Hi Jeff and Drew, Just like the Matrox cards I have been investigating, a lot of PC versions of the Millennium II were fitted with the smaller capacity flash ROM chips (256 kilobits) but most of the Millennium cards I have seen have chips much larger than what is required to house the Mac firmware.
Promise, like any manufacturer, has to get parts from suppliers as the demand arises, and the choice of parts comes down to availability and cost. Even though the 1-megabit 28F010 chip is more expensive and more than four times the capacity of what's needed to accommodate the PC firmware, Matrox would not say no to TI, AMD, CSi, etc. if there is a truckload of them ready to be shipped at a good price, even if they're to be used on cards intended to be permanently fitted into HP or Compaq computers. So that also explains why there had been five different suppliers of this chip to Matrox. There again, Promise could very well be protecting itself by making PC versions of the card incapable of Mac conversion, otherwise the support and refund expenditure would be horrendous. BTW, my Millennium II, the 8MB VRAM version (with chips on the back) with a flash ROM transplant from an otherwise dead Millennium, is pumping the pixels very nicely indeed. There seems to be only one supplier in Texas with these now discontinued chips, somehow I am not that inclined to clean out the stock and start a business modifying Millenniums, but if I could do it I'd rather make Mac versions of ATA cards though. All the best, Sam. Jeff Walther wrote: > At 16:33 -0500 09/09/2003, Drew Beckett wrote: > > > It just occurred to me that since all of these > >boards use the same controller chip, Promise has probably reduced the > >visible flash ROM size to 16KB somehow (SMT resistors?). Any thoughts? > > Uh, they probably installed a smaller capacity flash chip on that run > of cards. It's pretty common. For example, the only difference > (the *only* difference) in the hardware between an Adaptec 2940UW for > the PC and a PowerDomain 2940UW is the capacity of the flash chip. > > Flash chips are sold by their capacity in kilobits or megabits, not > in kilobytes or megabytes, for some reason. So a 64 KB flash is a > 512 Kb flash chip. I saw a lot of 600+ of those go on Ebay the other > day for about $175. True, $200 is kind of steep to modify a EIDE > card, but the unit price works out nicely.... -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
