Just Updated 7/2/2002

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I want to thank Don very much for hosting my site when Apple shut me down! Thanks Don! I as well as all 6400 Zone visitors greatly appreciate your help in this matter.

Just Updated 6/29/2002

More user info on USB driver issues with the Tango card: Phil sent me his experience in trouble shooting system freezes that where directly related to the USB drivers being installed with his Tango card. Thanks Phil.

[Hi,
I have a 6500/250 with 128MB, a Crescendo G3/400, Farallon Com II ethernet, and a Tango USB/Firewire card. I have a pared down, clean installed OS 9.1 system, with no 3rd party software or extensions except for the Sonnet and Farallon stuff (newest versions of all). Solid as a rock IF the USB support, USB device extension, and USB Software locator extensions are OFF.
I get a freeze within 5 minutes if they are on. It still freezes if I turn off the Farallon extension, firewire extensions, most of the ATI extensions, and have Virtual Memory OFF. Tried both PCI slots, lots of CUDA resets, zapped PRAMs, clean system installs, VM on and off, also tried versions 1.4.1, 1.4.6, and 1.5.5 of the USB extensions. Always the same. Did finally find out the real irritating fact that after a freeze, hitting the control+command+power keys and causing a reboot, keeping the spacebar down,
disabling the USB extensions when the extension manager comes up, then continuing the startup did NOT clear the hardware. The system would still freeze but it would take longer. Shut down, wait a minute, then startup and it will run all day with no freeze. They should put in a little delay... It sure screwed up my trouble shooting for awhile. The firewire half of the Tango card works great and the G3 seems rock solid so I have no beef with Sonnet. But this info may help someone else out so add it to the pile.Very excellent site by the way. Some very knowledgeable participants indeed. Thanks.
-Phil]

He later sent the following.

[Hi Thomas,
I just wanted to make it more clear, I was using the Sonnet firmware patch 1.2 and reinstalling it after every PRAM zapping and CUDA reset. I am using version 1.4.7 of the Sonnet G3 extension. My Mac freezes with the G3 on or off so it is definitely the combo card and/or USB extensions. I have no devices attached to the card. There are no other PCI cards installed.
-Phil]

Update on Sonnet giving up on fixing audio issues with Tango card: In my last update, I wrote that I thought Johns audio issues where due to his ATI card being installed with a L2 G3. He wrote back to correct me that he had removed the ATI card and tried with just the Tango card installed and he still had audio stuttering. Thanks for the update John. So it seems that even the 6400 is affected by the Tango card when a L2 G3 is installed. Sigh :(

[I read your post re: my audio stuttering issues and the Tango card with the Crescendo card installed.

I believe your conclusion at the end about the ATI card being the problem is wrong. I removed my ATI card, disabled the ATI extensions, and ran the computer with only the Tango card installed and the Crescendo card installed. I still had the same stuttering problem! It's not the ATI card, I promise you.

John]

Unfortunately, since no one but Apple makes USB and Firewire drivers for Macs, we may never get a fix?

More Radeon 7000 user info: John sent me some info on his experience with the Radeon 7000 video card in his 6400. Thanks John.

[Tom, just a note about my experience with the 7000.

I'm using a 6400 with a Sonnet 400mz card, 108 mg RAM and RamDoubler, with OS8.6-FU. It had an ATI Xclaim Pro graphics card (Rage-based) with 4 meg of VRAM with a KDS 17" monitor.

Like another contributor to the 6400 Zone I've installed a Radeon 7000 in my 6400, replacing the Xclaim Pro. In general it seems to work well but certain games would either refuse to launch or would hang and lock up the computer. The only error message was that of "error -1, cannot obtain gamma setting." The same games worked normally with the old card. I posted the issue to the Ambrosia help forum and received this answer:
"...it's an error being received directly from the OS, as for some reason it can't read the gamma table for certain video cards for the purposes of doing screen fades."
Since Tom states that he is using 9.1 this may be a problem specific to older systems or only a few games. The card is a major improvement but it may not work for everyone. If someone wants to give it a try I would recommend that you try to buy it with return privileges.
John]

As he mentions, some of his issues could be related to the OS he is running. ATI really made the card for OS 9.x and up. Click here for their driver support page. Notice they say that OS 8.6 is not supported. If you are not a gamer then the card should function fine. But I would install OS 9.1 if you wish to use the card for games.

He later wrote with more specific info on how he installed the card. Thanks.

[Tom,

I used TomeViewer to extract the components of OpenGL1.2.2 from an OS 9 installer and installed them into OS 8.6. I also installed QuickTime 5, as ATI requires. However, I found after a careful reading of the ATI tech info that it implies OpenGL1.2.2 may be needed only to support some features of Quicktime 5, such as full-screen playback.

