Jeff Walther wrote:
(snipped)
On the VST/Promise cards, the Promise cards require moving several resistors and
some other fiddling.
Promise was the first manufacturer who announced the intention of producing Mac-compatible IDE cards, but somehow never got around to it. Now that gets me interested: which model is capable of Mac conversion, and how does one do it?
Hi Sam,
Unfortunately, I've never written the details down. There are three or four surface mount resistors that require moving. When I do this, I just set the Promise card next to my VST card and move them accordingly. I've never noted which resistors and I've seen at least two versions of the Promise card with slight variations in the required modifications.
One of the resistors is under the Flash chip. So that must be removed. The easiest way would be to clip the pins and then desolder the (32) pins one by one, but then you'd need a replacement chip and some way to program it. So I usually do this the hard way and get all 32 pins to come loose at once so I can reuse the chip. A replacement can run $10 or more, which kills any economy in this conversion.
One version of the Promise card has a 66 MHz half can oscillator on the board which must be removed. Another version does not.
Once all the resistors are in place, getting the firmware in place is still a pain. The firmware updater from VST will not update the card unless it already has VST firmware on it.
So, what I do is to install a socket where the Flash chip goes. Then plug in a programmed Flash chip from a real VST card. Then install the card in a computer and run the flash updater, but stop at the last step before it updates the firmware.
Then oh so carefully, with the machine turned on, and the Promise card in the PCI slot, pull the flash chip from the socket and install the flash chip that you desoldered from the card). Then click on the last button in the firmware updater, and it will program the VST firmware into the chip which formerly had PC firmware on board.
You can see that in addition to the difficult desoldering, you really need to have an original (or copy) VST card already in hand, because you need a programmed flash chip in order to fool the firmware updater into working.
Jeff Walther
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