Silicon Image SIL3112 Flashing: Easier Way Using flashrom

[croissantking]

Confirmed!!
View attachment 59128
Here's my card :
View attachment 59129
Thank you @Carlito for showing us the way!

I’ve just bought one of these 1210SA after not having much luck with one of those Chinese no-name eBay cards. So I’ll hopefully be doing the little mod on it and getting it working soon. I notice it uses a different sort of flash chip than the usual PLCC.

 

[RunAway]

I ended up buying an Adaptec 1210SA, purely for aesthetic reasons is it possible to edit the strings in the rom file so they match the card and you get the correct data displayed by the OS?
In other words can I straight up edit those strings with an hex editor or are there checksums involved?

 

[croissantking]

I ended up buying an Adaptec 1210SA, purely for aesthetic reasons is it possible to edit the strings in the rom file so they match the card and you get the correct data displayed by the OS?
In other words can I straight up edit those strings with an hex editor or are there checksums involved?

Is that the data shown in System Profiler? Why is it incorrectly shown? What should it be?

 

[Phipli]

I’ve just bought one of these 1210SA after not having much luck with one of those Chinese no-name eBay cards. So I’ll hopefully be doing the little mod on it and getting it working soon. I notice it uses a different sort of flash chip than the usual PLCC.

The cheap £10 ones work just fine. I replace the chip with a 512kB chip of the same voltage that is on the list of approved chips, (or possibly use the firmware version that doesn't check the chip version), then desolder the original one and replace it with mine (preflashed in my TL866+). I have about 8 different brand SIL3112 cards, including a generic Chinese one in my B&W G3 as its primary boot interface for 9.2.2 and 10.3.

 

[croissantking]

The cheap £10 ones work just fine. I replace the chip with a 512kB chip of the same voltage that is on the list of approved chips, (or possibly use the firmware version that doesn't check the chip version), then desolder the original one and replace it with mine (preflashed in my TL866+). I have about 8 different brand SIL3112 cards, including a generic Chinese one in my B&W G3 as its primary boot interface for 9.2.2 and 10.3.

I got sent a faulty card.

 

[Phipli]

I got sent a faulty card.

Can I have it?

 

[croissantking]

Can I have it?

Sure, if you want, just cover P&P and I'll pop it in the post

 

[RunAway]

Just for the heck of it I tried modding one of those cheap SiI3112 cards that wasn't working at all in my QuickSilver after reading that the cause is the slow 3.3V regulator making the 1.8V feeding off of it lag just enough to break things (https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...-state-of-compatibility.1650568/post-31775847).

Since I don't have a FS8860 33C to try (a random one I had didn't work) I instead lifted the input of the 1.8V regulator to feed 5V to it directly and it works!
Unfortunately the 1.8V regulator gets quite toasty so I don't think this is a viable mod. I'll use the Adaptec card instead provided that one works of course...

 

[dosdude1]

I ended up buying an Adaptec 1210SA, purely for aesthetic reasons is it possible to edit the strings in the rom file so they match the card and you get the correct data displayed by the OS?
In other words can I straight up edit those strings with an hex editor or are there checksums involved?

Yeah, you can edit the PCI ROM header of the ROM image to match the values of the Adaptec card. Just requires a bit of hex editing, no checksums need to be updated after modifying that header. The strings in the actual FCode portion of the ROM cannot be modified without other work, though. You will need to update a checksum after doing so, but you also have to ensure the FCode image length and block allocation is updated appropriately in the PCI ROM header (if your string changes cause the size of the file to change).

 

[croissantking]

Yeah, you can edit the PCI ROM header of the ROM image to match the values of the Adaptec card. Just requires a bit of hex editing, no checksums need to be updated after modifying that header. The strings in the actual FCode portion of the ROM cannot be modified without other work, though. You will need to update a checksum after doing so, but you also have to ensure the FCode image length and block allocation is updated appropriately in the PCI ROM header (if your string changes cause the size of the file to change).

Interesting you can do this. Personally I would not bother - after all most of the other PCI cards I own have quite messy strings for example the Rage Pro onboard graphics on my beige G3 which displays as ATY,GT-B or something like this. But we all enjoy different aspects of our setups, so fair enough

 

[RunAway]

Yeah, you can edit the PCI ROM header of the ROM image to match the values of the Adaptec card. Just requires a bit of hex editing, no checksums need to be updated after modifying that header. The strings in the actual FCode portion of the ROM cannot be modified without other work, though. You will need to update a checksum after doing so, but you also have to ensure the FCode image length and block allocation is updated appropriately in the PCI ROM header (if your string changes cause the size of the file to change).

