Hi,
Thanks for all who've repliedd so far in my hardware queries, great info and
not so easy to find on the Web, I think. Thought I'd start a new thread,
though. I've been looking at the Apple specs and am very upset to discover
how quickly they are abandoning old hardware. If I've understood things
correctly, this might be worse than all the accessibility issues I've
raissed so far in switching. At the risk of a mini rant:
Simply put, can I use normal PCI cards, not PCI Express cards, with any of
the current and future Intel Macs on offer? AS far as I can tell, I canot,
darn. The Mac MINi has no expansion slots for internal hardware and the Mac
Pro seems to have only PCI Express slots. Both the Apple site and Wikipedia
state quite clearly that although PCi Express is backwords compatible in
terms of software interfaces, old PCI devices won't work in the PCI Express
bus, period.
The thing is this:
I've got two PCI cards I wouldn't want to part with, no matter whether my
next OS will be Windows Vista, some flavor of Linux or OS X. One is my 10 in
10 out soundcard, the TerraTec EWS88 MT. While it is an old one, it has been
Working fine and the cost of getting a replacement card is something I
wouldn't want to think off right now, as the card works in Windows and as,
if I'm going to get a MAc, I'll have to pay Extra for a Finnish speech synth
and PC virtualization to run Windows inside OS X anyway. I say extra because
I already have both for Windows for free.
The other PCI card is the HardSoftware HardSID, which is basically the C64
SID chip on a PCI card. I think they have OS X drivers so I could at least
play SID files with the card and use it in emulators, although the MIDI
environment in it is Windows-only. Again, the card is such a rarity that
they'll probably never make a PCI Express card, after all it took Hard
Software, which is basically just one Hungarian guy I think, several years
to switch the Old ISA based design to PCI. Nough said I guess. End mini
rant.
I hope the light at the end of the tunnel is not the headlamp of a fast
approaching train, like that Bad News voice would say in old Macintalk,
<grin>. I think I've suffered two very big blows in considering switching.
One is no accessible Logic or equivalent and Garage Band's silly on/off
style quantize which is unusable to me. The other is this hardware
compatibility mess. But then again there are similar biggies in Linux in
relation to soundcard latency, lack of visual customization in Gnome and
graphical MIDI seqs. So it seems to me I just might have to stay with
Windows no matter what. This is provided that I'm right about the hardware
situation. So, I truely hope I'm mistaken, <insert sad emoticon here>.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/
