Since i got a 2001 quick silver g4 and some skill working with xcode i decided to try and get running some sound cards on my machine using some open source pre-existing drivers.
So my first port to PPC macs is the driver for the CMI8738 sound cards, this driver is a fork of the pre-existing OS X driver made by Dogbert, but i have done some minor tweaks to improve it and i have added sample endianess corrction to allow the driver to be working on PPC machines.
I have open sourced the kext on github https://github.com/ITzTravelInTime/CMI8738_PowerPC_Intel
(NOTE that ir requires xcode 2.x or 3.x to be build, and can be also compiled for both PPC and Intel macs at either 32 or 64 bits, so in theory you can compile this driver for usage on modern macs too, since there are PCIe cards featuring the CMI8738 sound chip)
And you can find a pre-build PPC 32 binary here: https://github.com/ITzTravelInTime/CMI8738_PowerPC_Intel/releases
Aslso the driver for now requires OS X Leopard, i am still figuring out how to get it working with Tiger.
Limitations of this driver are:
- The absence of Input support, it's partially implemented ATM, but it isn't working.
- No support for anything which isn't 2 channel audio, so you can't make use of the 5.1 or the 7.1 support that some cards features, so you just have support for SPDIF/optical and the green jack on the back.
Those are the same limitations as the orignal driver by Dogbert, if you want to help me getting them to work, you are free to commit your code and ideas on the github repo i linked.
If you are wondering why you should use a sound card inside your mac, there are several reasons, here are a few:
-Having a mac with faulty audio.
-Having a mac with poor quality built-in audio (like my 2001 quick silver wose integrated audio just supports the 41khz sample rate and lacks built-in Optical audio, unlike my terratec Aureon 5.1 Fun card, that thanks to this driver gives me support for Optical, spdif and 48khz + 41khz sampling rates).
-Adding features the on-board audio lacks (like the M-Audio Dio 2448 which should work with this driver and adds ADAT support to your mac).
-Having more output devices for a combined setup.
-Not having bulky external boxes just to have better audio.
-Having sound cards laying around and putting them to use.
About me i am doing this project mostly for fun but also to get cards from my sound card collection working on my power mac, since i love to use pices of my collection in each one of my machines.
I hope this driver will be usefoul to you and that you will have a great time upgrading your macs.
So my first port to PPC macs is the driver for the CMI8738 sound cards, this driver is a fork of the pre-existing OS X driver made by Dogbert, but i have done some minor tweaks to improve it and i have added sample endianess corrction to allow the driver to be working on PPC machines.
I have open sourced the kext on github https://github.com/ITzTravelInTime/CMI8738_PowerPC_Intel
(NOTE that ir requires xcode 2.x or 3.x to be build, and can be also compiled for both PPC and Intel macs at either 32 or 64 bits, so in theory you can compile this driver for usage on modern macs too, since there are PCIe cards featuring the CMI8738 sound chip)
And you can find a pre-build PPC 32 binary here: https://github.com/ITzTravelInTime/CMI8738_PowerPC_Intel/releases
Aslso the driver for now requires OS X Leopard, i am still figuring out how to get it working with Tiger.
Limitations of this driver are:
- The absence of Input support, it's partially implemented ATM, but it isn't working.
- No support for anything which isn't 2 channel audio, so you can't make use of the 5.1 or the 7.1 support that some cards features, so you just have support for SPDIF/optical and the green jack on the back.
Those are the same limitations as the orignal driver by Dogbert, if you want to help me getting them to work, you are free to commit your code and ideas on the github repo i linked.
If you are wondering why you should use a sound card inside your mac, there are several reasons, here are a few:
-Having a mac with faulty audio.
-Having a mac with poor quality built-in audio (like my 2001 quick silver wose integrated audio just supports the 41khz sample rate and lacks built-in Optical audio, unlike my terratec Aureon 5.1 Fun card, that thanks to this driver gives me support for Optical, spdif and 48khz + 41khz sampling rates).
-Adding features the on-board audio lacks (like the M-Audio Dio 2448 which should work with this driver and adds ADAT support to your mac).
-Having more output devices for a combined setup.
-Not having bulky external boxes just to have better audio.
-Having sound cards laying around and putting them to use.
About me i am doing this project mostly for fun but also to get cards from my sound card collection working on my power mac, since i love to use pices of my collection in each one of my machines.
I hope this driver will be usefoul to you and that you will have a great time upgrading your macs.
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