Author Topic: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide  (Read 66892 times)

Offline Syntho

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Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« on: July 01, 2015, 11:23:52 PM »



Introduction:

Powermac 9600 machines are the very last Macs to boot System 7 natively, with System 7 originally being programmed to run on 68k machines. The transition to PowerPC processors was made in 1991 with version 7.1.2. The 9600/200 originally shipped with 7.5.5. The latest version of System 7 is 7.6.1 which is the preferred version for a 9600. With the introduction of 7.6, it was there that the Macintosh operating system was first referred to as Mac OS instead of System 7. Regardless of that, I’ll be referring to the OS as System 7 from now on. You can read more about the evolution of System 7 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7

The 9600 supports up to OS9.1 officially, but it can be ‘helped’ along in installing 9.2.2, as well as OSX via additional software. It’s my advice to leave your 9600 as is and boot to 7.6.1, plus your choice of an OS8/OS9 version for safety reasons. I prefer a combo of 7.6.1 and OS8.6 myself.

I have CPU upgrade information below but it’s my advice to leave your 9600 as stock as possible for many compatibility reasons. If you plan on running VST instruments and VST FX, I’d recommend against using a 9600 altogether. Even if you upgrade the machine with the fastest upgrade ever made for it - the 1ghz Sonnet Crescendo - you will still suffer from the slow system bus speed (50mhz) among other things that slow it down.

9600s are more of specialty machines and they’re best left to do what they excel at:

1) Pro Tools & Sound Designer rigs
2) MIDI machines
3) ADAT & DTRS transfer machines


Basically, if you’re not taking advantage of Digidesign’s TDM power, you’re not going to get very far with one. Leave all VST stuff for G4 machines. If you’ve got hardware recording consoles, hardware synthesizers, and/or digital tape machines, the 9600 will be a good fit for you. Tracking, Editing, and MIDI editing is what these things are about.

One of the best things about a 9600 and running System 7 is the lack of bloat. Every time a new OS or a new version of your favorite software is released, it comes with a lot of new features that are of no use to you. This clutters menus. Worst of all, it usually comes with new, heavy graphics which can bog down your system. Newer operating systems and software make you spend more time menu diving than you do getting any work done.

You’re going to be surprised to see how much more organized your favorite programs were back in System 7 days. Small program file sizes, short menus, uncluttered GUI interfaces... ONLY what you need is provided. System 7 is mostly monochrome and the software that came out for it at the time was mostly monochrome as well. That equates to some really zippy browsing around. Sometimes a white background with black text is all you need to get stuff done. That’s how I prefer it.

« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 12:24:54 AM by Syntho »

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9660 O.G. Guide
« Reply #1 on: July 01, 2015, 11:24:46 PM »
CPU & Motherboard:

There are two types 9600 motherboards: ones that have the Tsunami architecture and ones that have the ‘Mach V’ Kansas architecture. The Tsunami boards were included in the 9600/200, 9600/200MP (dual CPU) and the 9600/233, and the 9600/300 and 9600/350 have the Kansas boards. An easy way to spot the difference is to just look at the CPU speed of the machine. If it has a 300 or 350 that isn’t an upgrade, you know it’s of the Kansas variety.

Tsunami:



Kansas:



If you look at the comparison above, you’ll see that the Kansas versions have a row or two of chips removed. This is a good thing to keep in mind in case you ever want to buy a new motherboard. Always go for one with the missing chips (Kansas).

The Tsunami boards use PowerPC 604e CPUs and the Kansas boards use PowerPC 604ev CPUs. The Kansas 300/350 machines are the ones to get for a few reasons. The Tsunami machines have 512k of L2 cache soldered onto the motherboard itself, and the Kansas machines have the L2 cache soldered on their CPU cards (1MB of inline cache, not backside). If you decide to upgrade a Tsunami machine with a 3rd party CPU, you’ll have all of your CPU juice running though a slow 512k L2 cache at all times whether you like it or not.

Also to note: seeing that a G3/G4 upgrade card has L2 cache on the CPU, if you install one into a Tsunami board, the upgrade card's superior L2 cache will turn into L3 cache as noted in the Apple System Profiler. Having L3 cache compared to not having it is a benefit generally, sure, but not when you have superior L3 cache to your L2 cache.

With the L2 cache being on the CPU (Kansas), when you take the 604ev processor out of its slot, its L2 cache comes along with it. This means that any upgrade CPU’s own L2 cache will be working alongside the processor like it’s supposed to instead of being demoted to L3 cache. We could get into some tech stuff about why getting that onboard L2 cache out of there is a good idea (Tsunami), but just take my word for it that for maximum speed (as well as dodging crashes due to some kind of weird L3 cache incompatibility with certain software), you should either get a Kansas machine, or do the following:





If you get out your soldering iron and unsolder the R31 resistor (which really just acts as a simple jumper), it decouples the L2 cache from the board and essentially turns a Tsunami board into a Kansas board. Try this if you wish, but just go for a Kansas machine in the first place and be done with it. Even if you can only find a 200mhz machine and you plan to leave it stock, it's still more than capable for TDM, MIDI and simple editing jobs so no big deal.

In the end I personally decided to leave my machines with the stock CPUs: a 200mhz Tsunami machine and a 350mhz Kansas machine. The 9600/200 is my main MIDI rig and the 9600/350 is for Pro Tools & digital transfers. If you absolutely insist on upgrading the CPU for either a Tsunami or Kansas machine, go for a Newer Technology MAXPowr CPU upgrade rather than a Sonnet. The NewerTech upgrade I had worked flawlessly while the Sonnet didn't. There are many reports that corroborate this, namely there being an incompatibility between Sonnet's extension and the MOTU hardware extension. It led to freezing on every single startup, so out the Sonnet came and in the NewerTech went.





NOTE:
There’s something called Speculative Addressing in G3/G4 upgrade processors which, put very shortly, means that your CPU will guess (speculate) what’s coming next. In other words, it pulls the information ahead of time and it results in better overall CPU performance. The problem with this is that older Macs -- such as the 9600 -- don’t have the correct information in their ROMs to properly execute this, resulting in a system prone to crashes and hard drive failure. Companies such as Newer Technology added a hardware solution to their MAXPowr upgrade CPUs which completely corrects the issue (added BEFORE the very 1st upgrade CPU even shipped. All are ok!). I believe Sonnet went with a software solution via the Sonnet control panel, which turns out being an incomplete solution. Perhaps this is why I’m getting crashes between MOTU extensions and Sonnet extensions? NewerTech it is!

« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 01:49:49 PM by Syntho »

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9660 O.G. Guide
« Reply #2 on: July 01, 2015, 11:25:39 PM »
RAM:

The 9600 support up to 768mb of ram officially but it’s possible to install up to 1.5GB in the TWELVE slots that are on your board. Each slot will take up to a maximum of a 128mb stick. As mentioned earlier, these machines are used more for specialty purposes so it’s overkill to install more than the official maximum amount, 768mb.

There are two types of RAM sticks for the 9600: FPM (Fast-Paged Mode) 70ns DIMMs, and EDO (Extended Data Out) 60ns DIMMs. Go for the latter - the 60ns EDO DIMMs, for obvious reasons. Both types of sticks are 5v, 64bit 168pin DIMMs, and the EDO variety is still available from OWC (Other World Computing). The motherboard also supports RAM interleaving which results in a 5%-15% increase in system performance. However you MUST install the sticks in a certain order to take advantage of this:





First install a stick into the A6 slot, then into the B6 slot. Then into the A5 slot, then into the B5 slot and so on. When installing you’ll begin to have a gap in between the sticks, which seems kind of weird, but that’s what it takes to get these interleaved correctly. We start with a number first (6 in this case), then we fill up A and B, then move down to the next number (5) and repeat — A then B in a descending way.

You may wonder why we’re starting with the number 6 first rather than the number 1. The truth is that the techs at Apple have contradicted themselves as to what we should start with first. People have more often found success when starting with the higher-numbered slots first, but testing has shown that interleaving was successful in both scenarios. You’ll be fine regardless of your starting point, but I recommend populating A6-B6, then A5-B5 and so on in a descending order since more people have recommended it that way than the other way around.


NOTE:
When booting up, System 7 performs an automatic RAM test and there is no way to disable it like in OS8 or OS9 (by holding Command + Option when opening the Memory control panel). According to my calculations, with 768MB of ram installed, you’ll have to wait approximately 1 minute 25 seconds until you finally see the System 7 screen come on your monitor. Each 128MB stick of RAM adds about 15 seconds of check time to the startup. Here’s what I got when I tested this:

128mb - 0:10
256mb - 0:25
384mb - 0:40
512mb - 0:55
640mb - 1:10
768mb - 1:25


When you turn your system on and you get nothing but a blank screen, don’t worry. It takes time…
« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 11:36:37 AM by Syntho »

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9660 O.G. Guide
« Reply #3 on: July 01, 2015, 11:26:15 PM »
PCI Slots:


PCI was fairly new when the 9600 hit the market. The 9600 was a favorite amongst studios - and obviously still is - because it has a grand total of 6 PCI slots for maximum expandability. This is a big help to people running Pro Tools rigs because if you want to run, say, a Mix Core with two Mix Farms, you still have 3 PCI slots left over. We haven’t gotten to the video section just yet, but a note in advance for you is that the 9600 requires that you sacrifice at least one PCI slot for the video card.

Slot order on the 9600 DOES matter. There are two PCI busses on the board which are controlled by their own Bandit chips. The 1st bus handles slots A1, B1 and C1, and the 2nd bus handles D2, E2 and F2.





There is conflicting information as to which slots particular cards should go in and what actually works, but as a rule of thumb, the highest slots (A1 for bus 1 and D2 for bus 2) are the slots that your most important cards should be installed in (either audio interfaces or any type of HD controller). The two busses are basically equal, it’s just the A1 and D2 ones take priority over the other ones slightly.

