Tag: Reverse_Engineering

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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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Mac Portable Hybrid Module Now In Production

The long-awaited date has finally arrived. After testing this module on two of my Portables, testing by some community members, writing documentation, building a crazy looking tester system, I think it’s ready for release.

The Macintosh Portable Hybrid Module Recreation is now an open listing.

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Macintosh Portable Projects Progress

  • Backlit Macintosh Portable Screen Cable Recreation:
    Prototype cables have completed production and are on the way to me now. They should arrive by the end of the week. I don’t own a backlit Portable, and will be sending two cables out to testers once they arrive. Presuming they work, I’ll place a larger order for them and will start selling them here.

    Pricing is likely to fall around $40 to $45 per cable for the raw flex only. You will need to move your connector from the original cable to the new, because I couldn’t find connectors available which are the same. If you want me to move the connector for you, that’ll cost a bit more and require sending in your cable. My fancy desoldering setup makes moving the connector pretty fast.
  • Non-Backlit Macintosh Portable Hybrid Module Recreation:
    This is a recreation of the original Hybrid module, using new old stock parts. The first round of PCBs are for prototyping only, and are pretty ugly. I created a ‘downstream’ board which mimics the components in a real Portable so there’s no fear of blowing things up as I tweak high-precision resistor values.

    Looks aside, these recreations are working quite well and only a few things remain to be worked out.
    Things which work: Main 5v power rail, 12v enable, -5 enable, battery charger, battery charge indicator signal (to the power manager chip), battery charge cutoff (HICHG)
    Things which still need work and testing: -5v power rail itself (-6 for some reason), under-voltage lockout, A/D feedback line voltage, and testing in a real portable for functionality

    Picture of the setup for fun (like I said, not exactly pretty):