Silicon Image SIL3112 Flashing: Easier Way Using flashrom

[lmartu]

Here are photos. View attachment 67635View attachment 67636View attachment 67637View attachment 67638View attachment 67639View attachment 67640

Hello !
A bit late to the game but I got one of the cards yesterday (branded Conceptronic) for the princely sum of 9 euros shipped. I managed to flash it on card using the guide on Tinker Different (Seritek flasher on OS 9.2.2 with 128k Roms) and it works great. The tinker different procedure is exactly the same as the one posted here AFAIK.

 

[zefrenchtoon]

Hello everyone!
I will create a dedicated trading post ASAP but to let you know, I've got 7 Adaptec 1210SA cards to sell ... As I'm in France, I prefer to send in EU (can send easily in UK in september too)

 

[lmartu]

@zefrenchtoon how much are you Asking for them?

 

[zefrenchtoon]

Desoldered pin 8 (VCC) of the 24WC02 and the card changed identity to 1095:3112 and started to work (since I'd flashed it before). So, if you have a 1210SA and want it to work on a Mac, remove or disable the 24WC02!

So the answer to 1. is yes!

Hi Carlito !
Do you know if this is true for Adaptec 1205 too or not ?

 

[zefrenchtoon]

@zefrenchtoon how much are you Asking for them?

I’m sorry I did not see your question !!
Since then, I did a trading post for them and they are all reserved. Stay in touch if I can get one more for you.

 

[autoexec1]

can someone Build me the latest compressed image for flashing on 128k rom with Flashrom?

 

[drjohnnyfever]

I just have to say bravo to dosdude1.

I have one of these el-cheapo Sil3112 cards you can get for $12 with an AM28F010 eeprom and an MDD G4 that wants to lean how to boot SATA.

I desoldered the eeprom, popped it in my TL866CS, programmed it up with his 128kb rom and resoldered it back on the card and it just freakin' works. Fantastic.

 

[Schorschinjo]

Me is another one sayin thanks!

It was pretty easy converting a SATA controller to a Mac version, that can boot!

Grabbed two "Adaptec AAR-1210SA 2xSATA RAID Adapter Board PCI Controller Card", flashed it with the patched flasher from dosdude1, clipped pin 8, attached a Samsung Evo 840, installed OS, booted off that drive. All that in a PowerMac9600 (350 MHz model, but with G3 450MHz card).

The machine already has an Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller with a decent SCSI hard drive attached.
Just a quick bench with Hard Disk Toolkit 4.5.2:
The SATA Samsung Evo 840 on the flashed Adaptec 1210SA reads slightly above 20 MB/s, writes with slightly above 30 MB/s.
The SCSI Fujitsu MAP3735 on the Adaptec 2940 reads and writes around 35MB/s.
Other SCSI drives attached to the 9600 internal SCSI bus top out at 8 and 6 MB/s.

With the 30MB/s of the SATA SSD in the 9600, if everything is ported from the SCSI drive of the 9600 to the new SATA storage, I will remove/detach the SCSI drives and enjoy a much quieter 9600, than the buzzing of the four SCSI drives.

Will try the second SATA controller in a G4 level Mac (probably the MDD or the pimped 1.8GHz Sawtooth) to see, if the SATA controller can go any further than 30 MB/s.


Thanks to dosdude1 for making this possible!

 

[zefrenchtoon]

Hi everyone !

I've grabbed 2 noname Sil3112 with a ICE27C010 EPROM chip for very cheap.

Do you think I can flash them in any way to use them on a Mac ?

 

[dosdude1]

Hi everyone !

I've grabbed 2 noname Sil3112 with a ICE27C010 EPROM chip for very cheap.

Do you think I can flash them in any way to use them on a Mac ?

At the very worst case you can desolder the EEPROMs and flash them using an EEPROM programmer. Best case, you can simply flash on-board using Flashrom or my patched SeriTek updating utility under OS 9. I can’t find a datasheet for that EEPROM from a quick search, but if it supports 5V programming, you are probably good to flash on-board.

