AAUI - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

25 Mar 2001

...
 From: Mike Ford &lt;mikeford(a)socal.rr.com&gt;
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>>>