Disk Speed Upgrades (aka The Bootable PCI SATA & SSD thread)

[widter]

wow... i was hoping this day would come! is it really true?
u did this by removing the osx code from the firmware? as i suggested might be possible? (dont ask me where or when i said this but i know i did, sometime somewhere)

Big secret how I did it, supernova, hehe! 

But basically you are right. The firmware was constructed in such that they put in the os9 code first, followed by the osX code. The new firmware I created had to be exactly 128k long, which can be easily done in a HEX editor. The hard part is really understanding the code enough to know where to cut.

As I said, I need to test this more thoroughly. I did see that the card registered perfectly as a SCSI card under 9.2.2, but I have not had time to run speed tests or even reliabity tests. Quicksilvers seem not to like it, but that's hardly news.

Somewhat exiting is that Firmtek lists ATAPI support for the firmware - whether this means you can connect optical drives, I have not tested yet either. It might.

I'll try getting back to the forum asap. If all turns out well, I'll upload a complete package of all you need to conduct the flashing (provided a PC w/ floppy disc).

Thanks for your interest. Your comment acutally was part of the necessary inspriration for me! 

[supernova777]

im pretty sure i have used optical drive via SATA.. on my Tempo Sata Serial card

if u have succeeded in doing this.. its a very big news for our vintage macos9 community.. to be able to easily flash any sil3112 card + use sata in g3/g4 + mac os 9.. this is a huge plus for many people on a budget.. let me be the first to thank you

u have confirmed that they are booting mac os 9?

[widter]

im pretty sure i have used optical drive via SATA.. on my Tempo Sata Serial card

Yup, but it seems the Wiebe firmware (that most people use for flashing) is not supporting ATAPI. Hey, you could extract the firmware of your card and share it

[supernova777]

im pretty sure i have used optical drive via SATA.. on my Tempo Sata Serial card

Yup, but it seems the Wiebe firmware (that most people use for flashing) is not supporting ATAPI. Hey, you could extract the firmware of your card and share it

no point it uses the larger eeprom.
and the firmware is freely available from seritek to download.
also it was figured out that the seritek firmware includes limited copyright protection code that checks the size + manufacturer type of the eeprom aswell.. not sure if u knew this

its easy enuff to just use a cd connected via ATA..
why are u talking about wiebetech. wiebetech firmware doesnt support os9..
which firmware did u reduce? u said u reduced the seritek originally.. now u are talking about wiebetech? confusing.

[MacTron]

WoW!
Great job, thanks. I hope that this firmware will end working well. It will help to a lot of people.

[MacTron]

@ widter: How is this work going?

[widter]

Hej, sorry about the late reply. I have been on a business trip.

Honestly, there have been some setbacks. I have now tested several different cards, all of the 10 Dollar price range. While the modified firmware works with some cards, it does not with others. With some cards, Mac OS 9 will find them correctly and System Profiler will show them as a "Firmtek SCSI card", but attached devices will not mount or be unreliable.

I will conduct further investigation into this. Part of the problem is the "copy protection" in Firmteks firmware that only allows for certain EPROM chips to be used by the cards.

I have spoken with a Swedish hardware engineer, it seems that it could be difficult to change the EPROM specifications in the firmware to fit every card out there.

So far: I'm really sorry if I got your hopes up too much. Firmtek did a good job at making this harder than expected.    I will let you know if I come to a sollution that is more promising on a wide scale.

[tiousable]

One for the "not working" pile:

Bought from here. I have the Wiebetech firmware on it, and the "9.2.2 Universal" CD seems to identify the card just fine but does not see any disks connected to it - is that a known issue with the Wiebe FW?.

[MacTron]

... is that a known issue with the Wiebe FW?.

The Wiebetech firmware doesn't work on Mac Os 9. IIRC

... and this card port layout ( one external and two internal ) won't be compatible with Mac Os 9 firmware, I think.

[tiousable]

OK, thanks, I'm going to try the Firmtek 1S2 fw then. Kinda expected this and already ordered the parts earlier (stock prom's too small, and probably is the wrong kind too (dat darn copy protection...)).

Regarding the layout, it's really just two channels, and you have a jumper block to redirect the data lines of one of the internal connectors to the external one. So it's really not as weird as it might look at first glance.

[geforceg4]

seritek firmtek are the best solution for mac os 9 users.
or purple sonnet tempo (Which is same thing)

[geforceg4]

I have interesting news for supernova777 and some others.