When I ran the ATI installer it noted that my setup was an "unsupported configuration" (I assume it referred to OS 8.6 even with OGL 1.2.2. Maybe it was the French.) I continued the install and it proceeded normally. Except for the screen fade/ gamma value issue I have not seen any problem.

Since the card still functions even if all extensions are disabled I wonder what the "real" requirements are. It seems that you may be able to install the card on non-supported configurations if you are willing to forego certain functions.]

Speed Doubler may fix floppy drive issues with USB drivers installed?: John also wrote that his floppy drive issues disappeared when he had Connectix's SpeedDoubler installed! Thanks John. Speed Doubler use to be for speeding up native PPC code when the PPC was just born. Now it main use is for speeding up file copies from disk to disk and over a network. Since SpeedDoubler takes over the control from the Finder during a copy, This could be the fix we have been looking for with older OS's. I have to say that I fixed my issues with when I installed OS 9.1 and replaced the floppy drive. I think I had a bad floppy drive which made matters worse?

Apples USB drivers may cause copy issues to SCSI HD's?: John also noted that removing the USB drivers fixed copy failures he had when copying large files or folders with many small files via the SCSI bus. I am not sure if he was copying to or from a SCSI HD. Or both for that matter? Thanks for the info John.

Successful user experience with Evergreens USB/Firewire card in OS 8.6: John wrote to tell me of his experience using Evergreens Combo card in his 6400. Thanks John. Click here to read more on Combo cards.

[Tom:
(the following has been posted to the forum as well)

Just wanted to post my success in getting an Evergreen Firewire/USB combo card running on my (Newertech 300 MHz G3 upgraded) 6400. As reported in the 6400 Zone, this card does work with the 6400, and provides an on-board power connector so that you can power it from the internal power supply rather than the PCI bus - you need an adapter to connect the 4 pin power connector to the small size pins on the board - and you also need to move a jumper on the board to tell the board that the power source is external power.

I was a bit unsure as to whether OS 8.6 would properly support USB and Firewire, but so far things look good - I've tested the card with a USB floppy drive (both it and my internal floppy work fine, although formatting a floppy with the USB drive took about twice as long as the internal floppy did), and with a 20GB Firelight external Firewire drive -- these drives are COOL! 20 gig in the palm of my hand! Great for transferring the entire contents of my Mac at work to my Mac at home :-)

To make this card work on OS 8.6, you need the right USB and Firewire support. I was told that Firewire version 2.3.3 is the only version to use on 8.6 - higher versions presumably won't work. I also installed USB Card Support v1.4.1, and USB Mass Storage Support v1.3.5 All were available for free download at the Apple website. I did notice, however, that some of this software would NOT install until the card was installed. Apparently the software much check for the presence of a USB or Firewire interface before allowing install?

Just thought I'd share...
John]

Later he sent the following.

[Tom:

I have not checked into audio issues as of yet - I don't have the latest graphics cards (I've got an older Rage Pro card) which seems to be associated with these problems (based on reports on your site), but then I don't do a lot of gaming. However, I've had a long-standing issue of a system "freeze" associated with audio where the solution is to simply unplug and reconnect the headphones I have plugged into the speaker jack. I have tried everything suggested on your site with regards to extensions and patches and nothing has ever resolved that. I have yet to try (but will soon) the suggestion someone made about keeping a CD in the drive when doing alot with audio (such as having iTunes playing - I've got the hacked version that runs on 8.6 by the way) to see if that does anything. I also just installed a SCSI hard drive in the upper bay and I'm going to move all my MP3s that drive and see if that has any affect.

I haven't used the card much, but I have had two freezes occur when copying large numbers of files to my firewire drive. Most of the time it seems to work fine, but twice when copying around 3-4 gigabytes, I got freezes that required reboot. I am not sure if this is due to the card or USB drivers (perhaps I'll disable some of them - I don't plan to use the USB ports very much anyway - bought the card mostly so I could hook up the firewire drive, but figured I get the combo card in the event that I want to hook up a USB device in the future) - I actually thought it might be due to SpeedDoubler's copy function (I used to get some freezes backing data up to Jaz drives). I believe I've also seen on some website that certain firewire extensions should be disabled? I'll probably play around with extensions and see what seems to be optimal. But, at the moment, I'm probably not going to be using the card on a day-to-day basis.

John]

Repost from last update - New zone6400.com domain name!: I finally bought my own domain name :) Now you can access this site from:

www.zone6400.com

Isn't it about time! Plus I was able to make 3 more useful links:

forums.zone6400.com to link to the forums site

forsale.zone6400.com to link to the Mac Equipment for Sale site

search.zone6400.com to link to the search engine.

I hope you will all enjoy using my new URL's :) Have fun!

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