PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

HI All

I am hoping to upgrade my system to a powermac, from what i know G5's were the last macs to have PCI slots.

Does anyone know if the scope cards are compatable with the G5 powermacs. and if not these ones what others.

I have a pulsarII and a lunaII

Any advise would be appreciated

Thanks
Sean

You also have to work on OS9...no OSX support (yet)!

Thanks for the reply hubird

So does that means other than having to use OS9, the cards should work fine?

Sean

the cards will work fine in any OS9 compatible Mac with PCI slots, the latetest model beeing the first production half of the so called Dual G4 'Mirror Door'.
Later machines of this type will refuse to boot from OS9.
Best system for Scope under Mac OS is the Quicksilver G4 anything between 500 and 800 MHZ will do.

But: Creamware has never been really good in the Mac domain... and to be honest... OS9 wasn't Apple's greatest hit, too
in fact they already had waved goodbye to 'classical' Mac virtues with the very first release of that OS.

Intended as a patchwork to ease transition to their forthcoming unix-ish thingy named OSX it was never meant to be something on it's own.
That it worked quite well (for some people even amazingly well) is simply due to the fact that the original Mac OS (below the OS9 layer, so to say...) was a very solid piece of work.

If you want to stay in the currentMac domain with sequencing/recording, the best setup is 'any old box' for the Pulsar/Luna and your sequencer machine connected by 16 channels of Adat IO, preferably by an RME card.
Hubird's system is built like that and a few others here have similiar setups, even in the Windows domain.

Admittedly, the extra RME isn't a cheapo, but it has additional niceties in the digital clock domain (it can improve your signal chain significantly).
Of course any other Adat card will work, too.

Otherwise stick with a Quicksilver Sawtooth model under Mac OS9.

cheers, Tom

astroman wrote: Best system for Scope under Mac OS is the Quicksilver G4 anything between 500 and 800 MHZ will do.

will work great if you are just sequencing some tracks...when you wanne use also some today's VST fx and specially VSTi-s you will run into troubles.
like Tom says, two macs works best

Thanks Astroman and Hubird for the help

One last question what about a Mac with OSX running in classic Mode

Sean

no way - but it's perfectly legitimate to fall into that trap...
myself got caught into thinking Virtual PC would do the trick, because it looks so stunningly real

OS9 runs as an application under OSX (btw only under outdated versions...), so it has no access at all to the machine's hardware, same as Virtual PC.

in theory it's possible to write a hardware layer to translate between the host OS and a 'virtualisation' - for example WINE, aka CrossOver (by CodeWeavers) on the Mac.
But as current machines lack PCI slots anyway, there's no practical use - and it's probably even more demanding than to write the OSX thing from scratch...

I'm rather confident we will see something from Sonic Core in that direction, for the simple fact that OSX and Windoze is the same CPU architecture now - and not too long it will be the exact same mobos either

But i wouldn't expect anything without new boards.
It's not just for the fact that it's difficult to market a 10 year old item (even with a PCIe interface), but new Sharcs have significant changes in architecture which are not supported by the 'classic' Scope software.
As one of the former core developers re-joined the team, things look fairly promising.
But imho OSX is not (cannot be) their main concern in economic context.

cheers, Tom