croissantking
Well-known member
Right, following on from the discussion in the PowerMac forum, this project deserves its own thread.
Later revisions of the Personality card (Whisper, Wings and Bordeaux) that comes with every Beige G3 have footprints for a single USB 1.1 socket and supporting circuitry, similar to that found on early USB PCI cards.
Prototype machines have been seen with this USB socket, but no production machines ever had it installed. We don't know if it was at one point planned for the beige to have built-in USB, or if the footprint was meant solely for developement.
I have a soft spot for the Beige and was thrilled to find it has this 'secret', hidden feature and given nobody else has tried to get it working (afaik) I'm jumping in.
Over the past few days I've been attempting to understand the footprint better and thinking about how to populate it correctly as we don't have any kind of reference.
I have selected a Belkin PCI card that I got for £2 off eBay as a parts donor, since its CMD 0670 chip is pin compatible with the Opti Firelink that's used in the early iMacs and B/W G3s. I have also seen this 0670 chip in a prototype iMac that was featured on Krazy Ken's Tech Talk on Youtube. I felt it was safe to assume that the Personality card's footprint would be designed around one of these chips.
This evening I decided to desolder the 0670 and fit it to the Whisper card with a few supporting filter capacitors.
First boot attempt was a no-go, got a chime but then no picture and no boot. Examined the chip and noticed a solder bridge between an address line AD24 and an adjacent VSS (hope this didn't damage anything). I cleaned this up and then the Mac booted just fine. This is what ASP shows:
It's detected, and shows the same info that it did when it was on the original PCI card. So this is a big success. It's interesting to see 'Slot PERCH' in the list of PCI devices, I don't think that's ever generally been seen before. There is no USB bus shown at the top of the window, but maybe I'd have to populate more of the supporting circuitry to get that to show?
I am going to continue working on this and posting further updates. I hope there's some interest from the rest of the community - but if not I will do it for my own pleasure anyway
Later revisions of the Personality card (Whisper, Wings and Bordeaux) that comes with every Beige G3 have footprints for a single USB 1.1 socket and supporting circuitry, similar to that found on early USB PCI cards.
Prototype machines have been seen with this USB socket, but no production machines ever had it installed. We don't know if it was at one point planned for the beige to have built-in USB, or if the footprint was meant solely for developement.
I have a soft spot for the Beige and was thrilled to find it has this 'secret', hidden feature and given nobody else has tried to get it working (afaik) I'm jumping in.
Over the past few days I've been attempting to understand the footprint better and thinking about how to populate it correctly as we don't have any kind of reference.
I have selected a Belkin PCI card that I got for £2 off eBay as a parts donor, since its CMD 0670 chip is pin compatible with the Opti Firelink that's used in the early iMacs and B/W G3s. I have also seen this 0670 chip in a prototype iMac that was featured on Krazy Ken's Tech Talk on Youtube. I felt it was safe to assume that the Personality card's footprint would be designed around one of these chips.
This evening I decided to desolder the 0670 and fit it to the Whisper card with a few supporting filter capacitors.
First boot attempt was a no-go, got a chime but then no picture and no boot. Examined the chip and noticed a solder bridge between an address line AD24 and an adjacent VSS (hope this didn't damage anything). I cleaned this up and then the Mac booted just fine. This is what ASP shows:
It's detected, and shows the same info that it did when it was on the original PCI card. So this is a big success. It's interesting to see 'Slot PERCH' in the list of PCI devices, I don't think that's ever generally been seen before. There is no USB bus shown at the top of the window, but maybe I'd have to populate more of the supporting circuitry to get that to show?
I am going to continue working on this and posting further updates. I hope there's some interest from the rest of the community - but if not I will do it for my own pleasure anyway
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