For some reason the stock video cards that come with the 9600 won’t work properly in all slots. This is perhaps a fluke just on my own system, but if not, it probably has more to do with the video cards than the slots themselves. Every PCI card I’ve tried in a 9600 worked in all slots universally, other than the video cards of course.

If you’re running a Pro Tools rig, you MUST have a Mix Core as the bus master. A bus master card is a PCI card that controls the data transfer to and from the Bandit bridge chip, which controls its group (group 1 is A1 B1 C1 / group 2 is D2 E2 F2). This means you need to have a Core card in either A1 or D2. It’s also generally recommended to have your other (optional) bus master card such as a SCSI/IDE/SATA controller card in a bus master slot, but I find I can get away with putting mine elsewhere when necessary. My 350 Kansas machine was once set up like so:

A1 - Sonnet Tempo SATA controller
B1 - TT128 Video Card
C1 - TT128 Video Card
D2 - Digidesign Mix Core
E2 - Digidesign Mix Farm
F2 - Digidesign Mix Farm


Try your best to get your audio interface and HD controller cards into a bus master slot. If that forces you to put your video card(s) into a slot where it won’t work, it’s perfectly fine to switch things around until it does. I’ve read more than a couple of reports of people using weird slot orders where everything was working fine, so you should be OK too. Run some tests and see what works for you.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 11:40:39 AM by Syntho »

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9660 O.G. Guide
« Reply #4 on: July 01, 2015, 11:26:48 PM »
SCSI Hard Drives:

The 9600 has two SCSI busses: the internal ‘Fast’ SCSI-2 bus which rates at 10MB/sec (bus 0 as noted by Apple System Profiler), and the external SCSI-1 bus which rates at 5MB/sec (bus 1 as noted by Apple System Profiler). The Powermac 9600 manual states that the external bus is SCSI-1 (originally known as just ‘SCSI’), yet in tech notes it’s referred to as being SCSI-2 compliant. This is because SCSI-1 is usually compatible with SCSI-2 devices, and that’s the case here, but what the external SCSI-1 bus is NOT compatible with is the Fast mode of SCSI-2. This is why it’s only 5MB/sec, which is half of what proper Fast SCSI-2 can do.

The stock hard drive in the 9600 is an Apple-branded, Fast SCSI (SCSI-2) drive that connects via the internal 50-pin SCSI-2 ribbon cable. The external bus is accessible from the back of the machine via a standard DB25 SCSI cable. The external bus is good for connecting an external SCSI drive for back ups, as well as for running an additional SCSI drive for Pro Tools rigs. You’d also connect your Zip and Jaz drives here, but the 9600 comes stock with a 250MB zip drive on the internal SCSI bus already.





The stock 4GB drive that comes with the 9600 has one of the most annoying high-pitched squeals I’ve ever heard coming from a hard drive. It’s a good idea to replace it. Instead of replacing it with just another standard 50pin SCSI-2 drive though, I opted for a Seagate Cheetah 15k.4 36GB drive. The Cheetah happens to be an Ultra320 SCSI drive which is of a later generation of SCSI technology so that explains why it uses an 80pin SCA connector (Single Connector Attachment).





I picked up a cheap 50pin ribbon to 80pin SCA adapter like you see above, connected it to the Cheetah drive, then popped the drive into the 9600, and I thought it wasn’t working at first because I didn’t hear the hard drive spin up. However when I walked into the studio, I saw the hard drive icon appear on the desktop, so that shows you how super quiet these things are.








In total I spent about $50 with shipping for the drive and adapter and I couldn’t be happier with it.


NOTE:
Some software doesn't like it when you take out or disconnect the main SCSI drive because the software is expecting the drive to be there. A prime example of this is MOTU's Unisyn. When you install it, it's going to want to put the invisible hard disk authorization onto the SCSI drive. If it's not there, you'll get an error when running the installer. If you install it on the SCSI drive, then disconnect it, obviously, Unisyn won't launch since the authorization is offline. The funny thing is that this doesn't happen at all with non-SCSI Mac machines. I guess MOTU's software senses whether or not a SCSI drive came stock with the system or not. Try to keep a SCSI drive in your 9600 at all times to avoid weird issues like this.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 02:00:55 PM by Syntho »

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9660 O.G. Guide
« Reply #5 on: July 01, 2015, 11:27:31 PM »
SCSI Voodoo:

Only one terminator is allowed on the internal Fast SCSI-2 bus, and that should be on the main hard drive, which should also be last in the chain. No other devices on the internal bus should be terminated. The stock hard drive will come pre-terminated, so if you plan to swap it out for another one, you’ll need to make sure that the new one is either properly terminated on the drive itself, or if using an adapter for another type of SCSI drive, you’ll need to make sure that termination is provided on the adapter. The adapter I bought has a termination jumper so that’s where I apply mine.

The SCSI ID of your main hard drive should be ID0, with all other SCSI devices climbing higher in number. There are some standard conventions for SCSI ID numbers which you’ll find very often in old school Macs, but it's fine to deviate from this when necessary:

ID0 - Main Hard Drive
ID1 - (optional) Secondary Hard Drive
ID3 - CDROM Drive
ID5 - Zip Drive
ID6 - Scanner / Tape Drive


All other missing IDs are fair game, but again, feel free to deviate from this standard if you’d like.


The external bus (Bus 1) has automatic termination which means that if the circuitry senses that nothing is connected to the external bus, it automatically terminates itself at the 50-pin connector. If you're wondering where the external 50pin connector is located, there isn't one. On top of the 50pin connector for the internal SCSI bus on the logic board, there is also one for the external bus. This makes it internal as far as its location, but it’s for the external bus no matter how you look at it.

If for some reason you decide to take out the main hard drive and use a PCI SATA/IDE/SCSI controller instead, it’s recommended to disconnect the internal bus’ SCSI cable from the motherboard altogether to prevent termination issues. I’ve run my 9600 without the internal drive safely before, with the cable still connected, and all other SCSI devices on the internal bus still worked fine at the time. I wouldn't do that again, but these days I keep a SCSI drive in there just in case.


NOTE:
You should never confuse Termination Power with Termination. Term Power is NOT the same as Termination. Term Power is used to supply power to the terminator, and at least one device in your SCSI chain has to provide it. When I bought my first 9600, the stock Zip drive had the Term Power jumper on, and I’m unsure if the main hard drive also had its Term Power on. It’s recommended to have only one device supplying Term Power (preferably the main drive) unless you’ve got a LONG SCSI chain going on. If you have two of them supplying it, you may or may not run into trouble depending on if the manufacturers have set up their hardware to compensate for this. I never had any trouble with this personally, but it's better to be safe than sorry.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 01:12:57 AM by Syntho »

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9660 O.G. Guide
« Reply #6 on: July 01, 2015, 11:27:59 PM »
SATA/IDE Hard Drives:

This one is simple. Buy a PCI SATA or IDE controller and have at it. Your SATA controller will show up as a SCSI controller in the System Profiler as SCSI Bus 2. Some SATA/IDE controllers allow you to boot off of the drive while others only allow you to use drives as file storage. I personally run my main OS on the SCSI Cheetah drive to ensure compatibility, and I also use a Sonnet Tempo SATA PCI card for a fast SSD. The SSD has two partitions: one formatted to Mac OS Standard which is my universal backup drive, and another formatted to Mac OS Extended which I’ve titled Pro Tools Drive. The latter volume's name gives away what it’s used for.

Since the 9600's internal SCSI bus is rated at 10MB/sec, plus since not all SCSI drives can get close to that speed, an additional HD on the external SCSI bus may be needed in order to have all of your Pro Tools tracks playing back without dropouts. It’s been recommended in the past to not simultaneously boot off of, run Pro Tools on, and record to/read from your main system drive. Digidesign has always recommended using a separate drive for that (it can be on the internal bus, no problem), but I use just my SSD for all of my Pro Tools audio files and it works fine.

NOTE:
If you’re using an IDE or SATA controller and you’re booting off of the drive connected to it, you’ll most likely encounter a message every single time you boot up saying that the Mac was improperly shut down. Even if it’s not true, you’ll still get the message. Nothing is wrong, it’s just how the 9600 reacts because it doesn’t like SATA controllers for some reason. You can turn this message off in one of the control panels so you won’t have to click OK every time you boot up.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 02:02:23 PM by Syntho »

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9660 O.G. Guide
« Reply #7 on: July 01, 2015, 11:28:16 PM »
File System:

HFS is also known as Mac OS Standard, and HFS+ is also known as Mac OS Extended. There’s a big difference between the two. If you’ve never used System 7 as an operating system, you’re in for a big surprise. Due to the way the HFS file system is programmed, the bigger your volume size is, the bigger your files will be. As an example, I formatted a 1TB hard drive (which works fine in System 7!) to the Mac OS Standard format, then I created a simple text file or two. If I remember correctly, the txt files were a whopping 14.5MB in size even though they had only 3 characters on the inside of them.

The bigger your drive is, the bigger each file has to be at a minimum. Every time you create a new file, expect it to take up much more HD space than usual. Again, the minimum size of every file is dictated by the size of the volume that the file is on. Apple never really anticipated us to actually use 1TB hard drives in System 7. The stock hard drive is only 4GB, so that doesn’t really contribute to a large minimum file size. It's acceptable.

System 7 requires that a volume be formatted to the Mac OS Standard format, and OS8 and above requires that it be formatted to the HFS+ or Mac OS Extended format. When you boot into System 7 and you see your OS8 drive — or any drive formatted to the Extended format, when you open it, you’ll see nothing but a text file on the inside of it that says, “Where have my files gone?”. When you open it, it gives the explanation that System 7 can’t read a volume formatted to the HFS+ or Extended format.

