Power Mac G4 MDD and the USB 2.0 chip
- Thread starter Dandu
- Start date
I wonder if perhaps the chip is there for the AirPort Extreme + Bluetooth? That's another distinguishing feature of the FW800s compared to all other G4s.
I have a downgraded FW800, I think the only downside was that the FW800 ports were recognised as FW400 (maybe only on OS9, i can't remember), but I never actually tested that. It's been running nicely for many years without issue.
Oh they probably needed an extra internal USB port for Bluetooth. AirPort Extreme would be a PCI device.
Would be good to check it FW800 still works under Mac OS X (and AirPort Extreme/BT, if you have those).
What's the best way to test speeds? The only FireWire device I have is an iPod which I could try this weekend. The AirPort Extreme works, and will also test BT
If you don’t have a fw800 device you won’t be able to test if it’s working at full speed. Maybe you could see what it reports in system profiler about the bus itself. I guess there should be two buses?
The iPod only has FireWire 400. You'll want a Hard Drive enclosure that supports FireWire 800 to test the speed of the FireWire 800 port.
If you had a second Mac with FireWire 800, you could try FireWire 800 networking. Try
iperf 2 for PowerPC Mac OS X?You could also try FireWire target disk mode - but I don't think FireWire from an Open Firmware host will be as fast.
This thread shows a handful of disk benchmark apps.
https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/lets-see-your-best-disk-speeds-ppc-68k.49268
Here's a download link for a PowerPC version of "AJA KONA System Test":
https://www.aja.com/support/legacy/kona-3
Is there a better link for AJA System Test for PowerPC?
