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[LarsG5]

Haven't been active here for more that 4 years, so I thought I'd ask whether some progress regarding getting Cardbus to work under OS 9 has been made? I've seen a post regarding USB 2.0 potentially working, so yeah, I truly hope Cardbus working is just a matter of time

[UnexpectedBomb]

Haven't been active here for more that 4 years, so I thought I'd ask whether some progress regarding getting Cardbus to work under OS 9 has been made? I've seen a post regarding USB 2.0 potentially working, so yeah, I truly hope Cardbus working is just a matter of time

Hello! I was working on this exact thing until the backlight on my 667 DVI TiBook's display died    So I ended up pivoting to some other projects.

I bought a replacement inverter board in the hopes that it will fix the issue. If so, I will resume this effort soon. Given that the EHCI stack has already been built, the CardBus piece of the equation would hopefully be relatively trivial to solve. Stay tuned.

[LarsG5]

Hello! I was working on this exact thing until the backlight on my 667 DVI TiBook's display died    So I ended up pivoting to some other projects.

I bought a replacement inverter board in the hopes that it will fix the issue. If so, I will resume this effort soon. Given that the EHCI stack has already been built, the CardBus piece of the equation would hopefully be relatively trivial to solve. Stay tuned.

BRUH, i won't be able to sleep tonight out of excitement, fingers crossed!

[vectrex]

A vote from me as well for the cardbus!

My Firewire doesnt work at all, installed using the unsupported image install, which worked well in target disk install from a TiBook.

USB works great on all slots.

''unsupported usb device, click ok" prompt shows at every boot, unaware of how or what to use to silence that.

Also would share that these machines have major heat issues which can cause the lower ram slot and the ram itself to become defective. Spent several days diagnosing what i thought was an L2/L3 cache freezing. in both os 9 and OS X, but it turns out it was the lower ram slot all along (the one closest to battery). pitch the bad ram *whizzzzzzz*.  I havent tested to see if the lower ram slot is permanently knackered.

Dropping the processor speed (which affects cache too) in the energy savings settings helps immensely with heat, but some of you might be doing more with the machine and in that case you can flip it over on your lunch break and cook an egg on the underside. Suprisingly working well at a crippled 666mhz! (devil hand emoji)

[LarsG5]

A vote from me as well for the cardbus!

That's basically the only issue I have with this model - I would love to be able to plug my Cardbus SCSI card which only works under OS9 - need to use my Ti for this purpose instead.

''unsupported usb device, click ok" prompt shows at every boot, unaware of how or what to use to silence that.

AFAIK it's the Bluetooth - back when I was more knowledgable about those stuff I was able to write a script for OF to disable it, unfortunatelly now I don't know how to do that anymore, though the answer is definitely here, somewhere on this forum.

[UnexpectedBomb]

@LarsG5 I apologize, I think I misunderstood what you were originally asking about  I've been working on bringing true USB 2.0 speeds to NEC-chipset CardBus USB 2.0 cards for TiBooks under OS 9 (which I just finished!) so your post caught my eye, but now I realize you were talking about CardBus working specifically on the 17" AlBook, which it sounds like currently it doesn't at all. Unfortunately, the only CardBus Mac I own is my 667 DVI TiBook; I have no AlBook of my own to test on. Really wish I had one now.

HOWEVER... I designed a test probe app for you to run on your 17" AlBook. This simple app will determine if the CardBus port can be reached under OS 9 on the AlBook. After you run it, a text log file will be generated; please send me that file. Based on my CardBus work thus far, I am fairly confident that a proper CardBus solution could be developed for the AlBook, but again, I'd need a test subject first. (Care to loan me yours? Haha)

Additionally you can test out the app on your own TiBook, as it will also recognize CardBus cards themselves and document their properties, such as whether they are (in the case of a USB card) NEC-chipset or some other incompatible chipset like VIA.

Here's the repo where you can find the test probe app (called CardBusCompat.bin) as well as the system extension I developed to unlock USB 2.0 on CardBus in OS 9:

https://github.com/UnexpectedBomb/MacOS9-USB2-EHCI/releases#release-cbrel

Just expand via Stuffit and launch. Let me know if you have any trouble.

[vectrex]

=== CardBusCompat 1.0 ===
Read-only: writes only the config-address selector, which is how any config read is addressed.

--- MACHINE: is there a CardBus bridge? ---
  bridge vendor-id 0x0000104c
  bridge device-id 0x0000ac56
  CardBus bridge FOUND.

--- CARD: what is in the slot? ---
  No USB 1.1 function published UNDER THE BRIDGE. Either no card is inserted, or
  Mac OS 9 does not recognise it (some cards are invisible to Mac OS 9 entirely).
  USB 1.1 functions published in total 0x00000000
  of those, NEC (vendor 0x1033) 0x00000000

--- MACHINE: can we reach config space the way the extension does? ---
  Cannot test: no card function is published, so there is no known-good answer to check
  the raw path against. Insert a CardBus card Mac OS 9 recognises and run this again.

========================= VERDICT =========================
MACHINE:  UNKNOWN - a CardBus slot exists, but testing it needs a card Mac OS 9 recognises.
CARD:     NONE - no card detected in the slot.
===========================================================

A log named 'CardBus Compatibility Log' has been written to your startup disk.

[UnexpectedBomb]

@vectrex thank you for running that compatibility checker and providing the results! I'm realizing I had an outdated version on the repo; if you re-download now it should be v1.6. My fault. Run that one and it should tell us what we need to know about the AlBook's CardBus landscape.

Already this result confirms that your CardBus controller is a TI PCI1510, which Mac OS 9 had never seen before (hence the "dead"-ness of the port). The original v1.0 checker had a defect that made it unreliable at properly detecting inserted cards, so that's another reason to want the results coming from v1.6 if you had a card inserted when you ran it.

Edit: The most important part will be whether the "compatible" line contains the generic "cardbus-bridge", as the TiBook's does.
If it does... game on. I might be able to design a universal CardBus fix that would work for AlBooks too, without ever needing to get hands on one myself.