Sonnet Crescendo L2 500MHz 1M

[Charadis]

My latest acquisition, a Sonnet Crescendo\L2 500MHz 1M (BG3-500-1-kit03), completes my TAM conquest. I've sold off a lot of my vintage Mac collection to focus on my Leica hobby and concentrate on just a handful of my fav Macs (namely the 2400c, Quadra 700, and of course the TAM). 

545 after tax plus 50 eBay bucks, one of the priciest standalone upgrades. I've found lower priced recently ended auctions, but I've also seen higher listings; decided not to take my chances. 

Original eBay listing









Here is a wanted listing I posted in another site from last year.  

Cheers, 

 

[jessenator]

Very nice. I've got a 500 sitting around for me to fix the motherboard it goes to :lol:

I'm also impressed you got that Sonnet Tempo card in there. Is that for your main booting drive then? Is the TAM's riser just a PCI bottom, COMMII top?

 

[Charadis]

Very nice. I've got a 500 sitting around for me to fix the motherboard it goes to :lol:

I'm also impressed you got that Sonnet Tempo card in there. Is that for your main booting drive then? Is the TAM's riser just a PCI bottom, COMMII top?

Thank you, sir! I hope you get yours fixed, I assume corrosion issue? I've been waiting a while for one to pop up, only to miss many others that have. I've seen seen some ridiculous deals, as low as 250, and as high as over 500. 

That card is actually a Sonnet Tango version 1  I did have a Tempo that I tried with the TAM, but it did not work, sadly (so I sold it). The main drive, a compact flash card (64GB I think) in an IDE to CF converter, is in the main drive bay underneath the Sonnet Tango. You are correct on the risers, PCI bottom and Comm II top. I had to acquire each riser separately, and the humpback as well, as those parts were missing when I initially purchased the computer set.

At some point, this computer became a labor of love, but it has been an invaluable tool for updating/data transfer between other vintage Macs that have passed my hands (and the few that I have kept). And I love listening to music from it on occasion; the sound quality is still amazing. <3 

 

[jessenator]

I assume corrosion issue?

I tried to overclock it (the board itself, not the Sonnet!) and I think I need different resistor values for it to work, according to the guide anyway. It's a Starmax 5000 board that almost fit in my Power Macintosh 4400 case (the extra I/O made it impossible without modification). But in essence, I got my Sonnet 500 for the price of that board, which was pretty good—oddly, the board wasn't packed well and the sonnet chipped off several components, so after I got it working of course I was going to tinker with more surface components and muck it up :facepalm: . If I can't get the board working, I might put up a trading post ...post to part-trade+downgrade to a 400. 500 is kind of a waste in a system like the 4400 without the appropriate 50 MHz bus speed, and I doubt I'll be looking/find for a PM 6500 or 5500 locally or for a reasonable price. My previous 400 MHz sonnet card worked with the standard drivers, and I'm finding I need to use the PowerLogix control panel to disable speculative addressing in order for it to boot and run stably at 500.

 

[Charadis]

I tried to overclock it (the board itself, not the Sonnet!) and I think I need different resistor values for it to work, according to the guide anyway. It's a Starmax 5000 board that almost fit in my Power Macintosh 4400 case (the extra I/O made it impossible without modification). But in essence, I got my Sonnet 500 for the price of that board, which was pretty good—oddly, the board wasn't packed well and the sonnet chipped off several components, so after I got it working of course I was going to tinker with more surface components and muck it up :facepalm: . If I can't get the board working, I might put up a trading post ...post to part-trade+downgrade to a 400. 500 is kind of a waste in a system like the 4400 without the appropriate 50 MHz bus speed, and I doubt I'll be looking/find for a PM 6500 or 5500 locally or for a reasonable price. My previous 400 MHz sonnet card worked with the standard drivers, and I'm finding I need to use the PowerLogix control panel to disable speculative addressing in order for it to boot and run stably at 500.

I see, that’s unfortunate. I actually just recently sold a 400MHz 1MB cache Sonnet Crescendo\L2, breaking about even for what I paid importing it. Would have been very interested, but hope it all pans out and you can bring that board back to life. I know I have a spare board in the closet, but I don’t know much about it; it came with the second Tango I bought 

 

[EvilCapitalist]

Nice conquest, and congrats on finishing your TAM!  I have mine spec'd out exactly the same way (plus an SSD), though I got my 500MHz Crescendo by way of picking up an entire machine.  I'd say you're right smack-dab in the middle as far as prices go on that.  There haven't been a whole lot popping up for sale recently (not that there ever are, at least not since the early 00s) and the least expensive I've seen was untested so it's not a bad plan to pick up a known-working card from a reputable seller.

