USB on PB1400 or Others? USB Through PCMCIA...

[Elfen]

Has anyone tried getting USB on a PB 1400, 3400, G3-Wallstreet, et al using a USB-PCMCIA card and either OS 8 or 9? Didn't the Original B/W G3s with USB ran some later version of OS8 (8.6)?

Thus, if it is possible to get USB on an older PowerBook like a 1400, can it access thumb drives? I know that USB 1.1 will be slow as "Molasses going up hill on a cold day in January..." but I'm wondering it is possible to get files from a thumb drive from the older Powerbook using USB through a PCMCIA Adapter.

 

[Cory5412]

I have made a grave mistake, and lost the original version of this post because I was drafting in my web browser.

The short  version is "no", it's simply not going to happen on the 1400.

Here's the long version:

The PowerBook 5300 and 1400 family probably share more than the 1400 shares with its premium and mostly contemporary siblings the 2400 and 3400. In this case, the 1400 and 5300 both have pcmcia but not cardbus. A quick googling reveals that there may never have been PCMCIA USB adapters. If you try to find one today, odds are what will actually be presented to you is going to be an ExpressCard/54 USB 2.0 or 3.0 adapter.

From a technical perspective, if a PCMCIA USB host adapter existed, then running it in a 1400 should be no problem. the 1400 accomodates wireless, after all, and the xHCI drivers are there in Mac OS 8.5 and 9.0.

As a sidenote, the original release of the iMac/233 shipped with Mac OS 8.1 that had some USB drivers, support for changes to the ROM in NewWorld configurations, as well as other hardware support additions. Pretty shortly, Mac OS 8.5 shipped and Apple changed out the default OS. The Blue-and-White Power Macintosh G3 shipped with 8.5.1, which is said to have a much better USB stack and if you're a heavy user of actual USB devices (other than the keyboard and mouse) on an iMac/233, the advice at the time was to upgrade. 

I personally had good luck with USB on my Power Macintosh 7300 using a Belkin USB 2.0 card with a fresh install (after installing the card) of Mac OS 9.0.4, which is what I happened to have on CD at the time. 

The 1400's hardware just won't recognize and run USB cards that exist though. 2400/240 (or a modified /180) and the 3400 as well as all G3 PowerBooks will do just fine.

Another option for transferring files (this is what I do with my 1400) is to use a PCMCIA compact flash adapter in the 1400 and a USB card reader on my modern computers. Inexplicably, this appears only to work in 8.5 or newer, even if I format the card in a PC as fat16. Not sure if it's a drivers issue or a filesystem issue, I dual boot my 1400 basically for this issue exclusively.

Once I get my LocalTalk network running, I will probably not bother using the CF card to transfer files, even though it would be faster, just for physical convenience.

 

[butterburger]

PCMCIA USB adapters

First, important, before I discuss subject, get something straight:

PCMCIA was a body of people, an organisation.

16-bit PC Card is a hardware standard. A formal, specified, engineered, standard. (As opposed to a colloquial name for a de-facto "standard".) Defines physical outlines, shapes, spatial tolerances of things which fit together; electrical signals, electrical bus, power rails; and logic-level stuff, logical signals, timing, addressing, bytes/words & I/O & interrupts. 16-bit PC Card "is like PeeCee ISA in credit card form factor", in that it is a 8/16-bit parallel bus and not high-performance. One can probably say "it is like <some other 1990's or earlier computer> bus", too.

CardBus PC Card, also just CardBus, is a hardware standard. It is based on Conventional PCI, essentially a superset of logical and electrical PCI in a credit card form factor.

Yes, ISA to USB controllers exist. I often phrase things poorly, am misunderstood. For clarity: USB host controller, in form of ISA card which connects to ISA host (upstream) bus, provides USB expansion to a computer system not involving PCI. Two such chip / chipsets / controllers products existed. One might be a licensed relabel of the other's product, but at the time, I believed them to be separately developed. One of these is Elan VMB5000. I likely will not rediscover what is the other.

Yes, a USB host controller in form/package of 16-bit PC Card does exist: the ECA16 16-bit PC Card sold by Synchrotech. It contains Elan VMB5000, it hosts USB bus in form of ExpressCard (34) socket.

edit add PS: Please Cory do not read this wrong way. I am not singling you out, calling you on misuse of terms. I mean to address this audience general, spread awareness of correct terms to use when discussing PC Card.

