On Feb 26, 2007, at 16:19 , Veli-Pekka Tätilä wrote:
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.
Modern Macs have very complete sound support so you will not need a
sound card. infoVox has Finnish voices.
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'm not sure here could you send me a SID file and I'll see if the
mac can play it.
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/