 

[Charadis]

Nice conquest, and congrats on finishing your TAM!  I have mine spec'd out exactly the same way (plus an SSD), though I got my 500MHz Crescendo by way of picking up an entire machine.  I'd say you're right smack-dab in the middle as far as prices go on that.  There haven't been a whole lot popping up for sale recently (not that there ever are, at least not since the early 00s) and the least expensive I've seen was untested so it's not a bad plan to pick up a known-working card from a reputable seller.

Thank you, sir. Glad I could finally say mine is finally specced up there with yours now. Definitely don’t see them show up very often, and I expect to have a tight grip on this one for a long time. 

I guess the last thing to figure out is how to get that Farallon comm II Card working right, but it is no big deal. 

 

[jeremywork]

My Farallon CSII card was quite finicky when it came to drivers. Most of the ones I tried resulted in intermittent lockups of the finder, corresponding to associated link lights on the card. I can double check next time I'm nearby the TAM, but I recall the drivers hosted on zone6400 working for me...

http://zone6400.com/downloads/FastEther10-100+V2.2.1.sit

If not, let me know and I'll grab the actual extensions off the TAM. It's working alongside a Crescendo 500 and a Tempo Trio, no conflicts or audio stuttering.

 

[Charadis]

My Farallon CSII card was quite finicky when it came to drivers. Most of the ones I tried resulted in intermittent lockups of the finder, corresponding to associated link lights on the card. I can double check next time I'm nearby the TAM, but I recall the drivers hosted on zone6400 working for me...

http://zone6400.com/downloads/FastEther10-100+V2.2.1.sit

If not, let me know and I'll grab the actual extensions off the TAM. It's working alongside a Crescendo 500 and a Tempo Trio, no conflicts or audio stuttering.

Very cool, thanks a lot for the linky! I’ll have to try it out when I’m back in town tomo.  

I have two of the CS ii Farallon cards, both react differently to the TAM. The first one I acquired worked for a few boot cycles, but only after I would reload the drivers from the CD that came with the second one. At some point, I couldn’t connect to the internet and have to reload the drivers. Then the last time I tried, I couldn’t get it to work anymore. As for the second Farallon card, the system would always lock up every time I booted with it installed. 
 

my config at the time was with a 300MHz Sonnet Crescendo L2 and a Sonnet Tango v1. 
 

how did you get the Tempo Trio to work with the TAM?? I had one, but it did not work; was t even detected by the system (9.1), so I sold it. 

 

[jeremywork]

Very interesting to hear you get different results with different hardware. By the time I had a second Farallon card around, I had already found the working driver for the first one, and that same driver worked to run the second one in my 5500. (This machine is running a NewerTech 400/1M that the TAM refused to boot with, alongside an OrangeLink USB/FW- also no conflicts, in fact video playback is sometimes smoother than the TAM despite being two steps slower, in cases such as After Dark.)

The Tempo Trio has been a project I've only begun tinkering with. I have a second one in my 9600 that I can boot from with no issues, so from an OS support standpoint it should work. I'm relying on the fact that the TAM works fine with the Tango 2.0 (the one that's a Trio with the ATA hardware missing) and that the firmware enabler Sonnet provided also mentions Trio support. 

The one time I did bodge the wiring together to connect my CF card to the Trio's ATA, the device wasn't recognized, but I can't be sure my power leads were effective (I just jammed wires into the respective pinholes on the built-in ATA cable.) I was able to use USB and Firewire over the Trio though, after putting the CF card back on internal ATA.

Unfortunately my TAM needs both of its drives serviced; I have all the hardware ready, but haven't felt like starting that one yet. I have a CD150 on the SCSI bus, which is bootable, but the floppy drive read head is stuck blocking diskettes from being inserted, so I wasn't able to make a modified disk tools floppy. Next time I work on that I'll stick an external hard drive on SCSI and bring a molex splitter so I can be sure the CF card is properly powered. Might just try an old full size IDE hard drive powered off a sled, too. 

I had everything nicely routed and fitting with the fatback closed, so I'm not ready to give up yet!

 

[omidimo]

how did you get the Tempo Trio to work with the TAM?? I had one, but it did not work; was t even detected by the system (9.1), so I sold it. 

The Tempo Trio was very finicky and there were numerous silent hardware revisions. Many early ones were problematic.

I'm relying on the fact that the TAM works fine with the Tango 2.0 (the one that's a Trio with the ATA hardware missing) and that the firmware enabler Sonnet provided also mentions Trio support. 

