Magma Expansion Chassis P7R4, PCIHIF68 Host compatible with Protools Mix, G4, OS9?
 

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience on whether the Magma P7R4 Expansion Chassis with PCIHIF68 host card is compatible with the Mac G4 Dual Mirror computer using Protools 5.13 TDM Mix system on OS9 Classic?

If not, is the chassis able to by using a different host card?

Is there any way to get the Mix system to run on the P7R4 chassis?

Do I need a driver or software to run the chassis on the G4 or is it plug and play?

Thank you.

Re: Magma Expansion Chassis P7R4, PCIHIF68 Host compatible with Protools Mix, G4, OS9
 

All PCI chassis that I have used with G4’s were always plug and play. They were, however, very finicky about host card and chassis motherboard version. It’s been at least 10 years since I have set one up, so I don’t remember the specifics, but there was a magma 13 slot and a 7 slot that both worked very well. But some of them were only compatible with beige macs, there was a certain serial number/revision of the chassis and host card that was needed for it to work with a g4 or blue/white g3. If you can dig in the older digidesign section of this forum, I might have some old posts with better info about this subject.

P7R4 is designed to be a PCIe to PCI chassis, correct? It has probably never been tested with a system that old, so magma probably won’t support it in this configuration. You might be able to get it to work with some experimentation, but it could also not work at all.

Re: Magma Expansion Chassis P7R4, PCIHIF68 Host compatible with Protools Mix, G4, OS9
 

If your G4 has a FireWire 800 port, it will not natively boot in OS9. The “classic mode” environment that ran within OSX will not work for pro tools... you need to have a G4 that Is capable of booting natively in OS9. The mirror drive door G4’s with fw400 only will work for this, but the later fw800 version will not.

Re: Magma Expansion Chassis P7R4, PCIHIF68 Host compatible with Protools Mix, G4, OS9
 

Thanks for the response John.

Apparently the P7R4 is compatible with the PCIHIF68 which is a PCI host card but I am not sure what Mac version the PCIHIF68 is compatible with. I have heard of people using it for PCs but not for G4 running OS9.

Re: Magma Expansion Chassis P7R4, PCIHIF68 Host compatible with Protools Mix, G4, OS9
 

Man if you could find an old PPC 9600 that would be pretty dope. 6 PCI slots and onboard video IIRC. You can upgrade the 604e to a G4 also and I might have a G4 ZIF for you!!:cool:

Re: Magma Expansion Chassis P7R4, PCIHIF68 Host compatible with Protools Mix, G4, OS9
 

Until the current 8-slot Mac Pro was released, I believe the old 9600s had the highest number of expansion slots of any Mac. They were rare 15-20 years ago, probably nearly impossible to find now.

I ran many configurations of mix systems back in the day and when you start adding lots of cards the bottleneck ends up being TDM time slots. 4-5 mix cards is really all you need, unless you want to max your io to 64 and can’t find enough of the digilink Y cables that allow 16 io per card.

I had a 10 node TDM cable with the 13 slot chassis, and for me the most effective use of it back then was 3 mix cards with 7 samplecell tdm cards. Obviously with today’s crazy fast computers the need for a pci card with a dedicated cpu for samples and only 32mb of ram has come and gone... but it was really cool back then.

Re: Magma Expansion Chassis P7R4, PCIHIF68 Host compatible with Protools Mix, G4, OS9
 

I know these days, this sounds rather small, but I have about 750 mbs of ram in my G4 Dual Mirror 1.25, which the PPC 9600 usually only has 64mb, 128mb?

Would the 9600 have enough power to run Logic 6.4.3, DAE, SampleCell and other little apps at the same time?

Re: Magma Expansion Chassis P7R4, PCIHIF68 Host compatible with Protools Mix, G4, OS9
 

Samplecell on a card wasn’t much of a cpu strain, if any. I highly recommend the samplecell card with the tdm module for use with a mix system. Soft samplecell was a cpu and memory hog for those older machines, so if you’re running that, a g4 is better.

Does logic 6 work with OS9?
I remember using logic 4 on my os9 rigs. It was buggy and crashed a lot. I never upgraded to an OS X logic version until I was running Logic 8 on 10.5.x. If you want to use logic, I would suggest a g4 since it’s running natively, or run it on a newer computer and sync it up to your mix system (that’s what I did with logic 8). You can use a USD as a master clock, as long as the computer using logic has word clock in. Then use midi cables to sync up the transports of your pro tools and logic computer. It’s a lot of stuff to setup, but let’s you take advantage of these older systems while still having access to a more modern sequencer.

Other option, if you can find it, is studio vision... which was an excellent sequencer

Re: Magma Expansion Chassis P7R4, PCIHIF68 Host compatible with Protools Mix, G4, OS9
 

I can run Logic 6.4.3 on OS9 and it crashes but I realised it was mostly due to the OS sleeping/hibernating settings. Once I disabled that, my crashes are far less, mostly on heavy sequences and it is not far behind to Logic Studio on OSX which also crashes some times but not as much.