 

[Carlito]

I just bought a Mac mini G4 1.5 GHz that I'm about to install OS 9 on. For obvious reasons a SIL3112 card is not an option. The goto solution is an mSATA to 44-pin IDE-adapter. For fun I also got a 44-pin to 40-pin IDE-adapter so I could do some benchmarks in my 1.25 GHz SP MDD G4. Results of the benchmarks:

With the flashed 1210SA:


With the mSata to IDE 44 to IDE 40 adapters on the ATA-100 port:


It's obviously 20 MB/sec slower, but the looking at the graphs the reading looks a bit more stable. I don't know if it really matters.

Here are some reasons why I consider changing to the IDE instead from SIL3112:
- I always get the message that the computer wasn't correctly shut down on boot. Maybe depends on the (too) fast shutdowns, I know this has been discussed somewhere.
- I have a MOTU 424 PCI-card that is fully equipped with 4 MOTU 2408s. I wonder if the fact that the SIL3112 also is on the PCI bus could cause any "saturation" problems?
- The sustained write is better on the IDE. I guess that's important when recording audio.

I'll probably do some real life testing in Logic some time in the future that will decide if I'll do the switch.

Either way, here's a look at the IDE stuff:

 

[Schorschinjo]

Grabbed two "Adaptec AAR-1210SA 2xSATA RAID Adapter Board PCI Controller Card", flashed it with the patched flasher from dosdude1, clipped pin 8, attached a Samsung Evo 840, installed OS, booted off that drive. All that in a PowerMac9600 (350 MHz model, but with G3 450MHz card).

With the 30MB/s of the SATA SSD in the 9600, if everything is ported from the SCSI drive of the 9600 to the new SATA storage, I will remove/detach the SCSI drives and enjoy a much quieter 9600, than the buzzing of the four SCSI drives.

To resume the story of my PowerMac 9600, as I had some time during the holidays to continue investigations regarding the issue, that I encountered in October:

All the Classic MacOSes boot and run fine, no matter if installed on the SCSI HD or the SATA SSD. But when I try to boot into the SCSI 10.2.8, the machine stops booting at some early point.

When I try to install a fresh 10.2.8 onto the SATA-SSD with the help of XPostFacto and its default settings, the reboot process of the installation also seems to stop at the same point, but as the console prints throughout the whole boot process, it carries probably some more details. Therefore I added commented screenshots of the latter process.

... screenshot continued...

I suspect, that the term "OpenOldWorldNVRAM: Saved New World NVRAM partition at 0 is too long" might be the problem. But I have no idea, what this means or how to come across this. (Not sure, if this is really the problem, as in the working boot process from SCSI HD, without SATA controller, booting does not show console lines)

I tried removing the SCSI disks (2 on the internal controller, two on the 2940) and the 2940 SCSI controller, but it leads to the same result: Installation of Jaguar onto the SATA SSD stops already during reboot, before starting the Jaguar installer.

What does change the situation is removing the SATA controller: With only the SCSI HD drives, Jaguar boots fine again.

What does not change the situation is adding another SATA SSD and trying to install Jaguar to a dedicated partition of that added drive.

Could it be, that the SATA controller causes "New World NVRAM partition at 0" being too long? And what does it mean and how can I help it?

Thanks for any hints!

 

[joevt]

The sixty6 message happens because AppleGrandCentral kext added sixty6 (for control video support) only to the device plane of the IO Registry. It's not in the IOService plane, therefore, AppleGrandCentral should not call registerService for this entry.

Kexts that begin with "Apple" are originally from Apple open source. They may exist in the XPostFacto with modifications for later Mac OS X versions or to fix bugs.

Kexts that begin with "Open" are from XPostFacto. OpenOldWorldNVRAM is used for translating between Old World and New World NVRAM formats. The mostly unused 4K part of Old World NVRAM is used for storing New World NVRAM stuff.

I don't think either of the two should affect SATA support.

You said internal SCSI works during the installation part? Did it install onto the SATA?
The debug log says you're trying to boot from internal SCSI. Is it supposed to boot from SATA? Maybe you can boot back into OS 9, then set the SATA to boot? I forget the proper steps for installing a new OS with XPostFacto.

