OS 6.1 New Operating System

[Old School]

Hi Guys,
I have been following this thread with great interest, although I am sadly lacking in expertise to help, I do have a question.
Might it not be possible to find a coder willing to take on this project? Given the time period, the source code was most likely written in C and encrypted with RC4, which is now known to be vulnerable. Perhaps he could add drivers to the code? It's probably all just wishful thinking on my part but I really want to be able to keep this equipment running past when the motherboards give up the ghost.

Have a blessed day,
Mike

[RJH_MUSIC]

Since the case I bought is only 2RU high, I was trying to use low profile cards. Regular sized cards won't. Too tall. I bought a generic VGA card ATI Rage 8 mg. Maybe not enough ram, I don't know. I don't think the original card I have was the one that originally came with the d8b. Years ago I bought a box of parts from someone in the UK and the actual video cards are ATI Sapphire VGA/dvi 64 mb. So until I find a low profile card that will work, I will mount the original card sideways using a riser card cable. Parts coming next week so I will dive in again.

There was also more disappointing news I think but not sure yet. I was able to get in touch with the original person who posted the original instructions from weritz.com on building an external power supply. To be honest I was a little upset but I've learned to go with it. The power supply build was actually post it to the wrong for it should have been posted to the probox forum not the d8b forum. It is quite possible that this will not work on the mixer version only the pro box version, because the velleman kit that converts plus and minus 15 to plus and minus 16 may not put out enough amps for the console using it as a mixer. This means I might be stuck using the original Transformer from the d8b. But at least I should be able to swap out the + 5 power supply to a new one.

Also, that is good news on the BFC cable. I was afraid that a 50' length would cause too much line drop.

[captainamerica]

"Also, that is good news on the BFC cable. I was afraid that a 50' length would cause too much line drop"

have not run into this issue since for the last year - Philippe

[Y-my-R]

First, sorry… I made no progress this weekend. Some other obligations got in the way (…and this isn’t my only hobby, haha).

I have thoughts on what a few people shared in the posts above, so I’ll do this “by person”:

@arjepsen:
Thanks for sharing more info on what you already tried, and that the lack of support for the specific video chipset was likely the main hurdle (…and possibly also the Serial/COM chip, but I’ll try to cross that bridge when I get there).
What gives me a little bit of hope is, that RJH_MUSIC seemed to have a rather different ATI card working in his D8B (I’ll ask him more about this below). If I could somehow get a list of different video cards/chips that are in successful use in D8B rigs around the world, maybe there’s one among them that one of the VMs can emulate!
As for the Pentium 4 - I think we exchanged some notes, when I tried to get the MackieOS running on a Dell Dimension 3000 that also has a PIV. It didn’t work out, but booted up surprisingly far (I don’t recall right now, but I think it went further than just the blinking green asterisk).
What I’d suspect for that one, is that each new processor usually comes with a change/expansion to the “instruction set” for the main CPU. So, the commands and functions a processor understands and can execute… but this would need to match the requests the OS sends to it. When doing the Hackintosh thing, it was sometimes necessary to either activate extended CPU instruction sets or limit them, in order to get specific versions of MacOS running with a particular CPU/processor (e.g. when I got MacOS 10.4 working on an AMD Athlon 4000+ processor, that uses a different instruction set that was never supported by MacOS, directly). Might be something similar for the MackieOS/PIV combination. However, for the Hackintosh, I could tweak the OS itself to change how it “talks” to the processor… the MackieOS is a closed “capsule” to me, so I wouldn’t know how to achieve something similar for this.
…and totally understood about there being other priorities than working on a D8B hack. I’m in the same boat, and will only play with this when I really have “extra” time (Beer is definitely more important, haha!)

@RJH_MUSIC:
So, if I read what you’re saying correctly, then the "ATI Sapphire VGA/dvi 64 mb” card came with your D8B (even if it may not be factory-original) and worked as it should? IMO, ATI were a more wide-spread video chip than the Cirrus Logic one when the D8B was new, so this might make a few more card with similar chips compatible. (Or possibly, a PCI video card just needs to comply with a certain standard to be supported (...I think VESA bus cards worked like that without needing a specific driver for the chip... but it's not that, here. That's another thing I’ll need to research little).
I’ll try to find more info about this ATI Sapphire card, but if you still have it uninstalled and could share some close-up pictures from the front and the back of the card, this may be helpful. Sometimes there’s some info printed on the chips, that can be useful when having to configure the (in this case “virtual”) card in the OS.
I do remember trying an old ATI Rage 128 PCI card in either the D8B or HDR before (or it might have been a MDR with an HDR BIOS chip... not sure), and it didn’t get passed the point where the GUI usually gets launched. I thought I read a comment on the forum before, where someone said the ATI Rage chip may work… but it might be a different product from the family, or a different generation of the chip, not sure. When you try the ATI Rage card in your rig, please do report back if it manage to boot past the “Starting MackieOS, Please Wait… *” screen.
…and sorry to hear about the PSU schematics having been meant for ProBox operation, only. I didn’t know, either. That’s frustrating. Is the D8B transformer a difficult part to find a replacement for? I don’t have much of a clue about electronics… sorry if that’s a dumb question.
And about the 50 foot umbilical cord… there was a thread a while back where I tried to do a roll call to see how many people would be interested in getting a batch of longer such cords made, by the original company that made them for Mackie at the time. I think at least 20 people would have been needed to be willing to pay a bit over $200 or so per cord, but nobody responded. While trying to get permission from Loud Technologies (i.e. Mackie’s parent company), the person I was in contact with there found ONE such longer prototype/proof-of-concept cord in their garage. That’s the one Captain America has now. I have another one that I got through a different channel years ago, but AFAIK, these were never mass-produced, as there wasn’t enough interest. Any that exist, would likely be from a pilot run or "proof of concept" run, that didn't make it to mass production.