The predicament here is that sometimes you’re going to have files on Extended volumes that you need to access from System 7, so you’ll have boot into OS8 or above to copy over what you need to the System 7 drive. A workaround for that is to create what I like to call a universal backup volume. I create an additional partition on any random drive in my system, format it to the Standard file system, rename it something like, "Backup", then put all of my frequently-accessed files on it. This way, you’ll always have access to your important files from both System 7 and OS8/OS9, since OS8 and OS9 can obviously read and write to the HFS/Mac OS Standard format, just not the other way around..
« Last Edit: February 29, 2020, 05:24:38 PM by FdB »

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9660 O.G. Guide
« Reply #8 on: July 01, 2015, 11:28:50 PM »
Video Cards:

There aren’t many 3rd party video cards for the 9600. The ATI Radeon 9200 is the most powerful one you can get for a 9600, but the Radeon 7000 series cards also work well. The card that the 9600 ships with is the 8MB ixMicro TwinTurbo card that uses the oldschool Apple Monitor Interface DB15 connector:








You won’t be fooling with any DVI stuff on a 9600, at least with the stock 9600 card. Seeing that I’ve got two 1080p widescreen DVI/VGA monitors, I needed a couple Apple DB15 to VGA adapters. I got mine from a random online store and they work fine, but be aware that some are higher quality than others, and that some also include jumpers on them while others don’t. Mine didn’t happen to have jumpers on them, so take a look at the manufacturer’s provided documentation to make sure you have the jumpers set right. Otherwise, you’ll either lose quality, or you’ll lose color in your video.








The ixMicro TwinTurbo cards are pretty underpowered. They give you a bunch of different 4:3 display aspect ratio resolutions, with the highest one being 1600X1200. Unfortunately no 16:9 widescreen DAR resolution is provided. It just wasn’t around back then. I’m unsure if the Radeon cards provide any 16:9 DARs or not, or which kind of connectors they use, but if they do provide any 16:9 DARs, you'd be better off using those instead of the stock ixMicro TwinTurbo cards.

There IS in fact a way to get the Twin Turbo cards rocking some 16:9 flavor in your monitors, but it can’t be done without some serious hacks. The way I got mine running at 16:9 DARs was by paying someone to hack them for me. This involved having to physically mail the cards to the hacker. The problem with distributing my own personal hacked drivers is that they’re completely custom, and they’re coded precisely for my own needs and my own hardware. The Twin Turbo cards have different models, different revisions, different EPROMs, and possibly different stock drivers, so consequently there’s different code to fool with too. If you add on top the fact that I’m running at a slightly abnormal 1280X720 resolution, I think you can see that it most likely wouldn’t be compatible with your personal 9600 rig.

It’s best to use a Radeon to get where you’re going.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 01:35:19 AM by Syntho »

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Re: Power Mac 9660 O.G. Guide
« Reply #9 on: July 01, 2015, 11:29:27 PM »
Ethernet:

The built-in ethernet port is only 10Mbps with the highest speed I’ve ever gotten out of it being about 1.2MB/sec via FTP. This really isn’t much of a bother to me, but seeing that you’ve got a bunch of PCI slots, you can always add a cheap 100Mbps PCI ethernet card if you can afford to sacrifice a PCI slot. As mentioned earlier, file copying speeds are rather slow on the 9600 (a little over 2MB/sec), so you won’t get that much of a benefit by adding a faster ethernet card anyway. Save your PCI slot for something important instead.


USB / ADB:





USB wasn’t around at the time so ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) it was. You can add just about any older, cheap USB card to the 9600 and it will work fine (thanks to the USB Adapter Card Support 1.4.1 driver), but only OS8.5 and above actually support USB. The actual first version of Mac OS to support USB was OS8.1, but that was only for a special, one-off distro of 8.1 that shipped on the original Bondi iMac (which was the very first USB Mac).

I’ve read a report or two of people successfully getting USB working in System 7 but I will only believe it when I finally see it. The best you can do for now is to run OS8.5 at the least if you want USB capability. Again though, just as with ethernet, you’ll be sacrificing a precious PCI slot. Use an old school ADB keyboard and mouse instead:








The ADB mouse has a very short cable that plugs into the ADB keyboard (on the back/underneath it), and from the keyboard you’ll go into the ADB port on the 9600. Unfortunately the keyboard cable is pretty short too, but that can be solved with some S-Video extension cables. ADB uses a 4-pin mini-DIN connector, and so does the S-Video connector. Same connector, same wiring = ADB cables being 100% compatible with S-Video cables. S-Video cables are what we use on SVHS tape machines, so sometimes you’ll hear the S-Video connector/cable being referred to as an SVHS cable.

I have about 25 feet worth of ADB/S-Video cabling from my keyboard/mouse to my 9600 and I’ve had no problems with it at all. I’m also running through two Logic dongles right before I hit the 9600 on top of that, so that shows you that S-Video extender cables are reliable. One of the most convenient things about an oldschool ADB keyboard is that they have a power button on them. This means you can boot up without having to wreak havoc on your knees.

You’re going to lose the ability to right click seeing as ADB mice have only a single button, but you can always control + click if you're booted into OS8 or OS9. If you’re running System 7, the control + click menus won’t appear due to it not being implemented at the time System 7 was current. Also, you're going to have to hold the mouse button down as you're browsing menus. You’ll get used to all of this, I promise.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 01:44:53 AM by Syntho »

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Re: Power Mac 9660 O.G. Guide
« Reply #10 on: July 01, 2015, 11:29:56 PM »
Serial Ports:





The 9600 has two built-in serial ports: the modem port and the printer port. With these you’ll be able to get the Mac Daddy of midi interfaces, the almighty Opcode Studio 5LX. You absolutely WILL NOT get better midi timing with any USB G3/G4 or any USB interface in general. I’m not knocking USB here necessarily — there have been many talks about the speed of midi over USB as compared to the serial protocol, it’s just that the Studio 5LX itself has some wicked speed optimization programming going on on the inside of it, and it just so happens to use serial ports. The Opcode guys really knew what they were doing, and the Studio 5LX proves it.

Serial cables and serial devices use different pinouts for various reasons, so it’s of utmost importance that you choose the correct cables for your serial MIDI interfaces. A lot of the cables on Ebay and online computer hardware stores offer the same 8-pin mini-DIN serial cables as the ones that you want, but the wiring or pinout most likely won’t be correct. Usually you’ll come across straight-through instead of the ‘crossover’ pinout variety that we need. Straight-through is pin 1 to 1, pin 2 to 2 and so on. The correct crossover pinout is in the picture below:





Like with ADB cables, you’re going to find that serial cables are usually too short. To solve this problem, I bought a quantity of six serial cables with the correct pinout (in case I get some future 9600s), plus some serial extension cables, plus some standard, longer serial cables. There is a catch here, however.

The proper crossover pinout serial cables I got were about 5 feet in length, and the other cables I got were rather long (10’ extenders and 15’ standard serial cables). The catch is that both the extender cables, AND the standard cables both have a straight-through pinout. I know I said to not use these, but the reason this works is that if you have at least ONE crossover pinout cable in the chain somewhere, the wiring/pinout is corrected at that point. That means you’re free to run straight-through from there on out (since the wiring has already been corrected at another point in the chain).

It doesn’t matter if you plug the crossover cable into your midi interface, or if you plug it into the 9600. As long as it’s corrected once at least somewhere in the chain, you’re good. I was unable to locate long crossover pinout cables, and I was also unable to locate crossover pinout extension cables so it left me with doing what I said above. In case you do find crossover pinout extension cables someday, make sure to not use two crossover pinout cables in one chain as that would actually reverse the wiring that you tried to correct in the first place.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 01:57:50 PM by Syntho »

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #11 on: July 01, 2015, 11:30:23 PM »
Software & Compatability Issues:

As mentioned above, there is a weird incompatibility between Sonnet extensions and MOTU extensions. Use a NewerTech CPU upgrade instead of Sonnet, with NewerTech being the preferred 3rd party processor by Digidesign themselves anyway.

You also have the issue of MOTU software not liking when a SCSI hard drive is missing from the system (because it’s expecting their authorizations to reside on it), so if you want to use MOTU software, keep a SCSI hard drive in the system at all times.

I would highly recommend against running FreeMidi and MOTU’s Unisyn software. Especially Unisyn. Digital Performer requires FreeMidi to be installed, so if DP is software you can’t live without, then running FreeMidi is ok. Otherwise, I’d remove it from the system altogether. I won’t get into why Unisyn and/or FreeMidi aren’t a good idea since I’d be here for a while, just take my word for it that they’re not stable at all and that you WILL get some incredibly frustrating crashes when using them.

The list of software and the versions that will or will not run on System 7 will take lots of gathering work. Sometimes some things will work, sometimes not. Run some Google searches to see what the latest version of your favorite programs are that will run on System 7. I personally use the latest version of Logic 3 and  SoundDiver 2, but I also have an old version of Pro Tools (4.3) for my older Pro Tools III rig which is just for fun. I avoid using PTIII hardware for serious work though, and instead boot into OS8.6 for using PT5.1. That gives me the ability of having stereo tracks for example. As much as I’d like to stay in System 7 at all times, it’s worth it to boot into either OS8 or OS9 for PT5.1’s new features.