It seems that I have successfully reverse-engineered the Seritek firmware to fit on standard 128k EPROMs. This firmware will enable SIL3112 cards to register under OS9 as SCSI cards, making them more compatible than when using the Wiebe firmware.

it is a shame we have so many users like this.. who come in and then dissappear!!!! widter? what happened to you? you cant drop some serious news like that and then leave without sharing for the benefit of all? ?

[geforceg4]

do we have any japanese speaking users? that can get their hands on one of these mathey pci sata cards?


https://www.google.ca/search?num=30&q=msata-p02mac&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjAhsmq6KnPAhUS0IMKHQIUAcYQ7xYIGygA&biw=1258&bih=639

(to extract the firmware)






seems to be the same as the ratoc card

https://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8&q=(masata-p02mac%20%7C%20REX-PS30X)&oq=(masata-p02mac%20%7C%20REX-PS30X)&aqs=chrome..69i57.6745j0j7

[max1zzz]

I'm still trying to get my hands on a Mathey Msata-13UMAC as it looks like it uses the via6421a chip, PC cards based on this are both really cheap and really easy to get hold of. Just I have never seen a Mathey Msata-13UMAC for sale anywhere....

[geforceg4]

for those who were reading the thread above.. the user named widter has informed me that he has no intention of making his firmware hack public now or in the future.. so the search continues.. hopefully i wont give up + ill eventually be able to find someone whos capable of backward engineering the firmware or downsizing it to fit a normal/common size rom chip

[max1zzz]

Everyone gets so caught up on the size of the chip, The size of the chips is really not important here

The problem is that the firmware preforms a flash id check, if the firmware detects the flash chip is not a am29lv040, mx29lv040 or pm39lv040 the firmware will refuse to load. You can cut down the firmware to fit on the 1mbit flash chips the cards ship with but they still won't work as they will still fail the flash id check.

To get the firmware to work on these cards unmodified you would need to disable this check and cut the firmware down, the latter process being (in theory) quite easy (probably just cutting out the compressed OSX kexts in the firmware that aren't needed for our uses would do). The former is the difficult one, and thus far I haven't seen any one who has accomplished it.

At this point the only option is to swap the flash chip with one of the 3 mentioned above, they are a standard standard size but for some reason are pretty hard to come by (I guess that's why seritek chose them....)

[geforceg4]

i remember all of those details.. so yea..
its public knowledge now.., the goal is to 1) backward engineer + remove both the brand + size checks from the firmware 2) reduce the size anyway possible, one way possibly being by removing the osx related code.. (it was also thought that there might be further code-logic where the script inside the firmware checks the size of the firmware itself to make sure it hasnt been tampered with etc)


once thats accomplished, it would make it possible for anyone to get a SIL3112 card and be able to use any mac or pc to re-flash a card without doing any physical hardware chip swap - de-soldering + re-soldering

[max1zzz]

Interesting, Just been re-reading the thread over at 68k and just noticed something interesting about what dougg3 said about the flash id check

The firmware extracts a couple of kexts into OS X, and one of the kexts checks for supported flash chips during the OS X boot process and fails to load if the board doesn't have a supported flash chip. (In fact, on a newer revision of the firmware that they don't have available on the website for download, it causes a kernel panic...)

So the driver checks the flash chip and not the firmware, dougg3 only ever looked at the OSX kext's - this leaves a real good chance that the OS9 driver might not.
If this is the case we may be able to just cut down the firmware after all.... Looks like I have some testing to do at the weekend

[geforceg4]

Everyone gets so caught up on the size of the chip, The size of the chips is really not important here

The problem is that the firmware preforms a flash id check, if the firmware detects the flash chip is not a am29lv040, mx29lv040 or pm39lv040 the firmware will refuse to load.

well the 040 indicates the size of the chip.. (4M-BIT [512K x 8] but you probably know that already) .. so the size of the chip is part of the check for the specific size + make that was part of the check that was thought to exist in the firmware.

[madalynmcworm]

Is this still something we are working on?

I'm having a heck of a time finding any SATA cards that are native. I see these si(i|L)3112 cards for $8 on ebay. I don't see any confirmation that the $8 cards work. One post was the first went well, the next two failed.

Do we know what the firmware instruction set is for REing it? Or any more real info?