PCMCIA cards on desktop PowerMacs

[SnakeCoils]

Hello,
I have two PowerMac MDD in my collection, one 2003 and one FW800.
Mostly they are used for fun, playing retrogames both native and emulated, and rarely used for data transfer or recovery from other PowerMacs both desktop and portables.
I use them almost three or four times in a month, also for MacPorts updates.
One is devoted to OS9 (MDD 2003) and the other to OSX Leopard, I like have separate machines for different Mac OSes and so far everything is very pleasant.
Of course during the time the curiosity and willing to play with new configurations inevitably increase and now I am going thru a new idea: PCMCIA (Cardbus) interfaces on a desktop Mac.
Nothing new, I know, but I want to keep the number of installed PCI cards in my MDDs as low as possible, for cooling reasons and to not occupy system resource for tasks not needed in the 99% of the time.
For example, on the MDD 2003 I could install a USB 2.0 PCI cad, a Firewire 800, a Wifi card, a Bluetooth dongle, a SCSI card, an eSATA controller, an audio card and so on up to fill the last free internal slot.
Okay, some of those connection are available on combo cards (typical FW400/USB 2.0) but most of the time one do not need to have everything of above plugged, it would be nice to have them only when needed, and here is when the PCI / PCMCIA bridge card comes to help.

So far I have rescued only two adapters, one with RICOH chipset and the other with Texas Instruments. The Ricoh hangs the boot if any Cardbus card is inserted, the TI chipset instead works just fine. I have seen also some adapters with ENE and PLX bridges but I have not yet tried so I can't say anything about these.

The mission for me now is to find as many Cardbus cards possible with support on both OS9 and OSX enviroment to cover most of the common connection needs.

The first research I started with was for a FW800 card and so far I have found two almost identical devices, one from LaCie and one from anonymous taiwanese manufacturer but looking at the aspect and functionality they appear the very same.
Both have two FW800 ports and one FW400 port, the only caveat is that if you want to connect self-powered Firewire HDD or other devices you have to feed an extra 12V to the card thru a side plug using the provided PSU. If the device instead is already powered on its side no extra voltage is necessary. They are seen both on OS9 (FW400 speed only) and OSX (full FW800 speed).

The second connection I would love to have is an eSATA controller and since the Firmtek/Seritek 1SM2 (the only known with both OS9/OSX compatibility) seems to be no more available for purchase (their online shop site is unreachable) I have tried to found and alternative based on the external appearance. The only advice I had was to search Silicon Images 3112 or 3512 chip based controllers and so I have purchased on eBay a Sitecom card driven by a 3512 controller (it was a blind purchase, the specs did not say nothing on the chip inside).
This card seems to be the closest possible to the SeriTek one, but since its firmware is different it is rejected by official SeriTek drivers, both OS9 and OSX (on Tiger it hang the machine at boot, on Leopard the Kext simply refuse to mount, a manual uninstall deleting kext extension and kext kache restored the normal functionality of the Mac).
Luckily on Leopard it is perfectly recognized without any additional driver and works like a charm: I have tested intense file transfer using both eSATA channel and the Mac never shown an issue so this is really promising.
It would be wonderful if the Seritek firmware of their 1SM2 card could be extracted and flashed back to the Sitecom, since also the original is not bootable I think the firmware size is within the 64k space, it could be only a matter of vendor/product string ID, but I am not an expert.
Also could be an issue with my PCI/PCMCIA bridge card, I don't know if the Sitecom card would work happily in a PowerBook with the Firmtek drivers. Or it could be the issue is with the 3512 chip, maybe a 3112 would be more happy, who knows?
On OS9 side the Seritek driver is just an "enabler", it does provide an access to OS9 volumes but the bootability is not supported at all.

The future reasearches involves in 802.11x and SCSI cards, and less important some exotic cards like MIDI and Graphic Cards (for example the VillageTronic VTbook or the Roland SCP-55) but the main goal in the short therm are:

- To be sure to have the most MDD compatible PCI/PCMCIA bridge available (PLX and ENE chipset to be tested)
- Found as many PCMCIA cards targeted for PC market supported on OS9/OSX side

Any advice is more than welcome

 

[weckart]

I have an adapter host card in one of my old PCs, which I haven't booted in years. To be honest, while it sounded great at the time, I never really found a use for this as there are not really many adapters on PCMCIA or Cardbus which you cannot find in PCI(e) format. Realistically, it is useful for troubleshooting or developing for said cards if your main rig is a desktop. Alternatively, you can swap out a whole host of adapters quite quickly when needed if you you are short of PCI slots but it is a clunky way of operating as notebook adapter cards usually are compromised in some way to get them to work with the form factor.

