What are you patching? The check for the flash chip type or the necessity of the additional EEPROM?
Would be nice to have it for the XRack ROM as well.
-
Hello MLAers! We've re-enabled auto-approval for accounts. If you are still waiting on account approval, please check this thread for more information.
Mathey MSATA-13UMAC IDE/SATA card
- Thread starter finkmac
- Start date
Would be nice to have it for the XRack ROM as well.
Excellent. It will be great for everyone to have another easy option !
So, upon further analysis, it appears the reason they have done this weird "Use a stub NDRV that loads the real NDRV from a different location in the EEPROM" thing is because there is some weird bug with the VT6421 chip that prevents loading an option ROM past a certain length. The way I got it working in the above post was to replace the stub NDRV with the real NDRV, and then temporarily remove the Mac OS X NDRV completely for space savings. That worked fine, and got me the above result, but adding the Mac OS X NDRV back in would cause it to fail to execute the fcode option ROM completely. Going to see if I can use my compression methods from the Sil3112 option ROM project to get the content small enough to work around this bug; so far seems to reduce the OS 9 NDRV size by about half, which I think will do it. Another option is to patch the stub NDRV to work with any EEPROM, so will try that if this plan fails. Will keep you all updated.
In theory, any of these Projovian ROMs can be modified in the same way once I get it figured out fully.
Nice work @dosdude1! Is the serial EEPROM still required? That's a big hurdle to these being widely accessible.
@NJRoadfan I have not done an exhaustive amount of testing, but the handful of SATA HDDs and SSDs I have tested with, which are mostly SATA II and III devices, have not had any issues on new world Macs. No luck on old world Macs.
@NJRoadfan I have not done an exhaustive amount of testing, but the handful of SATA HDDs and SSDs I have tested with, which are mostly SATA II and III devices, have not had any issues on new world Macs. No luck on old world Macs.
I'm working on a method to load fcode images from disk for PCI cards. It's currently only for Open Firmware 2.4 but can be adapted to other Open Firmware versions. It won't work for PCI cards that read their own ROM which is probably what the fcode for this SATA card does to load the real NDRV but maybe a work around can be made such as @dosdude1 's method of replacing the stub NDRV with the real NDRV.
Here's the Open Firmware Extender I've been working on (only for Open Firmware 2.4)
1) Search
product/install_of_extender2.4.txt for load ide/disk and change the partition number (currently 15) to the partition number (in decimal) of a HFS Standard partition on the master IDE drive of the first IDE channel . Use a text editor like BBEdit.app that preserves null characters.2) Copy
install_of_extender2.4.txt and of_extender2.4.bin from the product folder to the root directory of the HFS Standard partition.3) Boot into Open Firmware. Maybe set
input-device and output-device to ttya:57600.4) Execute
load ide/disk@0:15,\install_of_extender2.4.txt (but first change the partition number). This will set nvramrc and use-nvramrc?5) Shutdown and reboot. You should see that the
of_extender2.4.bin got loaded. It contains a few scripts that I've created in the past.- "512MB BAR patch.of"
- "Open Firmware Trace.of"
- "print nvramrc.of"
- "dumphex.of"
- "dump-instance-chain.of"
- "lspci for Open Firmware.of"
- "calc-checksums.4th"
- "dump available and translations.of"
- "probe-ids.of"
- "find mapped mem ranges3.of"
- "Open Firmware list-partitions.of"
- "memory tests.of"
- "Open Firmware Fields.of"
- "extender2.4.of"
The scripts are executed one at a time to make patches or add words to the Open Firmware dictionary or whatever.
of_extender2.4.bin can contain a set of fcode images after all the scripts.The last script
extender2.4.of adds some of the fcode images to the >fcfiles list. These are automatically loaded for PCI cards that are missing an Open Firmware fcode image in their PCI Option ROM as long as the vendor ID, device ID, and classcode match:- 0x3D3D 0x000A 0x030000 "build/GA12-ROM 2.6.2.fc"
Other fcode images in
of_extender2.4.bin are not added to the >fcfiles list. extender2.4.of may execute them to modify packages or anything.- 100 "build/disk-label.fc"
- 101 "build/mac-files.fc"
The worksheet contains all the commands to create
of_extender2.4.bin.Running the
Startup Disk control panel will overwrite the nvramrc, so you may want to update the OFpt resource in the Startup Disk control panel so that it contains the same nvramrc that is installed by install_of_extender2.4.txt. There's a Create Startup Disk with new nvramrc section in the OpenFirmwareExtender.worksheet that creates a new Startup Disk control panel with the modification.The same would have to be done for XPostFacto's
OFpt resource.To Do:
- Convert worksheet to makefile.
- Add support for other versions of Open Firmware. Earlier versions may require reading directly from a partition (block read) instead of a file system.
- ...