 

[Schorschinjo]

You said internal SCSI works during the installation part? Did it install onto the SATA?
The debug log says you're trying to boot from internal SCSI. Is it supposed to boot from SATA? Maybe you can boot back into OS 9, then set the SATA to boot? I forget the proper steps for installing a new OS with XPostFacto.

Thanks for your insights! Need to google a little to understand more of it.

Installing and booting into 10.2.8 succeeds, if only the SCSI part is active and the SATA controller is removed. Even if the SATA controller is present, but not used, whilst booting Jaguar from the SCSI hard drive, booting stops at the upmentioned point.


Booting from SATA (into Jaguar) can not be done, as prior installation onto SATA does not succeed.
Neither with (SATA-(SSD and controller) and SCSI-(HDD and controller)) installed,
nor with (SATA-(SSD and controller) and SCSI-(HDD and onboard-controller)) installed,
nor with SATA-(SSD and controller)-only installed.

Trying to boot from SCSI ("From path: "scsi-int/@3:9"") would mean that the installation is tried from the SCSI-CD-ROM drive, as this drive is SCSI ID 3 on bus 0 (the internal SCSI bus), right?

I tried booting into 9.2.2 on the SATA-SSD, start XPostFacto there and tried to install onto the SSD-SATA partition dedicated for 10.2.8. Nothing really different, when I look at it:

The additional settings in XPF (the green moirée was not really there ):


The XPF general settings before hitting the "Install from CD ..."-button:


First part of the following boot process before installation starts:


Seconds part of the boot process before installation starts:

The content is (from what I see) exactly the same as before, when I initiated XPF from the 9.2.2 installation on the SCSI HD.

Another Idea was to remove the Keyspan USB/FireWire combo controller, as it is not in use anyway. Unfortunately, this lead to the same result:


Any more hints?

Thanks in advance and a good end of this year and a happy new year to everyone!

 

[joevt]

The backtrace via exception chain seems to indicate an infinite recursion problem - all the addresses are 0x219edc.

Have you read this?
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2063/_index.html
Your issue doesn't look like a kernel panic though since there's no kext information.

What CPU does your 9600 have?

Maybe you can try Panther or Tiger install?

Maybe enable kprintf and some other debug options? With serial port (modem) connection to another Mac or PC?

 

[Schorschinjo]

The backtrace via exception chain seems to indicate an infinite recursion problem - all the addresses are 0x219edc.

Have you read this?
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2063/_index.html
Your issue doesn't look like a kernel panic though since there's no kext information.

What CPU does your 9600 have?

Maybe you can try Panther or Tiger install?

Maybe enable kprintf and some other debug options? With serial port (modem) connection to another Mac or PC?

Thanks for another hint with the TechNote. Unfortunately my knowledge is not deep enough to derive something from it related to the situation of my PM9600..

The used CPU is a Sonnet G3@450MHz upgrade driven (under MacOS7.5.5-9.2.2 by the PowerLogix Cache Profiler driver as the Sonnet one seemed to be unstable.)

In my next session, I will try, if the issue changes, when I replace the Adaptec SATA controller by an original Seritek (eSATA, that is). And the hint with Panther/Tiger is worth trying as well. If this doesn't help, I'll try enabling the debug prints in XPF. I will come back, when I gained relevant clues...

 

[Nycturne]

For anybody reading this in the future, I recommend using the Diodes Incorporated AP7361C-33E voltage regulator, and not the MIC29150 that was suggested earlier. The MIC29150 will work, but it's the wrong size and the wrong package. The AP7361C-33E is an exact drop-in replacement, and it's readily available at electronics suppliers for 60 cents.

I know this is an older post, but are you sure the bolded is the right part? I bought a couple based on this recommendation before realizing it has a 6V max rating, versus the 12-15V rating of the original. I didn’t realize the difference until after I put the DI regulator onto the board and it destroyed itself.

I’m back on the original regulator and the card is working, but I need to do some testing before I try again. I am wondering if this regulator is fed from the +12V pin instead of +5V. If that’s the case, we need a different regulator.