Still, there will be niche cases with some proprietary cards, where alternatives are hard to come by so I wish you luck with this.

 

[SnakeCoils]

Still, there will be niche cases with some proprietary cards, where alternatives are hard to come by so I wish you luck with this.

From what I've seen so far, the biggest limit of this kind of card is due the fact they are mostly adapters, not controller cards: you can use them as long a driver for the OS is available but, in case of storage devices for example, you cannot boot from them. I fully agree: the limited space available in the form factor also limits the card functionality, at least at the time when the PCMCIA standard was popular: nowadays with the abundance of SoC and FPGA devices anything would be possible, but I doubt anyone would be interested in developing new cards, expecially for our little vintage PPC world

 

[weckart]

Off the top of my head, I think I only have two bootable PC cards: one PCMCIA, which is a rebranded Adaptec 1460 SlimSCSI card made for HP to power a portable SCSI CDRW drive. It is only supported under Windows. Maybe there is a Linux driver for it somewhere. I couldn't get it to work under OS/2 or MacOS/OS X. The other is an eSATA card for Mac but that is an Expresscard, so no chance of working on PPC hardware. Apart from them, i have a few carrier cards for CF cards, which makes for a bootable alternative in Old World PPC hardware. Not sure the firmware for that would exist in desktop OF to allow those to be seen as a boot medium. If so, it would make a decent alternative to USB or Zip drives for older hardware and pre-MacOS 8.6 installations.

I think most people will only either have a modem or network card that came with their laptop, which they never used and probably requires a connecting dongle, which is either long lost or broken (I see you 3com).

 

[SnakeCoils]

I've just purchased (and await for shipping) another PCI-PCMCIA adapter, this one has the ENE chipset onboard, so far I had the best results with a TI chipset based but I'm always curious to test further solutions.
I know there are some Mac specific SCSI adapter, mainly from Adaptec (APD-1480) and Ratoc (CB32PB), both of them does not support boot. Impressive is the control panel of the Ratoc, almost on par with the ATTO utility for number of options available, someday I really hope to find one...
About the eSATA adapters (PCMCIA not Express34) I think the reason all the Silicon Image 3512 based around does not work on OS9 with the Seritek 1SM2 driver installed is simply because a vendor/product ID softlock, if someone with enough knowledge would look into the code, maybe it could possible to hack the driver making it universal (just like the famous Apple CD/DVD extension hack that made it compatible with all non-Apple optical devices). The driver is still available on Firmtek/Seritek support site.
About what you told before on your eSATA controller... It happens I have a spare LaCie Express34 eSATA adapter, a PCI-PCIe adapter and a PCIe-EX34 adapter, I think I'm going to do a little experiment, just for confirmation it does not work on PowerMac, I will let you know how it went ;-)

Update: the experiment didn't go very well, the total height of the PCI-PCIe plus the PCI-Ex34 adapter exceed the frame aperture of the slot, mechanically the aperture of the Ex34 slot is partially covered by the MDD slot frame, I could not fit the LaCie adapter :-(
In the meantime I have tested the bridge with a flashed LSI 1064E adapter and it worked just fine.

 

[weckart]

if someone with enough knowledge would look into the code, maybe it could possible to hack the driver making it universal (just like the famous Apple CD/DVD extension hack that made it compatible with all non-Apple optical devices). The driver is still available on Firmtek/Seritek support site.

There is such a person here. He popped up on the Macos9lives forum with a long story about how he was the original firmware writer for the SiI3112 based Firmtek/Seritek cards. With the extra info he supplied, I got a cheap generic PC SATA adapter card flashed with the Firmtek FW and with a couple of mods to the firmware and voltage regulator chips had a Mac compatible card, which supported MacOS 7.6 to 9.22 and was bootable. A godsend for older desktops as IDE drives are getting long in the tooth and genuine Firmtek or Sonnet SATA cards were both rare and super expensive when available.

He planned to rewrite the firmware as it was buggy. Covid kicked in and a move from the US to Europe. I think he got an alpha out of a part written firmware, since which things have got really quiet. He last posted in 2023 on the thread below but he is still around.

Guide to flashing PC SIL3112 SATA cards for Mac

To begin with, hello - I'm new to this board, although I've been a member of the 68kMLA forums for a while. I'm also a long time user of PowerPC Macs. I recently flashed a PC SATA card to use in my PMG4, which I am currently in the process of fully upgrading. I put this guide together for...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[SnakeCoils]

There is such a person here. He popped up on the Macos9lives forum with a long story about how he was the original firmware writer for the SiI3112 based Firmtek/Seritek cards.