That model is kind of a weird one, I have 3 of them and there are two distinct variations in chipsets. Always worth grabbing if they come up cheap on eBay.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The Tempo Trio has been a project I've only begun tinkering with. I have a second one in my 9600 that I can boot from with no issues, so from an OS support standpoint it should work. I'm relying on the fact that the TAM works fine with the Tango 2.0 (the one that's a Trio with the ATA hardware missing) and that the firmware enabler Sonnet provided also mentions Trio support. 

Check the specs on the Trio, 6500/TAM/Gazelle architecture is not supported. Should work fine on the 6360/6400 Alchemy architecture  .  .  .  or not. :-/

I also have a pair of them and have recently been toying with Trio as a way to have a 6360 blow the doors off TAM using ATA-what-ever-it-is(?) on Trio with solid state CF boot drive. No TAM here, but If 6360/6400 40MHz boards outperform the 50MHz 6500 boards given the better disk I/O, that should be good enough. Long term project, I rebuilt the testbed and now it doesn't boot. Two steps forward, three steps back apparently. :

 

[jeremywork]

Re-reading the readme, I now see it explicitly mentions only the USB and Firewire functions when describing the Trio:

• This software installs an Open Firmware patch in Power Macintosh 6500 computers enabling them to fully support the Tempo Trio’s FireWire and USB ports. 

Oh well- I may compare my two Trios to make sure I get the same behavior from both.

On a separate note, am I correct in remembering the patch just manually defines the resources for each of the two controllers on the Tango? If that's the case, it seems feasible to support the third controller on the trio.

I am by no means an expert, but by analyzing the effect the patch has on the PRAM on the Gazelles, we could likely track down the info it patches to enable the USB and Firewire controllers. Then we'd compare to resources automatically pulled by a non-buggy PCI machine like the 9600, and derive a similar PRAM modification to enable the missing ATA controller. Is this something that's been done attempted already?

 

[BeniD82]

Very cool, thanks a lot for the linky! I’ll have to try it out when I’m back in town tomo.  

I have two of the CS ii Farallon cards, both react differently to the TAM. The first one I acquired worked for a few boot cycles, but only after I would reload the drivers from the CD that came with the second one. At some point, I couldn’t connect to the internet and have to reload the drivers. Then the last time I tried, I couldn’t get it to work anymore. As for the second Farallon card, the system would always lock up every time I booted with it installed. 
 

my config at the time was with a 300MHz Sonnet Crescendo L2 and a Sonnet Tango v1. 
 

how did you get the Tempo Trio to work with the TAM?? I had one, but it did not work; was t even detected by the system (9.1), so I sold it. 

Haven't been able to get my CS II card to work correctly either, neither on a 6400 or 6500 board (it used to work at some point but can't seem to get it to work now). It's recognized by the system as a PCI card but regardless of extension, it's not detected as an ethernet adapter. Not sure if it's driver related or with there is something physically wrong with the card itself, which could be the case. Out of curiosity, do both your CS cards use the same chipset (I believe mine is Intel based). 

 

[jeremywork]

Haven't been able to get my CS II card to work correctly either, neither on a 6400 or 6500 board (it used to work at some point but can't seem to get it to work now). It's recognized by the system as a PCI card but regardless of extension, it's not detected as an ethernet adapter. Not sure if it's driver related or with there is something physically wrong with the card itself, which could be the case. Out of curiosity, do both your CS cards use the same chipset (I believe mine is Intel based). 

This is the one in my TAM. I'll have to grab a picture of the one in my 5500, but it was similar enough I assumed it was identical when I installed it. Also, once the Farallon FastENPlus extension is present, it is not necessary to load the built-in Ethernet extension, but verify the EtherTalk extensions are installed, (IIRC the Farallon installer doesn't include them.)



Edit: Here's another source for drivers (v2.4). Zone6400 seems to indicate shutdown issues with this version for some people, but might be worth a shot if the others don't work:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050301085121/http://www.proxim.com/support/all/maccard/software/dl2001-09-10g.html

 

[Charadis]

The Tempo Trio was very finicky and there were numerous silent hardware revisions. Many early ones were problematic.

 That model is kind of a weird one, I have 3 of them and there are two distinct variations in chipsets. Always worth grabbing if they come up cheap on eBay.

I saw pictures of a Tango 2 on Trio board, if that's the one you're referring to. But I can imagine there being multiple revisions those days. 

Very interesting to hear you get different results with different hardware. By the time I had a second Farallon card around, I had already found the working driver for the first one, and that same driver worked to run the second one in my 5500. (This machine is running a NewerTech 400/1M that the TAM refused to boot with, alongside an OrangeLink USB/FW- also no conflicts, in fact video playback is sometimes smoother than the TAM despite being two steps slower, in cases such as After Dark.)

