AAUI

From: John Ruschmeyer <jruschme_at_mac.com>
Date: Sun Mar 25 21:27:05 2001

>From: Mike Ford <mikeford_at_socal.rr.com>
>Subject: Re: AAUI
>
>> Apple can't be blamed for the lack of drivers for various
>>cards though. I have used any number of PC PCI boards in my PCI
>>Mac's, including USB, Firewire and video boards. The slots
>>themselves are compliant with the PCI standard. It's just a matter
>>of lacking 3rd party drivers. Creative Labs is releasing a Mac
>>version of it's SB Live, NVidia has done Mac versions of it's
>>Geoforce boards, 3Dfx did Mac versions of it's Voodoo4 and Voodoo5
>>boards just before they went under, and Adaptec has done Mac versions
>>of many of it's SCSI boards.
>
>My back still hurts, so I'll keep typing....
>
>Sure I can blame Apple for the lack of drivers, if stinking Apple wrote a
>"generic" driver or even published a stable API for its non standard PCI
>byte swapped version of PCI then plenty of cards would have worked on the
>mac. As it was, ONLY a handfull of often third parties ever bothered to
>write a mac driver for a PC PCI card, and mac users paid through the nose
>for those items.

To some degree, though, I wonder if there isn't a supply and demand
issue in effect.

For instance, I've never gotten why no one has written a 3rd party
OpenTransport driver for common PCI Ethernet NICs such as the
EtherLink III or the cheap NE2000 clones. Apple has published sample
driver code and the board-level code is public enough from NetBSD or
Linux, yet no one has ever put the two together. From what I can
tell, the same is the case over in the PCMCIA world with few cards
having MacOS support.

>Firewire was always an Apple first product, my guess is that some PC
>products may have Apple ancestry in the driver code or at least high level
>design. Sort of true for USB, except in the PC world about half the cards
>meet the open standard that is what Apple drivers recognize, and half don't
>and hence won't work with Apple drivers (nobody "really" AFAIK makes a
>Apple specific USB driver).

OHCI (supported by Apple) versus UHCI. Ironically, I find that a lot
of the cheapest cards are the compatible ones.

>PCI Video cards I follow pretty closely, and MAYBE a total of 10 cards work
>with macs, with half of those being somewhat generic PC PCI cards. Not
>moving closer to the AGP PC standard was killing Apple video performance,
>so maybe the latest macs have better compatibility, I don't know the
>details of that however.

Video cards are the worst since it is not only a matter of drivers,
but also of firmware. As I understand it, a video card has to have
OpenFirmware code for it to be usable.

>Oh happy day, we get the two year old most overpriced PC sound card,
>without all the features, finally for the mac.

Okay, but why do I want it anyway?

>I have fun with old macs, I currently use a Starmax for daily stuff, but I
>am moving to daily PC use because I am sick of browsers on the mac that
>don't work. In a word, javascript, love it hate, heck I don't even know
>exactly what it is, but it doesn't work on mac browsers and that means many
>pages I want to access I can't.

I'm curious... what browser versions have you had the problem with?
iCab aside, I've had less trouble with Javascript implementations
than with sites that arbitrarily lock out non-Windows users, even if
the site would otherwise work.

<<<john>>>
Received on Sun Mar 25 2001 - 21:27:05 BST