I know, I have followed that thread for a while, very interesting also from a technical point of view. At present I have a very good SATA controller, made by ACARD, the 6890M with dip-switch selectable hardware raid support (0-1-JBOD), the only raid card I know that allow a RAID-0 to boot under OS9. After some extensive test and benchmark I went back to my ACARD IDE-SATA bridge with an industrial PATA SSD 2.5" drive attached, I saved a PCI slot and I've lost nothing in terms of performance.
I've just posted a request about the Firmtek 1SM2 hack on OS9 Lives! forum, hoping SATAman is listening

 

[weckart]

I know, I have followed that thread for a while, very interesting also from a technical point of view. At present I have a very good SATA controller, made by ACARD, the 6890M with dip-switch selectable hardware raid support (0-1-JBOD), the only raid card I know that allow a RAID-0 to boot under OS9. After some extensive test and benchmark I went back to my ACARD IDE-SATA bridge with an industrial PATA SSD 2.5" drive attached, I saved a PCI slot and I've lost nothing in terms of performance.
I've just posted a request about the Firmtek 1SM2 hack on OS9 Lives! forum, hoping SATAman is listening

You can reach out to him directly here under his Ataman moniker but I get the impression he gets distracted/waylaid with other things and stuff doesn't happen in a hurry.

 

[SnakeCoils]

A little update about my experiments.

In a previous post I have made the assumption that my Sitecom PCMCIA eSata adapter based on Sil3512 chipset was natively supported by OSX but recently I did a fresh install of Leopard and also after the last 10.5.8 update the card was not recognized at all...

To figure what was happening and why in my other MDD the card was recognized and the driver loaded, I plugged both the PCI-PCMCIA bridge and the Sitecom card in the other OSX 10.5 MDD and sure enough it was working as expected!

At some point I must have installed an OSX driver but either looking in my Mac archive or in the recent downloads I found nothing Sil3512 related and all my Web searches did not produce any results so, how this card went working?

In a hackintosh forum I found a post that lead me to a first step: find what resource on my Mac was activated by the Sitecom card and quickly I found the responsible was something called "SunrichTechSATA3512" but browsing the net again in the SunrichTech site I found nothing OSX related so I went back to my Mac and thanks to the powerful utility EasyFind I discovered an extension called "SunrichSATA3512.kext" in the System/Caches/com.apple.romextension folder so the SATA adapter was activated by this file but when and how this file was installed?

Since the "romextension" in the name was suspicious I went to my hardware repository picking the LaCie eSata PCI card (by Sismo) and looking at the chipset onboard it was a "Sil3512ECTU128"... uhm, it could be this related? But this card do not need any driver, all the needed stuff is within the firmware...
Quickly I disconnect the Sitecom card, installed the LaCie card in the fresh installed OSX 10.5 PowerMac, plugged a SATA HDD in one of the eSATA ports and looking at the System Profiler I did read this.

Bingo! So I have found the LaCie was based on Sunrich based firmware and looking in the Caches folder I discovered a "com.apple.romextension" folder newly created with the Sunrich extension inside! Simply plugging the LaCie card in the Mac lead automatically to the creation of this folder!

So... what happens if I remove the LaCie card and plug in the Sitecom PCMCIA card instead? Just as I thought the Sitecom was now recognized because to the LaCie card installed its own ROM extension, so from now on all the Sil3512 card I should put in my "blessed" Mac would be recognized and used: no OSX boot of course (they will act as SATAlink only) but at least it can be used for internal/external storage purpose.

I found this method works both for OSX 10.4 and 10.5, the Kext is installed in the same place and works in the same way.

For completeness, I tried to copy the kext straight from a Mac to another in the same place but at boot it refuses to load, pointing me to an incorrect installation. Anyway after plugging in and out the LaCie card the driver went permanently resident (at least until the next deep cache clean).

It would be interesting (and I think useful) for the community to have the choice to install this driver even without a donor LaCie eSata card, if someone is willing to try I will be happy to post both the firmware (if it is possible to extract without desoldering the chip) and the extension i talked above.

 

[weckart]

For completeness, I tried to copy the kext straight from a Mac to another in the same place but at boot it refuses to load, pointing me to an incorrect installation. Anyway after plugging in and out the LaCie card the driver went permanently resident (at least until the next deep cache clean).

The kext probably won't load via drag and drop. It will need to have its permissions set properly. It is what you need to do when manually installing a kext in the S/L/E folder. There are kext installer utilities, particularly for hackintoshes. Not sure if one exists for PPC but that is what the script editor is for.