Tag: Announcements

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10/100 Comm Slot II Ethernet Cards

Update: Production order has been placed for these cards. Approximately one month until production completion, then they need to be tested prior to listing for sale.

This is an upcoming product announcement.

Comm Slot II Ethernet cards have been expensive and hard to find for quite some time now. And as it turns out, Comm Slot II is basically just PCI with fewer signals. Thus, a project was born.

A thread has been started on Tinker Different about these cards: https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/comm-slot-ii-10-100-ethernet-cards.3658/

Farallon produced a 10/100 Comm Slot II card “back in the day”, but it had some compatibility issues and other problems based on old posts at zone6400.com

After spending several weeks looking around for information about Ethernet chipsets and Mac OS compatibility, I found one which is very widely compatible (tested on 7.6 through 9.1) and is a convenient single-chip solution unlike the Farallon which needed the 100 megabit driver separate from the PCI-side controller.

Speeds have been low in testing, unfortunately – only 150k per second max download. But this is the speed I see from PCI cards of the era on my 7300 that’s upgraded with a G3 card. So I’m confused, I expected far better than that from a 10/100 chipset. Not sure if there’s something I am doing wrong in configuration or what.

For your viewing pleasure, the card is pictured below:

Comm Slot II Ethernet Card
Comm Slot II Ethernet Card
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Upcoming Products

Other than the normal-priced BlueSCSI desktop design which is incoming, what else is there to look forward to as we approach the end of the year?

Far too many things for my spare time to be very happy.

First, a product for the Mac Portable which should resolve once and for all the problems that are caused by its Lead Acid battery and the maintenance that requires: The Mac Portable Battery Eliminator.

It hooks up to the Modem slot, requires a small (included) jumper cable to connect to the motherboard instead of the original battery harness, and uses Supercapacitors to take the place of the battery. Plug your power adapter into this card through the Modem port’s cutout, wait 2 minutes for the capacitors to charge, and that’s it. Never bother to charge a lead acid battery again. Also includes solder points for a 9v battery clip if you demand PRAM retention, but supercaps have high discharge so don’t expect great battery life.

Second, an update to the Mac Portable 7 Meg RAM card which includes the switching option by default (I don’t have to solder things to the CPLD any more, hooray). This will entirely replace the base model 7 megabyte card after those are sold out, and will sell in parallel until then.

Third, an entirely new product line. Are you tired of having to find original keyboards and mice for vintage Apple, Sun, and other systems? Say hello to the HIDHopper series. This line of affordable interface adapters is planned to start with USB to ADB, and will expand from there to a variety of vintage systems with impossible to find (or overly expensive) input devices.

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New BlueSCSI design incoming – now with transceivers!

I have been experimenting and prototyping with this hardware for months – since late 2021.

I have gone through three hardware revisions.

And now, it’s time to reveal the latest and greatest BlueSCSI so far.

Behold, BlueSCSI with bus transceivers for increased compatibility.

F4 XCVR Desktop Version 1

It looks a little odd, but with the right bracket design it should be compatible with Macs that require a card-edge connector for hard drives.

Currently being benchmarked, with a production run in progress. Available late March.

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New Products On The Way

On the BlueSCSI front, there are new through-hole designs on the way from the PCB manufacturer, for desktop and powerbook. These have already been verified functional, and these PCBs are for production. They are easier to assemble, with only a few surface mount parts : the microSD slot, and large SMD capacitors.

A new BlueSCSI product line, ‘F4 Lite’, will make its appearance with green PCBs. This style is just as fast as full F4 with the current SCSI protocol implementation, despite being more affordable. Future improvements to the SCSI protocol will make full F4 likely faster. But for now it’s a cheaper solution that runs at the same speed.

Also for the first time, F4 will be available for powerbooks. These designs are through-hole too, and allow disabling termination (by removing active terminator packs) for those that want to try systems other than powerbooks where termination must be fully off.

The eMate 300 RAM/Flash upgrade module will start production when the PCBs arrive.
— Update on the eMate module: either my PCBs are really fiddly or the flash chips I have are all bad. These don’t really seem to want to work, and the PCB design will be updated again later to see if things can be worked out.

The LC MACAA Power Supply Replacement has had one more PCB tweak and is not the easiest to assemble, but will be a good solution for those who want a new power supply for their LC, LC II, LC III, and LC 475.
— Update on MACAA: For the LC there’s actually a nice little medical power supply that does +12, +5, and -5 just like the LC needs. Will be easier and cheaper to just use that instead, and work is being retargeted to that.

The ribbon cable for macintosh portable backlit display upgrade is in production, with one tester ready and waiting to give it a shot.

Another new product (later in the future, design in progress) will be the standard backlit mac portable ribbon cable, as this is a different design – but they tear just as often.