The Great Gazelle PCI Hack Thread, Part 2

[Swabbie]

Yes, the two variants of the Tango 2.0 are pretty different, which is why they need different patches. I assume the first revision (which is a cut down version of one of their other cards) was a stopgap solution of some kind? Dunno.



Yup. But the differences are in the application that installed the patch, not in the actual patch it puts into nvram. The nvram patch is exactly the same in all versions. I think the newer patchers recognise more cards or something, because sonnet's patcher is kinder than mine and will try not to let you shoot yourself in the foot? Don't know.

Oh, and another thing:



Bear in mind that if you install OS 9 without a USB card installed, the USB stack won't get installed at all and installing a USB PCI card won't work. Go back to the OS 9 installer and install the USB support, which I think is in the custom installer (? can't remember, been a while)

Welp. Got a new cheapo FireLink Opti type card in today (very similar to the Keyspan version I tried previously) AND decided to try all sorts of USB devices. System profiler still barely recognizes the card AKA no Card Model No Card ROM (

https://imgur.com/a/z2LRvOk

) but Sure enough part of the problem was the test thumb drive I was using that works fine in my modern Mac but the 6500 hated apparently. I now have basic 1.1 USB! Lesson learned here: try all sorts of USB devices before declaring USB broken!

I’m eager to still get this Tango card working though. I’ll keep you posted. Now that I have a known good thumb & basic USB drivers it’ll make troubleshoot so much easier!

 

[CircuitBored]

System profiler still barely recognizes the card AKA no Card Model No Card ROM

From my experience with PowerMacs with dodgy PCI this is completely normal. Anything on the "other side" of a PCI bridge will not show up properly in system profiler but will function properly anyway.

 

[Swabbie]

From my experience with PowerMacs with dodgy PCI this is completely normal. Anything on the "other side" of a PCI bridge will not show up properly in system profiler but will function properly anyway.

Ok. Good to know! Thank you.

 

[cheesestraws]

System profiler still barely recognizes the card AKA no Card Model No Card ROM

That's jutst "this is a USB card I can talk to but I have no more info about it", that's fine.

Now that I have a known good thumb & basic USB drivers it’ll make troubleshoot so much easier!

absolutely. Looking forward to seeing how you get on

 

[Swabbie]

Holy forking shirt balls. It works!

Well the usb side does for sure.

Great progress. Idk what you’re patch does but it’s making USB sausage now.

plugged in an old 500Gb Western Digital USB/FireWire drive and got nothing on the FireWire side tho it also wouldn’t mount via FireWire on my G3 B&W. Could be the drive tho. Can’t find any other FireWire devices to try atm.

I don’t even know if I have any resident FireWire extensions. Do they come standard with 9.1?

Any ideas on what to try to get FW side working?

 

[cheesestraws]

Great progress. Idk what you’re patch does but it’s making USB sausage now.

It's just a modification of the original patch that creates the "fake" USB device where it actually is on the new card rather than where it was on the old card. I think there's a post upthread where I go into more details on how it all works. It's not particularly subtle, but I'm glad it's working :-D.

plugged in an old 500Gb Western Digital USB/FireWire drive and got nothing on the FireWire side tho it also wouldn’t mount via FireWire on my G3 B&W. Could be the drive tho. Can’t find any other FireWire devices to try atm.

I'd agree that you should try with another drive that's known to work before panicking here. If the drive you've got also doesn't work in a B&W G3, that may well be the drive.

I don’t even know if I have any resident FireWire extensions. Do they come standard with 9.1?

Not sure; might be the same as USB, e.g. they get installed if you've got the hardware installed when it's installed?

Note, by the way, that Firewire will never show up in System Profiler with this patch, or with the original Sonnet patch. I don't know why: the whole firewire bus just doesn't appear. Seems to be purely cosmetic, though...

 

[Swabbie]

Well sure enough. I deleted/reformatted that FW drive with disk utilities on a modern Mac then tried again. It mounted as unrecognized and asking if I wanted to initialize it. Did that and bam I now have a ~400Mb/s ext drive! Only nit, and it’s probably an anomaly with the drive is it isn’t recognized after a restart unless I wait till it’s all done loading the unplug it and plug it back in again.

We are fully up and running thanks to you and I can finally put to storage this honkin scsi ext. drive.

Great job making this happen and I thank you so much for your work and patience!

 

[cheesestraws]

We are fully up and running thanks to you and I can finally put to storage this honkin scsi ext. drive.

Hurrah! I'm really pleased. Please feel free to pass around a copy of or a link to that patch if it'd be useful to people, by the way: it's as near finished as it's going to get for a little while, and the more people have nice working hardware the happier I am, generally.

 

[mg.man]

Well... I hate being a parade-rainer, but I have the exact same Tango 2.0 card that I'm trying to get working in a PowerCenter. When I run the modified Tango2.0new, I get this...