Another thing to watch out for is compatibility of files that you’ve been used to working properly right off the bat. Stuffit files or Disk Copy files for example. There are newer versions of Disk Copy and the free Stuffit Expander in newer versions of Mac OS, so make sure you upgrade simple programs like that when necessary. You may have to go on the hunt to find older versions of your favorite programs, and you may have to find replacements for others altogether.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 01:51:40 AM by Syntho »

Offline DieHard

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #12 on: July 02, 2015, 12:33:20 PM »
Absolutely Awesome :)

Offline MacTron

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #13 on: July 02, 2015, 01:28:57 PM »
Even though I'm not prone to use "non G4" Macs, I still have a couple of PM 9600 brothers: a PM8500 and a PM8600.
Any way, Thank you, for this great post.
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supernova777

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #14 on: July 02, 2015, 04:14:10 PM »
wow great post  8)

supernova777

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #15 on: August 21, 2015, 01:52:53 PM »
the 8600 is basically the same as the 9600 correct?
just found an ad of a guy selling his 8600!
from 1997!!!!!!

Offline MacTron

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #16 on: August 21, 2015, 01:59:12 PM »
the 8600 is basically the same as the 9600 correct?
just found an ad of a guy selling his 8600!
from 1997!!!!!!

The 8600 have less PCI slots but include a video digitizer, with composite/S-Video PAL/NTSC in/out hardware.
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Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #17 on: August 21, 2015, 02:01:45 PM »
The 8600 have less PCI slots but include a video digitizer, with composite/S-Video PAL/NTSC in/out hardware.

I believe the Avid-ready 9600s also came with this.

Offline DieHard

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #18 on: August 21, 2015, 03:34:35 PM »
From Mactron...
Quote
The 8600 have less PCI slots but include a video digitizer, with composite/S-Video PAL/NTSC in/out hardware.
This 8600 AV (Audio/Video) came with the famous "Personality Card"

Offline MacTron

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #19 on: August 21, 2015, 04:02:50 PM »
From Mactron...
Quote
The 8600 have less PCI slots but include a video digitizer, with composite/S-Video PAL/NTSC in/out hardware.
This 8600 AV (Audio/Video) came with the famous "Personality Card"

No, this "Personality Card" was a cheap solution for other models ...
The PM 8600 (and PM 8500) video digitized was fully integrated into the main motherboard. The 8500/8600 included also RCA connectors for  audio input/output.


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Offline DieHard

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #20 on: August 22, 2015, 12:34:30 PM »
Do you have a pic ?.... AFAIK, the pic you posted has a "personality card" and is NOT on the MB ?

Offline MacTron

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #21 on: August 22, 2015, 12:49:20 PM »
Do you have a pic ?.... AFAIK, the pic you posted has a "personality card" and is NOT on the MB ?

Not at all.
I have a PM8500 and a PM8600. (and even a Q840 AV :) )
ALL is in the MB. there is no "personality card" on those models. Only a ribbon cable to the connectors panel (RCAs and S-Video). I'll open one of mine AV's and I'll take some pictures ...
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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #22 on: August 22, 2015, 01:39:28 PM »


From top to bottom, you can see
- A USB PCI card
- An empty PCI slot
- A Firewire PCI card
- and the ribbon cable to the rear panel connectors
- The CPU card (with the heat sink)
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supernova777

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #23 on: August 22, 2015, 01:46:11 PM »
wow ok i was totally wrong - this computer is not a g3 all in one its a Performa 5200 from 1995!
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_performa/specs/mac_performa_5200cd.html
« Last Edit: August 22, 2015, 04:49:56 PM by chrisNova777 »

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #24 on: August 22, 2015, 03:16:21 PM »
Way cool... thanks... somehow, my old brain forgot that... I now remember :)

supernova777

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #25 on: August 22, 2015, 04:10:25 PM »
the 8600 i have a chance to buy has the crescendo 800mhz upgrade installed!
http://www.everymac.com/upgrade_cards/sonnettech/crescendo_g4_pci/crescendo_pci_g4_800.html

wasnt syntho looking desperately for this?
or was that the 1ghz crescendo he was looking for.. i cant remember..
didnt he end up using his 9600 with stock cpu? (>300mhz?)
« Last Edit: August 22, 2015, 06:45:51 PM by chrisNova777 »

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #26 on: August 23, 2015, 01:07:27 PM »
I was looking for a 1ghz version, but I don't care about them at this point. The stock 9600s with the 350mhz cpu is good enough. If you read above the Sonnet cpus have an extension that's incompatible with MOTU software/hardware, which I use all the time, so I went with a Newertech upgrade. Newertech cpus are definitely preferable, but I leave my 9600s stock anyway.

supernova777

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #27 on: August 23, 2015, 03:41:19 PM »
how much could i get for the 800mhz version if i bought the 8600 + sold it.. trouble is the guy doesnt have the original cpu

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #28 on: August 23, 2015, 04:06:11 PM »
I'm going to guess maybe $85 or something. You can get an original CPU for your 8600 no problem. If you really want an 8600, and you don't use MOTU stuff, you'd probably do well by just leaving the Sonnet CPU in there.

Offline Raptor007

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Tsunami to Kansas
« Reply #29 on: September 26, 2017, 06:57:09 PM »
This guide is awesome!  I've had several Macs throughout the beige days, but the Power Mac 9600 with G3 upgrade I got recently is just... a little different... and now I have a better understanding of why.  For example, I upgraded the RAM at the same time I added a Mac-flashed Voodoo3, and I assumed the long delay before video was the Voodoo's fault!  Now I know about the slow memory test.

It turns out I have a Tsunami board with a NewerTech G3 upgrade, and I'm guessing the additional layer of slow cache has something to do with the instability I've been experiencing.



If you get out your soldering iron and unsolder the R31 resistor (which really just acts as a simple jumper), it decouples the L2 cache from the board and essentially turns a Tsunami board into a Kansas board. Try this if you wish, but just go for a Kansas machine in the first place and be done with it.

Has anyone here tried this?  Syntho, it sounds like you read about this somewhere but haven't actually done it to your machines.  Do you remember where you found that information?  I just want to make sure I'm checking my sources before I go after the motherboard with a soldering iron.
« Last Edit: September 27, 2017, 01:23:22 AM by Raptor007 »
Currently Have: 128K on 3.2, 512Ke 2MB on 6.0.8, Performa 575 on 7.6.1, PowerMac 9600 G4/450 on 7.6.1/9.2.2, Beige G3 433 on 9.2.2, iMac DVSE 400 on 9.1, B&W G3 400 on 9.2.2, G4 Cube 500 on 9.2.2, iMac G4 800 on 9.2.2/10.3.9, TiBook G4 867 on 9.2.2/10.5.8, QS2002 G4 Dual 1GHz on 9.2.2/10.5.8, G5 Dual 1.8GHz on 10.4.11
Previously Had: Classic on 7.0, Quadra 605 on 7.5.5, Umax C600 on 8.1

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #30 on: September 26, 2017, 09:29:04 PM »
I haven't done it myself but it's definitely the correct information. I read about it in a couple different places, mainly the 68kmla forum.

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Re: Tsunami to Kansas
« Reply #31 on: September 27, 2017, 12:46:34 AM »
Thanks Syntho!  I have one more question about this:

If you decide to upgrade a Tsunami machine with a 3rd party CPU, you’ll have all of your CPU juice running though a slow 512k L2 cache at all times whether you like it or not.

Does that mean this motherboard cache option doesn't actually work on the Tsunami boards?

« Last Edit: September 27, 2017, 01:02:55 AM by Raptor007 »
Currently Have: 128K on 3.2, 512Ke 2MB on 6.0.8, Performa 575 on 7.6.1, PowerMac 9600 G4/450 on 7.6.1/9.2.2, Beige G3 433 on 9.2.2, iMac DVSE 400 on 9.1, B&W G3 400 on 9.2.2, G4 Cube 500 on 9.2.2, iMac G4 800 on 9.2.2/10.3.9, TiBook G4 867 on 9.2.2/10.5.8, QS2002 G4 Dual 1GHz on 9.2.2/10.5.8, G5 Dual 1.8GHz on 10.4.11
Previously Had: Classic on 7.0, Quadra 605 on 7.5.5, Umax C600 on 8.1

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #32 on: September 27, 2017, 01:18:52 AM »
Quote
Also to note: seeing that a G3/G4 upgrade card has L2 cache on the CPU, if you install one into a Tsunami board, the upgrade card's superior L2 cache will turn into L3 cache as noted in the Apple System Profiler. Having L3 cache compared to not having it is a benefit generally, sure, but not when you have superior L3 cache to your L2 cache.

I don't know exactly how it works, but L3 cache becomes present when you install these cards into Tsunami machines, when you're only supposed to see L2 at most. I believe the program still works, but it's controlling its L2 cache as now-demoted L3 cache.

Offline Raptor007

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Tsunami Cache
« Reply #33 on: September 27, 2017, 03:24:34 AM »
I don't know exactly how it works, but L3 cache becomes present when you install these cards into Tsunami machines, when you're only supposed to see L2 at most. I believe the program still works, but it's controlling its L2 cache as now-demoted L3 cache.

I found an interesting utility from NewerTech installed on there called Gauge Pro, which reports the G3 card's cache as L2 and the motherboard's cache as L3:



Intuitively, that makes sense to me; the flow of information seems like it would be from the memory to the motherboard to the processor card to the CPU.  But maybe it's only behaving this way because I'm using the MAXpowr G3 Extension.  Or maybe it's not behaving this way at all, but it thinks it should because of my MAXpowr G3 Control settings.