The Tempo Trio has been a project I've only begun tinkering with. I have a second one in my 9600 that I can boot from with no issues, so from an OS support standpoint it should work. I'm relying on the fact that the TAM works fine with the Tango 2.0 (the one that's a Trio with the ATA hardware missing) and that the firmware enabler Sonnet provided also mentions Trio support. 

The one time I did bodge the wiring together to connect my CF card to the Trio's ATA, the device wasn't recognized, but I can't be sure my power leads were effective (I just jammed wires into the respective pinholes on the built-in ATA cable.) I was able to use USB and Firewire over the Trio though, after putting the CF card back on internal ATA.

Unfortunately my TAM needs both of its drives serviced; I have all the hardware ready, but haven't felt like starting that one yet. I have a CD150 on the SCSI bus, which is bootable, but the floppy drive read head is stuck blocking diskettes from being inserted, so I wasn't able to make a modified disk tools floppy. Next time I work on that I'll stick an external hard drive on SCSI and bring a molex splitter so I can be sure the CF card is properly powered. Might just try an old full size IDE hard drive powered off a sled, too. 

I had everything nicely routed and fitting with the fatback closed, so I'm not ready to give up yet!

Yeah, it is interesting. I couldn't tell the difference between my two cards though, they both look the same besides the imported one having blue capacitors and the other black. Oh well, blue for good, right? 





I popped in a PATA to CF card and a 64GB CF and called it a day. I'm just praying the the floppy drive continues to work for a long while. It has been so useful transferring info and restoring the vintage systems I've played with, and my heart skips a beat every time the disk gets stuck every once in a while. 

 

[jeremywork]

It looks like Sonnet thought this would work at one point at least. And they continue to mention 6400 and 6500 support in the latest manual, still hosted by Sonnet.

http://www.zone6400.com/files/Sonnet_Tempo_Trio.html

[Mr. Koons,
The Tempo Trio is compatible with the 6400 and 6500. They were omitted from the press release because we were still testing when it was published. However, as you probably know, it is quite a challenge to install PCI cards, etc. into these machines.

The mention of the 6500 on the Tempo Trio was actually an oversight that proved to be correct. We are in the process of altering all of our materials to include these two machines.

Thank you for your interest in the product. Don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Regards,
Debbie Michelle
Product Marketing Manager
Sonnet Technologies, Inc.

...

One thing I hadn't considered was checking the firmware version. 

http://www.sonnettech.com/support/kb/kb.php?cat=344&expand=_a1_a3_a13_a2_b338_b440&action=b439#b439

The advisory on the 4.5.0 firmware states:

• Drives connected to Tempo cards updated with firmware version 3.5.0 will not appear under Mac OS X versions prior to 10.2.

(I think that's meant to say 4.5.0, not 3.5.0)

edit: just caught it says Mac OS X versions, not Mac OS versions. Not contradictory.

The advisory on the 4.0 firmware is only slightly contradictory:

Supported System Software: Mac OS 8.1 through Mac OS 9.2 on systems that do not support Mac OS X; up to Mac OS X Version 10.2 on supported systems
Installation Notes: ***IMPORTANT*** This firmware updater is only for use with Tempo ATA133, Tempo HD, and Tempo Trio PCI Host Adapter cards. Large hard drives (greater than 137GB) are supported under Mac OS 9 and OS X 10.2 with firmware Version 4.5. If you are not planning to use these large drives, download this firmware (Version 4.0).

I'll see if I anything changes when I run the 4.0 firmware (going on the assumption that the one in my TAM was flashed with 4.5.0; seller did pull it from a Quicksilver so that's a good possibility.)

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

They intended to support Trio in the 6400/6500, but the 50MHz Gazelle architecture boards proved to be unsupportable as a viable product. I've got a pic of the box (maybe even the box?) somewhere listing supported Macs. 6500 was a glaring omission. Could have been either the first printing if Trio hit the market before x500/TAM release or a later, third rev of the packaging? Dunno, I'll poke around.

edit: there's a Trio discussion in the thread about identification of FW/USB cards compatible with TAM, they're scarce as hen's teeth.

 

[jeremywork]

That thread was very helpful for identifying cards online. I've luckily come by a couple rev 1 OrangeLink cards and one of the Tango 2.0's (trio form factor.) As-is, the trio works for all purposes as a tango 1.0/2.0 as well. 

I might try sticking it in a 5500 or 6500 to see if it behaves any differently than the TAM. I know all the boards are the same, but I have found some things aren't happy with the TAM ROM, but work in my 5500.