I'm on 9.1 and have tried running with Extensions Off - same popup. Thoughts?

 

[cheesestraws]

When did you get the error? As soon as you ran the application, when you tried to apply the PRAM patch, when? Also, precisely which machine are you trying to run it on?

(Once again, please excuse terseness. No rudeness intended)

 

[mg.man]

When did you get the error?

Ah, sorry, should have been more clear. When I run the App, I get a window with quite a bit of notes / pgm info finished with a "if it breaks, you keep the pieces", then a (y/n). If I hit return, I just get "OK" (and have to exit / re-load). If I hit 'y', I get the popup.

precisely which machine are you trying to run it on?

It's a Power Computing PowerCenter (PM 7200 derivative?), with a Sonnet G3/400. Apple System Profiler "sees" the card - the output is pretty much identical to what @Swabbie shared above. Maybe I don't need the PRAM hack and it's just USB driver issues?

 

[mg.man]

please excuse terseness

no worries... getting late over here...

 

[cheesestraws]

It's a Power Computing PowerCenter (PM 7200 derivative?),

That'll be why! This patch is only really relevant to the Gazelle architecture machines which have a specific firmware bug. I'm not surprised it crashed on anything else: it tried to access OF in a place where there wasn't any OF to access, and ... I didn't bother with error handling, because this is a hack. At some point I really need to do something better about the UI...

Apple System Profiler "sees" the card - the output is pretty much identical to what @Swabbie shared above. Maybe I don't need the PRAM hack and it's just USB driver issues?

Do you mean it just shows it as "USB card - no ROM - no anything"? If it shows that and doesn't work, it's probably a USB driver issue. This patch is only for when a machine just displays "pci-bridge".

 

[mg.man]

That'll be why!

OK... fair enough... hence the title... "Great Gazelle PCI Hack"...

Do you mean it just shows it as "USB card - no ROM - no anything"?

Pretty sure it shows the same as above...

...I'll double-check.

 

[cheesestraws]

Hmmm. The first iteration cards certainly have the 7200 on their supported list. Do you know if they need a patch to work or whether they just work? I am a bit out of my knowledge here...

 

[Byrd]

Dragging this thread up again, I've a TAM with the "old" Tango 2.0 card (with unpopulated IDE headers) that purports to work using Sonnet's official Tango/Trio patch. Using a fresh install of OS 9.1, patch applied, USB works but FW does not. Can anyone confirm if a different version of the Apple FW drivers will play more nicely - OS 9.1 comes with the last iteration, V2.7 I think.

Nothing to lose I applied @cheesestraws fabled new patch, and it's the same is slightly more unstable (some random type 11 errors at startup) - I've reset PRAM pushed CUDA switch, is there anything else I need to do to clear this NVRAM patch? It's quite a big card inside the TAM, cooling isn't the best so I'll likely pull it out and replace with a janky small USB 1.1 card.

 

[cheesestraws]

Nothing to lose I applied @cheesestraws fabled new patch, and it's the same is slightly more unstable (some random type 11 errors at startup)

Hmmmm, "my" patch (which is really just an adjusted version of the original Sonnet patch) bails out early if it can't find the card, so loading it on a computer with the old Sonnet card won't do anything at all. Or shouldn't .

NVRAM reset is done separately from PRAM reset (for some reason)—I think you just need to hold the Cmd-Opt-P-R down for longer (?) until it's chimed twice, but my TAM is extremely resistant to resetting both the PRAM and the NVRAM the normal way, and I have to use a non-TAM ADB keyboard to do it. (Why? Who knows.) So I always have to look up how to do an NVRAM reset

Type 11 errors are "the 68k emulator has gone wonky" errors, if I remember correctly.

 

[Byrd]

Thanks - along with the Tango 2.0, another upgrade might have been installed - an IDE to SCSI 2.5” adapter + relatively new SATA3 120GB Kingston SSDNow SSD. Let’s just say it boots, but the longer I’ve left it the weirder the errors I’m getting. Might be switching back to standard IDE HD soon

 

[ried]

You or someone else asked this upthread . No, or at least not that I'm aware of. I don't have one to play with, for starters. I doubt you'd get all three peripherals working in the same nvramrc, or at least I can't see how to yet, for lack of room.

Managed to track down a Sonnet Tempo Trio (based on the early Tango 2.0). ATA-133, FW & USB in the TAM sounds like the dream. I'll give it a whirl and report back.

 

[Phipli]

Managed to track down a Sonnet Tempo Trio (based on the early Tango 2.0). ATA-133, FW & USB in the TAM sounds like the dream. I'll give it a whirl and report back.

I didn't think anyone had got three subsystems working have I missed a post?

I was trying but ran out of space in the available patch memory.