Either way, whether running 7.6.1 or 9.1, it's having significantly more application malfunctions than on my stock G3s and G4s... but there are also a lot of other variables involved.  I'll keep messing with it.  ;D
Currently Have: 128K on 3.2, 512Ke 2MB on 6.0.8, Performa 575 on 7.6.1, PowerMac 9600 G4/450 on 7.6.1/9.2.2, Beige G3 433 on 9.2.2, iMac DVSE 400 on 9.1, B&W G3 400 on 9.2.2, G4 Cube 500 on 9.2.2, iMac G4 800 on 9.2.2/10.3.9, TiBook G4 867 on 9.2.2/10.5.8, QS2002 G4 Dual 1GHz on 9.2.2/10.5.8, G5 Dual 1.8GHz on 10.4.11
Previously Had: Classic on 7.0, Quadra 605 on 7.5.5, Umax C600 on 8.1

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #34 on: September 27, 2017, 12:29:06 PM »
My advice: Mod it as little as possible. All I've got on mine is a Sonnet PCI card for an SSD (which is actually for a recording drive, not the OS), a SCSI adapter and faster/quieter SCSI HD as the main drive (having a SCSI drive as the OS drive is important), and a few software hacks. I modded and tested my rig for an entire year and learned that the more I fooled with it, the more problems I had.

Offline Raptor007

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Problems solved, I think!
« Reply #35 on: October 09, 2017, 12:40:36 AM »
Thanks Syntho!  I tried simplifying the hardware configuration to the bare minimum usable, but to no avail.  This is after I'd already done my best to trim to a minimal extension set (and had freezes/errors with extensions off).  My 9600 didn't come with the original processor card, so more and more I suspected the G3 upgrade was the source of my problems.

Because my 9600/200 would have a 50MHz system bus with the stock processor card, I turned on dip switch 2 on the G3/300 card to use a 50MHz system bus per Siber-Sonic's findings.  It worked, but it wasn't the solution to my stability problems.  Still, I'm guessing this is the best mode for any 50MHz bus 604e system with this G3 upgrade, and similarly you might want 1,2,4 for 50MHz bus Kansas systems.

The Solution: I finally made some progress after digging into the G3 upgrade issues on The 6400 Zone, specifically the parts about Speculative Access.  Newer Technology claimed they had solved the these problems in hardware on their MAXpowr G3 so a software fix wouldn't be necessary, but I don't believe it anymore.  I found an extension called ROM Fixer (download) that disables G3 Speculative Access, and it seems to have solved my stability issues.



Among other things, MechWarrior 2 was giving me a consistent, repeatable crash at the pilot menu when Speculative Access was "Enabled (I/O Compatible)", but now it works!

It looks like my only remaining problems are with files that already got corrupted (especially application resource forks) so now I'm doing fresh software installs.  Aside from that, it can get stuck at the grey screen with cursor when it starts booting, but the Apple three-finger salute usually gets it moving.  I assume this is another oddity of the G3 upgrade.

Hopefully someone else struggling with a G3-upgraded Mac will find this information useful!  :D

All I've got on mine is a Sonnet PCI card for an SSD (which is actually for a recording drive, not the OS), a SCSI adapter and faster/quieter SCSI HD as the main drive (having a SCSI drive as the OS drive is important)
I'm using the AztecMonster II to boot from a SATA SSD on the SCSI bus, which is working great.  (The stability problems were happening before I did this upgrade.)
Currently Have: 128K on 3.2, 512Ke 2MB on 6.0.8, Performa 575 on 7.6.1, PowerMac 9600 G4/450 on 7.6.1/9.2.2, Beige G3 433 on 9.2.2, iMac DVSE 400 on 9.1, B&W G3 400 on 9.2.2, G4 Cube 500 on 9.2.2, iMac G4 800 on 9.2.2/10.3.9, TiBook G4 867 on 9.2.2/10.5.8, QS2002 G4 Dual 1GHz on 9.2.2/10.5.8, G5 Dual 1.8GHz on 10.4.11
Previously Had: Classic on 7.0, Quadra 605 on 7.5.5, Umax C600 on 8.1

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #36 on: October 09, 2017, 01:52:08 AM »
These things are beasts once you work out all the bugs. I currently have two 350 machines and a 200 machine. All have a 15k Cheetah drive as the main HD with the SCSI adapter noted above. They're whisper quiet and pretty fast, considering. I ran into the same CPU trouble as you did, then got sick of it and decided to run it stock. Rock solid since then!

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #37 on: October 09, 2017, 01:56:34 AM »
this is a great refresher course for those who forget all the details after almost 20 years!

Offline Raptor007

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The 9600 can boot from a SATA PCI card!
« Reply #38 on: October 18, 2017, 01:12:47 AM »
For some reason yesterday, FWB Hard Disk Toolkit 2.0 hung while trying to add another partition to my boot SSD on the SCSI bus (with SATA/SCSI adapter).  Since then, I can't seem to boot from it anymore, and the drive doesn't even show up on the SCSI bus in utilities like Drive Setup.

So, I decided to borrow the Sonnet Tempo SATA PCI card from my B&W G3 and see if the 9600 would boot from its SATA SSD on that (in PCI slot A1).  It does!  :D

(I also wiped and repartitioned the SSD with Drive Setup, so now it has an Apple driver on it instead of FWB.)
Currently Have: 128K on 3.2, 512Ke 2MB on 6.0.8, Performa 575 on 7.6.1, PowerMac 9600 G4/450 on 7.6.1/9.2.2, Beige G3 433 on 9.2.2, iMac DVSE 400 on 9.1, B&W G3 400 on 9.2.2, G4 Cube 500 on 9.2.2, iMac G4 800 on 9.2.2/10.3.9, TiBook G4 867 on 9.2.2/10.5.8, QS2002 G4 Dual 1GHz on 9.2.2/10.5.8, G5 Dual 1.8GHz on 10.4.11
Previously Had: Classic on 7.0, Quadra 605 on 7.5.5, Umax C600 on 8.1

Offline DieHard

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #39 on: October 18, 2017, 08:19:57 AM »
I am not a fan of 3rd party drivers like FWB Hard Disk Toolkit 2.0 or Hard Disk Speed Tools when formatting/partitioning Drives.  They can get quirky for booting and sometimes partitions do not auto-mount or even disappear when moving internal drives from system to system.

However, HDST has been the only tool I have found that will successfully partition Large FireWire drives (500GB or more); the internal Mac OS drive setup will only let you format/partition them as a single large drive.  So it's either use HDTS if you want smaller partitions or you have to remove the drive from the FW case do it internally with Mac OS drive setup, and then re-install in the external case (which is hard for some well-sealed factory made external FW drives)

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Sonnet G4 Upgrade Success
« Reply #40 on: September 05, 2018, 12:28:34 AM »
I have another update for my 9600 CPU upgrade saga.  I saw a Sonnet G4 450MHz/1MB upgrade on eBay and decided to go for it.  I swapped CPUs, held the Cuda reset (red button) for 60 seconds, waited 10 minutes, then plugged it back in.  Unlike my previous G3 that usually requires me to cmd-crtl-power after 30 seconds or so, this one booted right away (probably because it's the first time I've done a Cuda reset).

Keep in mind I'm still using the ROM Fixer extension, which I highly recommend for any Old World Mac with a G3 or G4 upgrade.  At first I booted without any Sonnet driver, and the system was stable but had no access to its 1MB L2 cache.  Then I installed the Sonnet 2.3.1 driver, but found instability when copying files or playing MechWarrior 2, and saw in "Gauge PRO" that the Sonnet extension had re-enabled speculative access.  To solve this, I booted up without the Sonnet Processor Upgrade extension (so the system would be stable), made a copy of ROM Fixer called " zzz ROM Fixer" so it would load immediately after " Sonnet Processor Upgrade", and used ResEdit to change its type from "scri" to "INIT" so it wouldn't load before other INITs.  Then I re-enabled the Sonnet extension.  Success!  ROM Fixer now loads once at the very beginning, and again immediately after the Sonnet extension to re-disable speculative access.  The system is now fast (cache works) and stable (no speculative access).

Edit:  First I did this with System 7.6.1, and it worked great.  When I got to OS 9.2.2 (os9helper), I had unfortunately changed too many variables at once.  Last week I installed a Radeon 7000 with the ATI 2005 drivers and didn't test it much before the G4 upgrade arrived.  Today when I switched to 9.2.2, I had frequent lockups if the ATI drivers were loaded.  This was also true with a Radeon 9200LE.  I put back the Voodoo3 3000 with 3Dfx 1.1.3b drivers, and the system is rock solid again (using the Sonnet extension and double ROM Fixer).  I guess this machine doesn't like ATI Radeon drivers, which doesn't surprise me too much after my Umax C600 rejected the Rage128 similarly.  I don't think the G4 was to blame.

Let me tell you, System 7.6.1 on a G4 with an SSD is glorious.  I love that I can do that on this machine.  Folders open fully rendered as you're finishing your second click, and that's without any 2D acceleration from the video card.  I just wish I could trick the 3dfx drivers into loading in System 7.
« Last Edit: September 05, 2018, 04:16:29 AM by Raptor007 »
Currently Have: 128K on 3.2, 512Ke 2MB on 6.0.8, Performa 575 on 7.6.1, PowerMac 9600 G4/450 on 7.6.1/9.2.2, Beige G3 433 on 9.2.2, iMac DVSE 400 on 9.1, B&W G3 400 on 9.2.2, G4 Cube 500 on 9.2.2, iMac G4 800 on 9.2.2/10.3.9, TiBook G4 867 on 9.2.2/10.5.8, QS2002 G4 Dual 1GHz on 9.2.2/10.5.8, G5 Dual 1.8GHz on 10.4.11
Previously Had: Classic on 7.0, Quadra 605 on 7.5.5, Umax C600 on 8.1

Offline FdB

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Re: Power Mac 9600
« Reply #41 on: September 05, 2018, 11:01:07 AM »
Many thanks to Syntho especially… and now Raptor 007, I’ll be trundling out an old Power Mac 9600 to replace a 9500 that was once the primary scan station here.

I corrupted the boot drive on the 9500 recently, partitioning another SCSI drive for someone and I had always considered the move to the 9600. Now with this in-depth (and bookmarked!) expose’ on the 9600, this project shall move closer to the front burner here. Seems that every time I touch that 9500, something "plastic" always breaks. And, I'll probably “stick’ with OS 8.6.