 

[rsolberg]

Cory, your impression of PCMCIA USB cards' nonexistence is correct. If one hunts for such a beast, they'll only find poorly described Cardbus units (32-bit), not 16-bit PCMCIA cards. No 16-bit PCMCIA USB card ever made it to market.

In the past few years, someone has come up with a 16-bit PCMCIA to expresscard solution. I couldn't figure out why, until I found a white paper. There's a demand for Cardbus compatible cellular aircards, but not enough for major manufacturers to make them available to carriers. A Cardbus slot to Expresscard adapter was conceived, but they proved unreliable for aircards-- most Expresscard/34 modems use the USB 2.0 portion of the Expresscard interface and need a significant amount of current at 5v. Cardbus slots provide 3.3v for 32-bit cards. The voltage has to be stepped up, adding load on the 3.3v supply plus the USB controller itself consumes power. Some crazy person realized that Cardbus slots also support 16-bit PCMCIA cards, and supply them with their requisite 5v. Instead of deciding they couldn't use PCMCIA because of the potential limitations of the bus, they went ahead with it. The end result is that the aircards don't have power issues in the adapters and the adapters can be used in both 32-bit Cardbus slots and older 16-bit PCMCIA slots. These adapters only work with USB based Expresscards, but there are many. Even most Expresscard 34 USB cards are actually just hubs that use the internal interface. I see butterburger posted a link above while I was typing this.

 

[Bunsen]

Short version:

1400 / 5300 - no
2400 / 3400 and beyond - yes

USB is 32 bit and requires the 32 bit CardBus slot.

 

[Bunsen]

{reads thread}

Okay, well ... that's most peculiar, and news to me.  And I would bet dollars to donuts you'll never get that running on a Mac.
 

 

[Cory5412]

Yes, a USB host controller in form/package of 16-bit PC Card does exist: the ECA16 16-bit PC Card sold by Synchrotech. It contains Elan VMB5000, it hosts USB bus in form of ExpressCard (34) socket.

That's very interesting. It won't do (on its own) what the OP asked for and if I had to guess, it won't work out of the box with OHCI drivers the way a desktop PCI card or a 32-bit CardBus card does. I'm sure it's possible to write drivers for that card, presumably the EC/34 USB adapters that exist simply tie directly into that host controller.

edit add PS: Please Cory do not read this wrong way. I am not singling you out, calling you on misuse of terms. I mean to address this audience general, spread awareness of correct terms to use when discussing PC Card.

It's fine, it's good to have a record of the correct terminology. That one is an extremely common misconception and if I had to guess, it's not going to be fixed any time soon. Heck, I'll have forgotten in a week or so. But, adding responses to threads in order to correct terminology or other wrong information is fine.

Short version:

1400 / 5300 - no

2400 / 3400 and beyond - yes

In general, but one thing to note is that only some 2400s had 32-bit CardBus by default. Without any third party modifications, the 2400/180 had 16-bit PC Card only. I don't know specifically what's involved with the modification.

A (probably really slow) USB controller should be developable for just about anything, the biggest problem is that nobody has bothered to do it, and of course, the software for it, and I think some people question the utility of it, especially for older platforms with low limits on things like filesystem size.

LCPDS USB cards, anybody?

Another application I've seen is USB controllers on cards that have other logic to present themselves differently to the host. On the Apple II side of things, one of the more neat developments is the CFFA3000, which is a card that has a USB port for flash drives to store disk images on. It's sort of like the FloppyEmu, but on really good steroids as you can control it from the ROM of the machine, which you can drop into and out of at will without interrupting what you're doing on the machine. (At least on the IIgs.)

On a Mac, I imagine this would end up similar to the way the SCSI2SD works, but a hypothetical NuBus or LCPDS storage controller card would probably be able to be a bit faster.

 

[Paralel]

So, theoretically, the only thing needed to make this expresscard to 16-bit PCMCIA adapter system work in a mac is a driver.

 

[Gorgonops]

So, theoretically, the only thing needed to make this expresscard to 16-bit PCMCIA adapter system work in a mac is a driver.

And that's where you have to say "good luck with that". So far as I'm aware no one's ever managed/bothered to write an OS 9 driver for plain old PCI cards that aren't completely backwards compatible with the OHCI controllers Apple used in their OEM hardware.

