Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Pimp My Quicksilver: Part VI: PCI FireWire

A heads up: this post is going to be pretty boring as well, but probably even more so than the PCI USB one due to the fact that I do not currently have any Firewire devices to test with at the moment.  Not even an older Firewire iPod. That should change in the future as I plan on purchasing and using external storage devices via Firewire. For now, it is just nice to know that I have the availability.

I purchased a Sonnet Tempo from Amazon for $54.98.  I wanted the card due to the fact that it has 2 Firewire 800 ports (and one 400).

As before, I also used the lspci -v command in Debian to make sure the card showed up and was available and active.  Sure enough we are good to go with the card using the firewire_ohci kernel driver.
0001:10:13.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB82AA2 IEEE-1394b Link Layer Controller (rev 01) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
    Subsystem: Device 0ee4:3884
    Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 16, IRQ 53
    Memory at 80083000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K]
    Memory at 80088000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
    Capabilities: <access denied>
    Kernel driver in use: firewire_ohci


This is not to be confused with the onboard firewire device of which shows up as using an LSI Corporation controller and chipset versus the TI one this card utilizes as seen above.

Great. A quick check using System Report in OS X Leopard shows the card successfully appears there as well.


So there you have it.  Additional Firewire 400 and 800 connectivity.  Yay.  Up next, is the much more exciting transition to Ultra ATA connected SSDs. From there, we will move straight to a SATA controller and SATA SSDs (Specifically used for the boot drives of each respective OS. I will store my precious data on more reliable drives both internally and externally).

P.S. With each of these upgrades, I have grown more fond of the G4 QS.  I will keep this baby going as long as I possibly can. Also, I am pumped at having Core Player installed as it plays back even higher quality 720p video (Mr. Robot Season 1) on my current measly ATI Radeon card that came as the stock graphics card for these systems flawlessly.  Impressive!

7 comments:

  1. Firstly, congrats on faster FW.

    I had never even heard of Mr Robot until I read this post, so I looked it up and binge-watched the whole first season while I coded on OpenBSD. Great stuff.

    My only gripe about the show, and the general "hacker" word use, is that most, like the show, get it wrong. A hacker is what we are, because we toy with Linux, BSD, and all sorts of different hardware, but what people on that show do is crack, not hack.

    A true hacker is a typically white hat command line guy, not a black hat cracker.

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    1. Thanks Zen. Glad to hear you were able to experience and plow through Season 1 of Mr. Robot. I absolutely loved the show as well because for the most part it has been one of the most technically correct shows I've seen. Sure there are a few small things they describe incorrectly or exaggerate (the use of the word hacker as you mentioned something of which I explained to my wife right of the bat because it also bothered me greatly), but otherwise it's spot on. The intensity and pace is fantastic. And the show is great also because you learn you cannot always trust the narrator Elliot.

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  2. Your Mac is looking absolutely gorgeous! Great work really! =)))

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    1. Thank you. More post and hardware upgrades coming very soon!

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  3. Howdy! Just finished the final version of PPC Media Center. Might be of interest to your readers. Is very mature and functional for most all Mac systems from PPC (G4/G5) to Intel - 10.4-10.8. http://ppcluddite.blogspot.com/2016/06/new-ppc-media-center-version-6.html

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  4. I am commenting here because I cannot find any other way to contact you B-rock. You posted in Fienix that you would be willing to help anyone wanting to get it running on a 1.42mhz G4 (well thats what I have anyway) I have running into an issue in the install. biker1bobatgmaildotcom

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