So, another "mythical Phoenix” Mac rises from the proverbial ashes?

Great thread / Grand work!
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Offline WhiteWarlock

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #42 on: September 05, 2018, 12:23:32 PM »

That machine looks like my old PowerMac 5260...
not missing it...
except still pissed off "someone" donated it to salvation army without consulting me...
so could intervene after they got PC thus reclaiming my machine
when was in frequent contact with them
had been letting them use it as work/storefront computer
beyond annoying
reminds me of crazy XGF who would always say:
"Good intentions pave the road to Hell!"

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #43 on: September 06, 2018, 09:42:51 AM »
its not a powermac its a performa..
i have the earlier model from 1995! performa 5200CD

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #44 on: September 06, 2018, 09:55:18 AM »
i still never found a 8600 or 9600 tho.. shame

Offline torvan

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #45 on: September 09, 2018, 09:19:43 PM »
Thanks. I have a 9600/300 that I upgraded to a G4 1.0 GHZ and 1 GB RAM. Also popped in a Sonnet SATA card and an 80GB SATA drive, plus an ATI 9200 card.

The 23" Aluminum monitor is currently plugged in and working good too.

My only complaint is how it takes 4x as long in Photoshop 7 to do anything which the G4 MDD does with ease. Sure it is the march of tech between the two, but the 9600 is miles quieter than the MDD!
15 Macs (13 of them ranging from an SE to a MDD), 2 iPads, 2 iPhones, 1 Hackintosh. Small house getting smaller with each Mac. . . . .  .Husband shakes his head but supports my habit.

Offline Astroman

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #46 on: September 10, 2018, 01:37:15 AM »
Most of the MDD's powersupply capability is designed for running a bunch of big HDs in the box, which is not required for most modern/SSD solutions.
When testing with 2 Pro Tools cards I had the side open, running only one of the PSU fans from an external 5V source at low speed and mounted a big fan (also low speed) to the CPU cooler.
I was surprised about the really low heat emission from the PSU case (both case fans were disconnected)
This isn't a proper solution but shows the potential of silence mods if you're careful about specific heat sources.

Also observed the 9600 rarity while checking various online sale sites.
« Last Edit: September 10, 2018, 07:56:28 AM by Astroman »

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #47 on: September 10, 2018, 04:58:34 AM »
I probably shouldn't have even posted this thread because now they're more sought-after and I've literally driven up the price of them. This thread has nearly 30,000 views, for example.

Offline Astroman

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #48 on: September 10, 2018, 08:04:03 AM »
call yourself the Jack White of classic MacOS from now on...
(the dude made the prices of guitar trash gear shoot through the rooftop) ;D
But it's a highly specialized domain and most such machines were studio gear anyway.
I recently saw a Quadra 650 with NuVerb card and some other stuff selling for about $300 much less than expected (in Germany), so lucky purchases are still possible.

Offline DieHard

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #49 on: September 10, 2018, 08:06:42 AM »
I probably shouldn't have even posted this thread because now they're more sought-after and I've literally driven up the price of them. This thread has nearly 30,000 views, for example.

Hey my friend
Quote
...no good deed goes un-punished...lol

It has helped many, so don't be like that :) or I won't wrap any more pallets of ProTools stuff that you can't seem to help yourself from buying even when that old junk is out of state and here in CA

Offline W’rkncacnter

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #50 on: November 05, 2018, 10:37:12 AM »
Hi Syntho

Thank you for the fantastic forum post; I have just recently acquired a 9600/350 & this guide is an absolute god-send!

Just a quick question - & this is for all; what sort of video benchmark results do you get from say Norton Utilities Video? The machine right now is giving me around 63 which ranks it around a Quadra 700! (ironically; my first Mac). (Version of Utilities is 3.5.2)

As a TLDR; I've moved the video card to the secondary PCI slot - the primary is taken up with some sort of Audio card which I'm not so affiliated with.

I am currently waiting delivery for Mac OS 8.5; which I shall apply a clean install & update to Mac OS 8.6 in due course since admittedly the machine is still running the same install from it's previous owner.

Many thanks for any responses!
« Last Edit: November 05, 2018, 11:47:55 AM by W’rkncacnter »
- Power Macintosh 9600/350 604ev | 128MB RAM | 2x 4GB HDD | 8MB ixMicro TwinTurbo | Mac OS 8.6.
- Power Macintosh 5500/275 603ev | 64MB RAM | 4GB HDD | 2MB ATi Rage IIc | Mac OS 8.6.
- iMac 600Mhz G3 | 512MB RAM | 40GB HDD | 16MB ATi Rage 128 Ultra | Mac OS 9.2.2

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #51 on: November 05, 2018, 07:01:15 PM »
All I can say is that the 9600 will score low on just about everything benchmark wise. I'm using the preinstalled video cards, and even if I used the fastest cards that the 9600 could take, it would be bottlenecked by other system specs. The 9600 has very slow file copying (even from SSD to SSD) as well as the aforementioned, subpar graphics even with the higher end cards, and I STILL haven't gotten a straight answer on why this happens. I think the system bus might be the central bottleneck, so to speak, but I'll let someone else chime in on what they think it is. On a G4 machine, the Pro Tools meters are 60fps constantly with lightning fast file copying. If you'd take those exact same SSDs and video cards out of the G4 and pop them into the 9600, it'd be as slow as molasses.

I haven't touched a G4 machine in about a year and a half, and when I do it's only for testing/diagnostics or whatever. The 9600 is what my whole studio runs off of and will continue to run off of until I can't use it anymore. I unfortunately drove up the prices and scarcity of 9600s, which sucks for me, because I still need another 300 or 350 machine as a backup.

Does anyone here have or know someone with a spare 9600? I need another one. Maybe someone will be kind enough to help since I took a lot of time to get this thread going :)
« Last Edit: November 05, 2018, 07:13:16 PM by Syntho »

Offline FdB

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #52 on: November 05, 2018, 09:50:28 PM »
From July 2014:
Someday as a fun project I want to get a Powermac 9600 refurbished and brought up to date as much as I can.
Then later that year:
I think I'm about to vomit.
 >:( >:( >:( >:(
And then… after all the time and helpful info that he’s posted here, this:
Does anyone here have, or know someone with a spare 9600?
Well, not making any promises here… but I think I may know of a 9600 that’s currently collecting dust somewhere and if I can convince the owner to part with it… well, just maybe… your good deeds shall be justly and appropriately “punished”. PM me your contact info please and let me see what can be done.

(;) ;) nudge, nudge.) -Eric Idle
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Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #53 on: November 05, 2018, 10:43:30 PM »
I just looked it up and turns out my vomiting was because of the MOTU extension and Sonnet extension having a conflict, which is explained in the guide above. As soon as I switched to a NewerTech CPU upgrade there were no problems. I have since stopped using MOTU/FreeMidi altogether though, so no problems ever since  :)

Offline refinery

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #54 on: November 06, 2018, 06:15:31 PM »
i always loved the taller 86/9600 cases. someday i'll get my hands on one.
got my mind on my scsi and my scsi on my mind

Offline W’rkncacnter

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #55 on: November 12, 2018, 03:19:01 PM »
All I can say is that the 9600 will score low on just about everything benchmark wise. I'm using the preinstalled video cards, and even if I used the fastest cards that the 9600 could take, it would be bottlenecked by other system specs. The 9600 has very slow file copying (even from SSD to SSD) as well as the aforementioned, subpar graphics even with the higher end cards, and I STILL haven't gotten a straight answer on why this happens. I think the system bus might be the central bottleneck, so to speak, but I'll let someone else chime in on what they think it is. On a G4 machine, the Pro Tools meters are 60fps constantly with lightning fast file copying. If you'd take those exact same SSDs and video cards out of the G4 and pop them into the 9600, it'd be as slow as molasses.

Thanks for the reply Syntho - that is absolutely bizarre!

Well as a side note; I'll be updating the machine to OS 8.6 this week (it's currently on OS 8 - ew). Performance difference on a recently updated 5500/275 was night & day difference!

Radeon 9200 look to be in high demand right now; perhaps the 7000 is an option although I both cards require OS 9 to run (If I'm honest; I wanted to keep this machine on 8.6)

Still, will see what happens..
- Power Macintosh 9600/350 604ev | 128MB RAM | 2x 4GB HDD | 8MB ixMicro TwinTurbo | Mac OS 8.6.
- Power Macintosh 5500/275 603ev | 64MB RAM | 4GB HDD | 2MB ATi Rage IIc | Mac OS 8.6.
- iMac 600Mhz G3 | 512MB RAM | 40GB HDD | 16MB ATi Rage 128 Ultra | Mac OS 9.2.2

Offline W’rkncacnter

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #56 on: November 18, 2018, 02:02:51 PM »
Still, will see what happens..

Updated to Mac OS 8.5 this week; clean-install with a freshly formatted drive (HFS+).

World of difference; would appear for whatever reason the graphic drivers had not been installed/ running beforehand. The 9600 is ranked at 699 now - way above the Norton (3.5.2) last recorded specification of a 9600/200MP.

Now just to get 8.6 on there..
- Power Macintosh 9600/350 604ev | 128MB RAM | 2x 4GB HDD | 8MB ixMicro TwinTurbo | Mac OS 8.6.
- Power Macintosh 5500/275 603ev | 64MB RAM | 4GB HDD | 2MB ATi Rage IIc | Mac OS 8.6.
- iMac 600Mhz G3 | 512MB RAM | 40GB HDD | 16MB ATi Rage 128 Ultra | Mac OS 9.2.2

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #57 on: November 19, 2018, 06:42:22 AM »
I just looked it up and turns out my vomiting was because of the MOTU extension and Sonnet extension having a conflict, which is explained in the guide above. As soon as I switched to a NewerTech CPU upgrade there were no problems. I have since stopped using MOTU/FreeMidi altogether though, so no problems ever since  :)

i think a better approach would be to not mix oms + freemidi on the same hard drive (OS) and if you do want to run motu/freemidi apps to keep them on a seperate install to reboot to.. just for simplicity sake to save the headache of conflicts between motu + OMS! with the price of hard drives these days, id say mostly everyone has a spare drive solution like a CF card, or SD Card, they can use. alot easier to sidestep the conflicts alltogether.

