Silly question...

[Vintage_H._Shack]

Context: I have flashed ROMs in the past on various cards and motherboards in the PC world in the past. I'm wanting to flash the ROM on an Adaptec 39160 PCI-X card and use it permanently in my Quicksilver G4 tower. For clarification, this is a 64-bit PCI card, not PCIe, PCI-e, or anywhere near the latest expansion standard. It has a factory label on it from Dell (grumble grumble).

Question: Is it possible to flash the ROM in my G4 tower or would I have to use a PC to flash it?

If I have to use a PC to flash this card, I do not have a bog standard PC of any kind with a PCI-X slot in it whereas the Quicksilver does. The SST29EE010 chip on the card is soldered straight to the card. I do have a TL866-II+ programmer, but my soldering skills are questionable at this point and I don't have the PLCC32 to DIP adapter on hand. Any assistance/advice provided is appreciated.

 

[luminescentsimian]

There's a PowerDomain Control Utility for slightly older cards that's can flash the firmware on those cards so I'd say that it's a good chance that you can flash in place in the Quicksilver. Oh, there's a PowerDomain 39160 Flash Utility for Mac as well so I think you have an excellent chance of switching from the Adaptec PC firmware to the "PowerDomain" Mac firmware in place. https://storage.microsemi.com/en-us...productid=apd-39160&dn=powerdomain+39160.html

 

[Vintage_H._Shack]

Thank you @luminescentsimian. I will try that!

 

[luminescentsimian]

I happened to have picked up an Adaptec 29160 card a couple of weeks ago, it should be the single-channel version of your dual-channel 39160. I slapped it into the G5 I have out of storage and plugged in one of those BiTMICRO SCSI SSD's that popped up last month. Sorbet Leopard booted without complaining but didn't have a driver for the card. i downloaded the 1.3beta driver from Adaptec/Microchip and even though it was made for OSX 10.2 it installed and loaded without complaint and the SSD popped up on the desktop. A quick XBench run gave the SSD over 35MB/s read and write speed as expected.
The flash utility is only for OS9 so I wasn't able to try it on this G5. The OSX driver is working fine with the PC BIOS unchanged on the flash chip though.

 

[Vintage_H._Shack]

I have OS9 installed on my Quicksilver, so I might be good to go for the flash utility. I didn't want to mess with OSX on a Quicksilver G4, but this may be the one thing that makes the choice for me. I currently don't have a G5 machine on hand, but *if* I wait until VCFMW 2023 and show up there, I know that I'll have one then. I think that I'll try to install drivers before flashing the ROM on the card. There's probably less chance of bricking it that way. My reason for doing this is to backup the contents of an original PPC 7200 hard drive to a BlueSCSI. I hope that this work will yield the results that I'm looking for.