(Really, this dingus pretty much falls into "the exception that proves the rule" category; when someone asks if it's possible to put USB on a machine that only has 16 bit PC Card slots the answer is for all practical purposes still no. So far as those threads on the Thinkpad forum go it doesn't look to me as if any of them actually went so far as to prove that you could use this as a general purpose USB port. Yes, in *theory* it's a full fledged USB root hub and if the driver presents itself as such to the higher level OS subsystems in a sufficiently convincing manner than maybe it'll do the needful, but color me... unconvinced of the practicality of the thing.)

 

[Cory5412]

While you're writing that drive, you may as well build a more physically practical 16-bit PC Card with perhaps two actual USB ports on it, rather than rely on somebody being able to find two unrelated (and kind of uncommon) pieces of hardware.

 

[CC_333]

Well, as time moves forward, it seems that USB-on-prehistoric-Macs would be useful for transferring stuff via USB flash drives, which are virtually ubiquitous nowadays. Especially on machines like the PowerBook 1400, 190, 500 series and 5300, which can use neither a Floppy Emu nor any of the readily available USB PC-Cards (they can use CF cards, fortunately).

If not this, maybe someone can at least get USB 2.0 working at the full 480Mbps on OS 9 (the task is undoubtedly quite formidable due to the antiquated architecture, but it's certainly not impossible?)

c

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

Considering the fact that no one besides Cameron Kaiser is doing any real coding with OS9, I'd put the odds of that happening around a million to one.

 

[Bunsen]

In general, but one thing to note is that only some 2400s had 32-bit CardBus by default. Without any third party modifications, the 2400/180 had 16-bit PC Card only. I don't know specifically what's involved with the modification.

A single wire needs to be soldered across to the card port.  The mod is IIRC identical on the 2400 and 3400.

 

[Bunsen]

BTW, the Elan VMB5000 chip itself is available on ebay for $5 per, at the moment.  Documentation seems to be a little hard to find though.

Cypress Semi do have a small number of USB Host ICs available, one of which has an onboard programmable CPU, and fairly flexible arrangements for the back "to host" end.  Though USB2 compatible, they top out at relatively low transfer speeds.

 

[Gorgonops]

Though USB2 compatible, they top out at relatively low transfer speeds.

It annoys me to no end how the USB2 standard is written in such a way that a device can be sold as "USB 2" when it really only supports the 11mb/s top speed of USB 1.1. I had a digital camera that pulled those shenanigans.

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

They're doing that again with USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2. Gen 1 is just rebranded 3.0, Gen 2 is true 3.1.

 

[Gorgonops]

And of course to make it even more ridiculous Thunderbolt 3 is going to use the same Type C connector as USB 3.1, so in theory a given device with a compatible plug may run at any number of speeds ranging from 5gb to 40gb/sec, and because the cables require active components *and* and a given port may or may not be able to provide the power it needs (up to 100W!), well... yeah. Have to admit I'm not totally sold on this whole Type C thing.

 

[Cory5412]

Well, as time moves forward, it seems that USB-on-prehistoric-Macs would be useful for transferring stuff via USB flash drives,

Unfortunately here you're asking for "improbable" and "different improbable."

Only time will tell if somebody comes up with something akin to the CFFA3000 for the Mac, or a proper USB host controller.

A single wire needs to be soldered across to the card port.  The mod is IIRC identical on the 2400 and 3400.

I actually wasn't aware that any model of the 3400 needed the modification at all? Nevertheless, it's worth noting that from the factory (and the way many people will get theirs) the 2400/180 needs work to make it happen.

Have to admit I'm not totally sold on this whole Type C thing.

So far, labeling for ThunderBolt vs. USB on computers is pretty consistent. I haven't seen enough cables yet to see whether or not things will be consistent there. It will probably be messy for a while when Apple starts using ThunderBolt 3 for some things and the cables outwardly look identical to the ones they're using on the Retina/2015 MacBook, except presumably for the logo.

It'll probably be one of the easier tough transitions forocmputer cabling. So far the biggest problem is that some cables are actually physically wired wrong for the USB Type C standard, which has fried at least one Chromebook Pixel. That's less of a "confusion" problem and more of a "bad cables" problem.

For all of its potential drawbacks, which as far as I can tell exist purely in the labeling and build quality realms: I'm personally extremely excited for Type C, but that's primarily because I have a computer powered by a Micro-USB-B cables (which break and wear out super easily) and because for the past decade or so, Apple's been selling laptops with about 100w of components inside, powered by 85-watt power adapters. I hope for nothing more than a swift death for MagSafe, replaced by 100W Type C power bricks.