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #58 on: November 29, 2018, 07:21:19 PM »
There is no way to edit my original posts so this one will have to do.

Something I've noticed over time is how finicky 9600 machines can be when there is a PRAM battery issue. Sometimes you'll have trouble booting the machine from the keyboard's power button if there is no PRAM battery installed, or if it's weak. I've heard that when you get down to around 3V, it's time to replace it. The batteries should read 3.6V when brand new. One of my 9600s had this exact problem until I changed it.

On top of that, I find that sometimes I have weird trouble with bootup times and things going slow when a PRAM battery isn't installed. It'll take forever to boot sometimes when it's searching for a hard drive. I even had trouble installing some software on an external drive because the PRAM battery wasn't installed! It just stalls or freezes.

All of the above is especially true for the older Tsunami architecture machines. For some reason the 200 and 233 machines suffer from more weird issues when there is a low, dead, or missing PRAM battery. Just random issues that make no sense. This is another reason to try and find a 300 or 350 machine. Whenever you have some issue that you just can't pin down, as weird as it may sound, the PRAM battery can make things go haywire, so check the PRAM battery and see if it clears up the issue even if you think the problem you're having is completely unrelated to the PRAM battery. They're only like $4 brand new. 1/2 AA 3.6V is what you want.

I've also found that you need to make sure you've got good RAM, and that it is seated correctly. Sometimes I'll get a broken glass sound (indicates RAM issue) but all it takes is pushing the RAM down into the slot better. I'm not sure if this has any connection to it, but I noticed this more so on my 200 machine than my Kansas ones.

One more issue is that on my 200 machine, I think there may be an issue with RAM slot order. All of my Kansas machines work fine with the RAM installed as I posted in the original guide: the '6' slots first, working back. However I've found the Tsunami one wanted me to install the first stick vice versa: slots '1' and counting up. Perhaps this was just a fluke and I wasn't seating the RAM correctly, but changing slot order on an older Tsunami machine is another troubleshooting method you can try for a non-booting machine. If you start up and don't hear the chime, fool with the RAM by either switching slot order or reseating it well and see if that helps. I had what I thought was bad RAM (broken glass sound) until I reseated, only to discover that it was actually fine.

Lastly, there seems to be idiosyncrasies from machine to machine regarding PCI slot order. Sometimes a video card won't work in a certain slot on X machine, but it will work fine on another. I've also read reports that other types of cards (Digidesign) work in some slots on some machines, but don't in others. You should shoot for the slot order as I've posted above first and foremost (the PCI Bus Master slot thing), but sometimes you HAVE to go against abiding by the Bus Master thing as noted above, either due to a video card issue, or maybe with some other type of PCI card that won't work. Sometimes your odd slot order configuration is stable for you, but not for someone else. I can't explain it, but it's definitely an idiosyncrasy from machine to machine.

I would like to think that these machines are all uniform, but from all of my experimentation on four different 9600s, and from all the years of posts at the old Digidesign forum, each 9600 seems to be its own beast.

If you can work out the small bugs in these machines, you'll have what I consider to be the best computer Apple ever released. They become rock solid once you hack the hardware as above, prune the extensions to your liking and work out the niggles.

It's my favorite computer of all time.
« Last Edit: November 29, 2018, 08:06:51 PM by Syntho »

Offline Philgood

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #59 on: December 01, 2018, 09:27:44 AM »
Regarding pram I can second that experience even on my G4 MDD machine.
With a depleted pram battery I got weird issues that I thought we're coming from bad memory as I couldn't even run programs anymore.
So it seems the first to look after.

I definitely learned that the battery are li-on batteries but not rechargeable as I thought so they will have to be replaced sooner than you might think.
*G4 MDD 1.25GHz (Single 2003)* with 2x 80Gb harddrives, 1Gb RAM, Tascam US-428 and Edirol FA-101 USB/Firewire soundcards-*iMac G3 DV 400MHz* with installs from OS 8.6-OSX Tiger on different harddrives-*Powerbook G4 1.67Ghz* with new SSD ! Love it.

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #60 on: December 04, 2018, 01:09:12 AM »
I've worked out another weird issue concerning my old 200mhz 9600.

Earlier I said that without the PRAM battery installed in the 200, my external drive wouldn't install software onto it without freezing. After I installed a new PRAM battery, I noticed that the external SCSI drive wouldn't mount at all! So without the PRAM battery, it mounts but has issues, but with the PRAM battery, it wouldn't mount at all. It was noticed by the System Profiler, including the partition names and everything, but just wouldn't mount and show up on the desktop. I had no idea what was going on so I decided to troubleshoot it, and nailed it on the first shot.

Turns out, there is most likely yet another difference between the older Tsunami machines and the Kansas machines. The whole time I've used external drives on my Kansas machines, I never had to terminate the external drives. They work without termination just fine. But I decided to grab a terminator and pop it onto the external drive that was on my 200, and what do you know, it works flawlessly now.

I'm going to guess that there was some sort of SCSI update between the Tsunami machines and the Kansas machines. Perhaps this is an issue specific to my own 200 machine, but I bet it's like this across the board. This is one more reason to shoot for a Kansas machine.

I don't want to deter anyone from getting a 200/233 machine though. I love mine. They just require a bit more care and everything has to be in place, and of course are slightly slower. Kansas machines seem to be able to be stripped down and be on their last legs and still function somewhat, as to where Tsunami machines will freak out if any little thing goes wrong.

Offline W’rkncacnter

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #61 on: March 28, 2019, 12:31:08 PM »
It's my favorite computer of all time.

This is quite profound statement. I've been an avid computer enthusiast for about 25 years & can honestly not put my finger on what my favourite computer is of all time. Having said that; despite my latest custom built PC; or even my Surface Book, my Mac's have always held the special place in my heart.

My *daily* if you like is my 5500/275, cracking machine. The 603ev is fast enough for most things but when I really need the power; the 9600/350 is just so flippin' fast. I'm actually in the market for a VooDoo 3; since I'd like to use it as my main gaming machine for classic Macintosh games. Unfortunately the 2MB ATi Rage IIc in the 5500 doesn't quite cut it for the heavier 3D stuff! (Quake, Unreal, etc).
- Power Macintosh 9600/350 604ev | 128MB RAM | 2x 4GB HDD | 8MB ixMicro TwinTurbo | Mac OS 8.6.
- Power Macintosh 5500/275 603ev | 64MB RAM | 4GB HDD | 2MB ATi Rage IIc | Mac OS 8.6.
- iMac 600Mhz G3 | 512MB RAM | 40GB HDD | 16MB ATi Rage 128 Ultra | Mac OS 9.2.2

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #62 on: March 30, 2019, 05:29:03 PM »
Bad news, guys: my main 9600 is sick. It all started with trying to use an external 1gb jaz drive. I had problems with getting the machine to boot due to the external termination on the Jaz drive. After I gave up trying to get it to work, I unplugged everything and restarted, but after many attempts, I get freezing almost every time I boot up. I thought it might be a corrupted main drive, but the funny thing is that when I try booting from my external HD connected via SCSI, I get the same thing sometimes.

I used Tech Tool Pro 3 to check the RAM and a bunch of other stuff but I didn't have any issues. When I try to boot from different drives/installations, it freezes. WTF is going on?

Offline FdB

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Re: Power Mac 9600 SCSI/JAZ
« Reply #63 on: March 30, 2019, 07:27:47 PM »
SCSI VooDoo!

Just re-visiting Zip & Jaz drives here today and the Zip drives SCSI ID choice was only between 5 & 6. (With 6 being the best, as 5 was reportedly problematic.) Long-dead external Jaz drive that I’m looking at here has an selectable SCSI ID range between 0-7. BUT anytime such SCSI flakiness occurs… perhaps best to “refresh” the OS?

Recent SCSI problem here with a 9500 had me thinking a “complete software wipe, re-install and re-build” after a SCSI conflict (it would not boot)… but a simple HD driver refresh took care of the problem without much effort - which led me to believe that some small file or aspect of the OS had simply been corrupted.

Sorry not more specific… but maybe inserting your OS install disk and making the right available choice… will lead you back to stability. Then if that works, review the termination choice mumbo-jumbo for the Jaz. Was your external SCSI HD also connected at the time of the Jaz drive connection?

Excluding me going back & reviewing the available termination switch settings on the Jaz drive (“I-A-O”), not much help I’m afraid. [Jaz drive now in use here is an internal.] Good luck. ;)
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Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #64 on: March 30, 2019, 07:37:52 PM »
Actually, I THINK I found the problem. I noticed that a backup SATA drive wasn't showing up on my desktop. I went into my machine and re-set the cable/connector, and now I've booted up a couple times without issue. I'm hoping it stays that way. I'll do an update about it.

Offline FdB

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #65 on: March 30, 2019, 07:41:56 PM »
Sounds promising. Glad to hear it!
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Offline W’rkncacnter

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #66 on: July 18, 2019, 03:39:40 PM »
Actually, I THINK I found the problem. I noticed that a backup SATA drive wasn't showing up on my desktop. I went into my machine and re-set the cable/connector, and now I've booted up a couple times without issue. I'm hoping it stays that way. I'll do an update about it.

