USB on Mac OS 9

[Forrest]

Aggressive?? Not sure why you said this. I’m just sharing my experience, and sharing Apple’s own advice when USB1 cards were released. Nothing more.

 

[meall]

Thank you all for your help. I just wanted to know if I could use the cards I have in that machine. Now I’ll just try to find another home for them and free the space for something else!

 

[uridium]

I've just got one working in MacOS8.6 in my 4400/160 after a lot of jiggery pokery, forehead slapping and some colourful metaphors.

Hope the device ID's help. Speed wise it's charging at EHCI and correctly configuring USB2 stuff but it's staying in 12Mbps mode. I plan to have another hack around in resedit later tonight or tomorrow when I get a moment.

 

[CC_333]

Speed wise it's charging at EHCI and correctly configuring USB2 stuff but it's staying in 12Mbps mode.

Unless you did something extra special, Classic Mac OS doesn't support anything other than USB 1.1.

It will support USB 2.0 peripherals (as you've seen), but it will always run them at USB 1.1 speeds, even on hardware that otherwise supports higher 2.0 speeds.

c

 

[uridium]

It'd seem you're correct. I can get USB2 signalling, but can't for the life of me get it rocking past 12Mbps. Works beautifully but is slow. Jiggered around significantly with several cards.

 

[65a]

I got an ugly but working PCI USB2 (full size 5 port model) card with an MDD recently. It has a NEC chipset, and it works under 9.2.2 out of the box (at least, starting with the univeral image). However, ASP complains about it preventing low power mode, so I'm treating it as a testbed. I took the EEPROM off the board and read it with a ch341a and IMSProg...I think it was a 24c21, but I had to try some different options before I got a good read. Not all NEC cards have an EEPROM, or a crystal. This one has both.

I got this eventually, which I think is a good read.

a911a911a91135003500e0000101102a
2a220000a23310c4ffffffffffffffff
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

The first parts match the PCI metadata, so I imagine that it should be possible to work around various issues on these cards (as I recall they are many and some random ones worked) by messing around with matching existing allow lists or possibly (probably) by fixing the power management bits. Might be checksummed, because it won't boot with the first 0x01 value set to 0x0f (minus five points from Claude).

If anyone else happens to be able to dump their EEPROM on a similar NEC 4+1 USB board I'd be interested. I'll post back here if find anything useful here beyond changing the device IDs.

 

[65a]

I found https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_necdataShe9_916884/page/124/mode/2up which describes the format, and seems to match this card. My first attempt to set default vendor IDs and 0xff0f the PME related bits booted fine (will not boot with chip removed) but the card is not detected (optimistically it went to sleep and never woke up...). If I find a useful ROM value for this generic keyspan usb 2.0 4+1 card I'll share it here.