Hi. Has anyone here been successful with PCI IDE cards (or any other cards) on PowerPC BeOS? I don’t know if any of the Intel supported ones work.
Separate but related, there are third party drivers for Voodoo3 2000 cards that do work (limited functionality) on PowerPC BeOS.
BeOS PPC has a fraction of the drivers that x86 has. I don’t remember any drivers for IDE other than limited Mac and BeBox IDE.
Ditto for video.
What underlying hardware are you using?
@memsom to tag in the only other person who I know has working BeOS/MacPPC hardware
If you want to use IDE storage on a PowerPC machine, you need one that has IDE onboard, like most clones, and some Apple models.
Those pci cards are officially supported in PPC BeOS:
-TV/capture card with a bt848 chip
-S3 Sonic Vibes soundcard
That sound card info might come in handy.
I do have a couple Mac clones with IDE, but they aren’t as good as the scsi ones.
Most models could have a cpu upgrade, either via the cpu slot or the L2 cache slot.
I know the beige powermac g3 had IDE by default, i have some of those floating around here that do.
G3 models are not supported, but 603/604 models with a G3/G4 upgrade are, like the 4400 which has a 603e, IDE hdd and atapi cdrom.
I think the stub Mac graphics driver might make any Mac compatible card ”work”, but without a driver for the specific card, you will be severely limited in performance.
The best cards I know of that are definitely supported well are the IMS Twin Turbo (sometimes called ixmicro Twin Turbo), but needs to be a Mac edition (not sure if they made PC Cards) or a Matrox Millennium 1 or 2 Mac edition, though a PC Matrox Mil 2 can be flashed to Mac - I did this a long time ago, but don’t remember much about it and no longer have that card. Both of these give you acceleration and will do huger resolution and have Game kit compatibility.
Most of the other cards are unknown.
All of the Mac PCI IDE cards required some type of driver iirc, so none were BeOS ready. They were generally pretending to be SCSI also, so the on disk formatting was weird.
The Ati Rage Pro is also fully supported.
There was a thread on 68kmla, started by @_AP I believe, where lots of graphic cards were tested.
I used these which worked very well for me (updated):
Those working on PowerPC? I wasn’t aware that the Radeon 9700 was available for PCI
I use a G550 PCI-E in my “last generation of BeOS Intel hardware machine” and it was definitely available in conventional PCI as well as AGP.
I have a Matrox G450, which is a PCI dual head card. But though it worked in Intel, I don’t think it was Mac compatible in any way. The BeBox I had was using a Mil 2 so I never tried it in it.
@cocobean are you saying there are PCI variants of these cards that have Mac compatibility?
I guess to @_AP , are you asking about Mac, BeBox or in general? The BeOS has 3 different kernels. Intel, Mac and Joe. The Joe kernel is BeBox only. It allows for more general hardware support. The Mac kernel is hobbled by the Mac hardware support and weird PCI limitations. So there is no ”all cards are supported on PowerPC” because of all the weird requirements and restrictions the Mac PCI support has.
Yes, there are/were PCI variants (9700/9800 Pro models)… you could flash them for Mac/Intel.
Promise Tech - they provided IDE/SATA storage controllers and driver solutions.
And you’ve used them on BeOS/PPC?
Specifically for BeOS on a PowerPC Mac. I didn’t realize the OS was different than the one on a BeBox.
Yes, I’ve tested many video cards for both Mac and x86.
Much ended with Be legalese, BeOS/Intel parity, Apple dropping PPC, and crackdowns on any Mac clones.
This entire thread has been about hardware supported on PowerPC though…