Ah thank you. I'll let it be then, I'll just not look at the System Profiler too much...
I got the card today and it works perfectly so thanks for your work on patching the firmware and flasher

 

[RunAway]

Is that the data shown in System Profiler? Why is it incorrectly shown? What should it be?

Since the patched firmware is from a SeriTek card once flashed every card is displayed as a Seri-Tek152 but since it's actually an Adaptec 1210SA it'll be nice to see that shown in System Profiler.
Just a trivial aesthetic thing of course

 

[croissantking]

Since the patched firmware is from a SeriTek card once flashed every card is displayed as a Seri-Tek152 but since it's actually an Adaptec 1210SA it'll be nice to see that shown in System Profiler.
Just a trivial aesthetic thing of course

Yeah I totally understand. Speaking of aesthetics, I quite like the card itself, it’s a got a bit more character than the generic ones and seems good quality too (I hope it is).

I got mine boxed ‘as new’ and it came with three different SATA cables as well as two extra backplates for half height PCI slots. The CD-ROM, bizzarely, is completely scratched up and warped.

 

[RunAway]

Yeah I totally understand. Speaking of aesthetics, I quite like the card itself, it’s a got a bit more character than the generic ones and seems good quality too (I hope it is).

I got mine boxed ‘as new’ and it came with three different SATA cables as well as two extra backplates for half height PCI slots. The CD-ROM, bizzarely, is completely scratched up and warped.

Yeah Adaptec is a good brand name so it's not surprising the card is good.

The issue with the Quicksilver and the cheap black cards is so silly, never seen something like it, but oh well I'm glad I found this Adaptec card for cheap and locally.
These cheap SATA cards are awesome also for vintage PCs.

I wish it was this easy to ditch HDDs on older Macs as well but no Apple had to be extra fancy with SCSI... (I know BlueSCSI exists but it's not as cheap and readily available as these cards or IDE adapters)

 

[croissantking]

The issue with the Quicksilver and the cheap black cards is so silly, never seen something like it

I'm vaguely aware of the issue with the voltage regulator, how comes it only affects Quicksilvers though?

I wish it was this easy to ditch HDDs on older Macs as well but no Apple had to be extra fancy with SCSI... (I know BlueSCSI exists but it's not as cheap and readily available as these cards or IDE adapters)

I guess you're referring to pre-PCI Macs which can't use the SATA adapter. To be honest, Apple's early IDE implementations are so broken that I'd much rather have a SCSI interface. They only really sorted things out by the time the G4 towers came out.

 

[RunAway]

I'm vaguely aware of the issue with the voltage regulator, how comes it only affects Quicksilvers though?

I have no idea but apparently Quicksilver are really picky with PCI cards in general.
It could be tight timings on the initialization or a broken logic where if the card doesn't answer properly the whole Mac hangs instead of just ignoring it and carrying on with the boot process.

It would be interesting if someone measured the timings on the voltage rails to see how small the difference is between the stock AMS1117 33 regulator and the FS8860 33C

 

[shadedream]

So I used the Seitek flasher on my RHC SATA card and it's working great, except for the fact that there is a long delay after powering on before the machine starts coming up. I assume this is a result of using the 128kb firmware using compression? If so, is there any way to flash the 512kb firmware from a Mac to get around that at all?

 

[dosdude1]

So I used the Seitek flasher on my RHC SATA card and it's working great, except for the fact that there is a long delay after powering on before the machine starts coming up. I assume this is a result of using the 128kb firmware using compression? If so, is there any way to flash the 512kb firmware from a Mac to get around that at all?

What machine is it? The decompression takes less than 2 seconds to run on even the slowest of machines, so that won't be the issue. Though the SeriTek ROM is known to cause this delay on some machines.

 

[joshc]

I had a cheapo Chinese SATA card (red PCB) which was initially working and then started playing up (not being recognised, or being shown on the bus but no card info), so I replaced it with an Adaptec card and its been running great since then.

 

[mg.man]

I replaced it with an Adaptec card

I wonder where that came from... Glad you're rockin' & rollin'! Thanks again @Carlito for the mod and @dosdude1 for the awesome ROM-work!