ATI PCI DVD Card - Surprise/Retroactive Conquest

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

BackStory Alert: proceed to ScreenShot if uninterested . . .

Two days ago, I was checking out the backside of a 6500 I'd long since picked up dirt cheap at thrift shop. I bought this topless FuglyTower (there's no accounting for taste, I happen to have an aversion to this particular case design) to scavenge for parts. The part I really wanted was the SCSI Zip Drive behind the slot in its forehead. Got it back, hooked up to the 17" Sony Trinitron on the bench via the stock Mac Video connector, found that it booted up fine, no RAM worth raiding and the Zip drive tested fine so I pulled that and set the thing under another bench, ignoring it for quite some time. I've got several 6400/6500 MoBos and Crescendos to Sonnetize them for various hacks, so I never pulled the drawer.

I'd already re-cased the 6400 (even a lover of this case design would have considered this K-12 concentration camp survivor's plastics ugly enough to put the poor suffering thing down ) into a really cool DIGITALstation 910. I'd noticed the peculiarities of the 6400's drive spacing on the gaping maw of its and the was checking to see if the chassis' drive alignment matched up with that of the four Radius 81/110 front bezels slated to become additional re-cased "Cinder Blocks" for a new RadiusCloneMacShelfUnit™ atop the one real Radius 81/110/G-3 and the already 81/110 faced UbuntuGIMPbox™ hack.

To my surprise, there was an HD-15 connector sticking out of the top slot . . .

. . . so I pulled the MoBo and made a wonderful new conquest retroactively!



Does anyone know why ATI cards are designated as ATY in the profiler . . . Mac specific ROM on board indication?

Under which OS installations should this card play DVDs?

Will it need to be a Mac ROM'd DVD SuperDrive or DVD-ROM?

I have a, non-Apple ROM, Sony DVD "SuperDrive" in stock, will I be able to boot into an Install CD with this in place with a system tweak?

 

[gobabushka]

It MIGHT work. Probably not though.

 

[LCGuy]

Its slightly off-topic, but its funny to hear you talk about how ugly the InstaTower is - I remember how much people seemed to like it back in 1997! Heh, I remember MacAddict even called it "sexy".

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

:lol: Off topic? In one of my threads? [)] ]'>

Like I said, there's no accounting for tastes, I have a love-HATE relationship with the CC's case as well. I like the design of the Radius 81/110, IIfx, Quadras 605, 630 & 950 and the Graphite DA, those were sexy. But who wants a girly looking, high heeled feets under a fake-feets skirt, tower designed with an unsightly high forehead and a rounded muffin-top that precludes setting an external drive on top of it? Looks like the little sister of the marshmallow dude from Ghost Busters. [}] ]'>

Not my style, though the naked metal frame is an interesting design exercise inside and out, plastics are a huge downgrade from its 630/6360 heritage.

To my own jaded eyes and design sensitivities, of course! [] ]'>

 

[LCGuy]

No idea if you ever read MacAddict back in the day, but I remember back in 1997 they actually interviewed the guy who built the very first 6400 prototype - "Hacksaw". They had a pic of it - it was basically a 6300 with no case plastics on its side, modified so that it was about as wide/thick as a CD-ROM drive, allowing the CD-ROM drive to be installed horizontally with the Mac on its side.

For what its worth, all these years later - I still think the InstaTower is sexy...though I have bad taste.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Does anyone know why ATI cards are designated as ATY in the profiler . . . Mac specific ROM on board indication?

That's ATI's ROM designation. Has been for years. Has nothing to do with the Mac. (That was their stock ticker before they were bought by AMD.) I can't find corroboration, but it appears to be a contraction of the company's original name "Array Technologies".