 GB hard drive, an additional 2 GB internal hard drive, an 8x CD-ROM drive instead of the 4x it started with and 176 MB of RAM. I have System 7.5.5 on one drive and 9.1 (hacked with some 9.2.2 components) on the other. And I use it for old software and games that won't run on my newer hardware. And it still has RAM Doubler on it.