How's the 9600 Syntho? Healthy I hope!
- Power Macintosh 9600/350 604ev | 128MB RAM | 2x 4GB HDD | 8MB ixMicro TwinTurbo | Mac OS 8.6.
- Power Macintosh 5500/275 603ev | 64MB RAM | 4GB HDD | 2MB ATi Rage IIc | Mac OS 8.6.
- iMac 600Mhz G3 | 512MB RAM | 40GB HDD | 16MB ATi Rage 128 Ultra | Mac OS 9.2.2

Offline trag

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #67 on: July 18, 2019, 04:47:27 PM »
I wanted to add a bit of information.   I did some pretty extensive exploration of the PowerSurge (the whole x500/x600 family is called PowerSurge) family back when.   My main interest at the time was the Umax S900, but much of the info carries over.

Disclaimer:   Some of this stuff is NITPICKING.  I admit it up front.   My goal is not to take away from the excellent information that Syntho took the time and trouble to post.    I just want to clarify a few points and add some detail that might be useful.

1.  Speculative Processing:

First of all, you should not have any trouble with Speculative Processing being enabled on a Kansas motherboard.   Apple fixed the SP bug between the 9600 and the 9600 Enhanced (Kansas) models.

In fact, if one builds a ROM module with Kansas ROM code on it and installs it in an earlier machine, it will fix the Speculative Processing bug.   My current S900 has Kansas ROMs installed.   

It sounds like some problems that got blamed on SP were actually incompatibility between Sonnet's drivers and MOTU.

2.  PCI Slots and "Bus Mastering"

There's been a lot of confusion about this over the years, because the belief that slots A1 and D2 were "bus mastering" slots was repeated on Mike's XLR8yourmac.com website a lot.   A lot.

All of the PCI slots are bus mastering slots.   

Excursion to background material:   

The PCI system is a  bus.  Busses support two or more devices.  Deciding which device gets to send information onto the bus at any given time is called bus arbitration.    The bus arbiter receives requests (BUS REQUEST) to master the bus and grants (BUS GRANT) mastery of the bus to only one device at a time.   The device which is currently sending information is the Bus Master.  Any card/device which can request the bus and any slot from which mastery of the bus can be requested, is a Bus Mastering Device or Slot.

On all consumer PCs and Macintoshes, all the PCI slots support Bus Request, and Bus Grant from the bus arbiter.  They are all Bus Mastering slots. 

On the 9500/9600 the two little square chips labeled 343S0182 are the bus arbiters.   If you trace the connections to these chips, you will find that they connect to every BR (Bus Request) and BG (Bus Grant) pin on all of the PCI slots, plus one each to the Bandit chips (343S0020).

End Excursion

So, when you have PCI issues it is not because of a lack of bus mastering capability.  There are three primary things that can cause slot order to affect compatibility.

First, the bus arbiter starts with slot A1 (D2) or perhaps the Bandit chip when choosing priority for Bus Grants.    It's supposed to use a Round Robin scheme after that, but a card that monopolizes the bus could prevent other cards which, perhaps, request and release teh bus frequently, from getting enough access.

Second, card order affects what order the drivers are loaded into memory from the cards' firmware chips.  This gets you into the realm of software weirdness.   Who knows what the effects are of the order the firmware loads, plus the order the various extensions and CPs load.

Third, there is a software artifact either in the ROM or the OS by Apple that has to do with support for 32 byte cache line transfers. If your card doesn't need these transfers, it won't care whether it's in the top slot or not. This issue is documented in Apple's Tech Note TN_1008.pdf, "Understanding PCI Bus Performance":

===========================
As an example, if two cards (card x and card y) have addresses mapped into segment 8, one at 0x80800000 and another at 0x80801000, the first call to SetProcessorCacheMode from the driver of card x to make a cacheable address space in segment 8 will work. A second call, say from the driver of card y, to modify the cache setting in segment 8 will not work nor will it report an error. This scenario will most likely result in a lower than expected performance for card y, because card y address space is actually cache inhibited which disables PCI transactions of 32-byte cache lines. If the two cards are mapped into different segments, such as 8 and A, then they both can modify the cache settings withintheir perspective segments. This limitation will be relaxed in the future.
============================

So, if a card or its software wants to do this thing, which slot it is in affects which order its request would go in, which affects whether it can or not.

Finally, last thought about PCI slots -- In theory, slot D2 should offer slightly better performance than A1.   The 9500/9600 has two separate/independent PCI busses (hence two separate arbiter chips).   However, the PCI bus which supports A1, B1 and C1 also supports Grand Central which is Apple's catch-all I/O interface.   The floppy, SCSI busses, ethernet, sound, etc. all hang off of Grand Central.

The caveat to the above is that the two PCI busses interface with the CPU through the CPU bus which Hammerhead (343S1190) arbitrates.   It is possible that Hammerhead gives Bandit 1 (PCI bus 1) higher priority on the CPU bus than it gives Bandit 2, but I don't know.   The reason they might have done that is that all the I/O is hanging off of Bandit 1.  However, I doubt that they did.

The PowerSurge architecture was meant to support up to 4 Bandit-type devices with I/O arbitrarily spread amongst them, so it would not have made sense to give one device on the CPU bus higher priority than the others, probably.

3.   Twin Turbo Video Card:   

The Twin Turbo card was sold in two different versions.  The OEM version sold by Apple only works with Apple's 9600 Graphics Extension and limits one to Apple's selection of resolutions in the Monitors CP.   IxMicro's retail version of the card works with IxMicro's Extensions and Control Panel and provides much more extensive control of the card's abilities.

The only difference between them (two differences?  does the IxMicro version have a VGA connector?  cna't remember) is the ROM on board the card and it is easily swapped, as it is in a socket.   If one copies the ixMicro ROM to a Flash or EEPROM the chip can then be installed in the Apple version of the card making it more versatile.

4.   SCSI:   

The last device on the chain must always be terminated.  No exceptions.

If you don't terminate the last device and your SCSI chain works, that's lucky.   That's also what leads to SCSI voodoo.

Look, when configured according to the fairly simple rules, SCSI works reliably and predictably.   SCSI voodoo happens when someone configures SCSI wrong, then it works for a while, then it stops working, usually when they change something, and then they declare SCSI voodoo.  The problem wasn't that it didn't work when it should have worked.  The problem was that it works sometimes when it should not.

SCSI rules:
1)  Every device must have a unique ID -- usually set by jumpers on the device.
2)  Both ends of the SCSI bus must be terminated.   On Macs with Internal only busses, the Logic board is one end of the SCSI bus (cable starts plugged in there) and the logic board contains termination.
2b)   The End of the SCSI bus must be terminated.   Not the next device, nor n devices towards the middle.   The end of the cable is where the terminator goes.
3)   SCSI busses may only have two ends.  No Ys allowed.

There's a  lot of detail that can go in those rules, but that's the basics.

5.  Differences in the 9500/9600 Family:

A)  The 9500 was first.  Most people dislike the case.  The logic board still has six slots.

B)   The original 9600 has four differences from the 9500. 
 
1)  The power supply connector(s) have been changed a little bit.
2)  The case and power supply are different.
3)  The ROM changes from $77D.28F2 to $77D$34F2.  Also, the ROM chips change from 341S0169 - 341S0172 to 341S0280 - 341S0283 (four ROM chips per board).
4)  The CPU card options are upgraded.

So really, the only real difference in the logic boards of the 9500 and original 9600 are the ROMs and the power supply connector, but the latter doesn't affect performance.

C)  The Power Macintosh 9600 Enhanced (Apple's public name for Kansas) has 3 differences from the original 9600:

1)  The L2 cache on the logic board has been removed.
2)  The pins in the CPU slot have been changed slightly.  I haven't traced them, but I'm pretty sure there are more 3.3V supply pins and these were taken from other supply pins.
3)  The ROMs were updated to $77D.34F5 with chips labeled 341S0380 - 341S0383.   This is where the fix for Speculative Processing resides.  Note, that the 8600 Enhanced also has these ROMs.   No other Power Surge machine has them.  The 7300, e.g., was left with the $77D.34F2 ROMs.

Everything else on the 9500/9600 boards is identical. They all used the same chipset and the same logic board layout.

If all else fails, you can distinguish the three boards by reading the part numbers off of the ROM chips.   The ROM chips are about 1.1" X .5" long and have 44 pins;  22 down each long side.

The lack of cache chips on the 9600 Enhanced is a fairly big way to identify the Kansas board, though.

Offline DieHard

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #68 on: July 23, 2019, 09:14:45 AM »
Trag this is an excellent addendum and we thank you :)

Quote
Finally, last thought about PCI slots -- In theory, slot D2 should offer slightly better performance than A1.   The 9500/9600 has two separate/independent PCI busses (hence two separate arbiter chips).   However, the PCI bus which supports A1, B1 and C1 also supports Grand Central which is Apple's catch-all I/O interface.   The floppy, SCSI busses, ethernet, sound, etc. all hang off of Grand Central.

This is particularly good information for those using a PCI Audio Card and SCSI drives in a DAW environment, I always prefer to "load balance" machines with 2 independent PCI busses with Hard Drive controllers on one PCI bus and audio controllers on the other; so, in short put your audio card in D2, since the other buss will be at the mercy of SCSI I/O requests; If you add a SCSI card, put it in slots A1,B1, or C1 and still your audio PCI card in D2.

Offline Syntho

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Re: Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide
« Reply #69 on: February 12, 2021, 11:37:21 PM »
I just had another close call. I was going through a book with audio examples, playing them in soundjam, and every once in a while I'd get a crash. I thought it was my 9600 becoming sick again but what do you know... I re-set the connector on the same sata drive once again and the problem cleared up.

My custom ASR install images became corrupt due to the crashing, and it was my NAS that saved the day since I back them up on there. A NAS with AFP and the chooser on my 9600 is a god damned lifesaver 🙏