guys;
please;
your comments are incorrect + not true;
please start your own thread;
i started this thread for a specific purpose to try to obtain a specific outcome; and that information is being obscured + detracted from by your guy's comments
which are totally irrelevant + factually incorrect in my opinion.
there is no macos9 booting card that supports port multiplication because it is not supported by the ***only two chipset that actually have firmware that supports booting mac os 9 (sil3112, or vitesse vcs7174)
the understanding of pci vs pci-x put forth in the comments above is also not accurate
Why get a PCI-X card for a PCI Mac, and hope it will work, when you can just get a PCI card that you know will work?
ask anyone who understands and the answer will be: speed, bandwidth, throughput, performance;
pci-x is 64bit and is downward compatible with pci-64bit; while normal pci is 32bit; are u even reading my posts???
Unless, of course the PCI-X card is guaranteed to be "backward compatible" and is cheaper too!
i would say from what i have learned + understand to be true is that ALL PCI-X is backward compatible with PCI. no exceptions.
referring back to a post i made years ago :
http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=893.0PCI 32bit/33MHz 133.33 MB/s (most short pci cards)
PCI 32bit/66MHz 266.7 MB/s
PCI 64bit/33MHz 266.7 MB/s (most mac pci slots)
PCI 64bit/66MHz 533 MB/s
PCI 64bit/100MHz 800 MB/s
as u can see there is a great performance increase to be had from pci @ 64bit/33mhz (266MB/s which is what u get from using a pci-x card in a g3/g4)
compared to a normal shorter pci card (133MB/s)
but this is not what i intended to be discussing here and not why i made this thread;
my goal in starting this thread was to ask if anyone has ever acheived OS 9 booting on any other addon hardware featuring a chipset other than sil3112 (or VCS7174) this may be possible by firmware programming hacks or Openfirmware hacks etc etc
BECAUSE there used to be tons of SIL3112 cards cheaply available from china on ebay; now there is NOT
as far as i understand it : the term + definition of "PCI-X" really moreso refers to the EXTRA bandwidth above 64bit/66Mhz that they made available beyond 533MB/s
rather then the actual size of the connector on the slot (which all g4's seem to have connectors that are the same length but do not go above 64bit + do not operate at 66mhz)