@Old School:
Even if money would not be a problem and a programmer with the right skills could be found, it would be somewhat of a legal problem to modify the codebase of the MackieOS, IMO. I’m grateful for the 2 OS authorization hacks that exist, but suspect that Mackie only let that slide, because it helped calm angry customers after they killed support for the product and shut down the authorization server. At least people were still able to use the hardware via this hack, and got off of Mackie’s back, since they’re still able to use the product (and often got a whole bunch of “free" plug-ins for it this way).
I’m not sure how lenient Mackie would be, if “hacking” attempts beyond that would be made in a public space like this. “Hacks” or “reverse engineering” or “code changes” of any kind are still illegal - even for the D8B.
I’m hoping that my approach to get the MackieOS running in a virtual machine without modifying any of Mackie’s own code, would technically not be “hacking” their stuff. I’d just be running their software unchanged on a different platform (if I get it to work… but the pre-existing hack for the authorization would still be needed for this, of course… if I get this to work, I might have to leave the hack out of the shared Virtual Machine for legal reasons, and have anyone who wants to use it, apply the hack themselves).
In short, aside from the cost and finding someone who has the skills, you’d have to find someone who’d be willing to risk possible legal challenges for creating something like this, and/or do it behind closed doors and release without their name on it, and be paid in secret
Doesn’t sound particularly likely to me, either, I’m afraid. (Personally, I wouldn't want to invest any serious amount of money in this. Maybe I'd be willing to spend $100 on it or so, but you'd need to have A LOT of people participating, if everyone would only contribute a small amount like that, to pay a "serious" developer for dozens, if not hundreds of hours of work).

Open questions to be able to continue with this, if anyone can chime in:

- What video card models/chips are known to work in the MackieOS 5.1 (or older)? This is really important info for this project. If you don’t want to post publicly, I’d also be happy about a personal message!
1. Cirrus Logic with "CL - GD5434-J-QC-F" chip
2. ATI Sapphire VGA/DVI 64 MB
3. ??
4. ??

- What’s the exact Windows version Mackie licensed to base the Mackie OS on? (e.g. Win98SE, WinME, Win2000, etc.?)

If anybody has any bits of info on these two questions - even if it seems insignificant to you - it might be really helpful to move the “Virtual Machine” approach forward.

Thanks again, everyone!

[RJH_MUSIC]

WOW! All great information. Thanks for the hard work. I got the model numbers for the ATI cards i have from someone on this forum a few years ago. The DVI outputs would not work, but the VGA outputs did. Using it to drive a 23" wide screen monitor and the view is really great. Interesting Development. I purchased a d8b from e-bay and picked it up this past weekend. When i opened it up, i was surprised to find an AGP card installed. I will write down all the model numbers I have tonight when i get home and will post.

I called Electronetics to find out the specs on the transformer, but they could not recognize model # i gave them. They are checking further and hopefully will get back to me soon. In the meantime, i did purchase the velleman kit and will build it up when it comes and i will try that route again to see what happens. I asked the contact at Weritz.com to confirm that the PSU build would or would not work for fully functional d8b, but have not gotten a response. I guess we will know soon enough when i build up the kit.

The weekend took another twist, but at the end of it i have some good news. When I got the new unit home, I plugged it in an everything, well almost everything worked. The transport pane is dead and no # readout in the transport display. I contacted the seller and he said you have to have it hooked up to MIDI and have it addressed in your DAW, but that is incorrect. Whether or not a midi cable is hooked to it or not, the transport still should read all zero's and the stop button should be lit. So i had an idea. I have my original d8b auth codes on my flash drive, so i switched the flash drives in the new unit and connected it to my original console. It kept coming up with a DRIVE BOOT FAILURE, so i opened it up and smelled smoke. Apparently when i pulled the existing flash card out and tried to insert my original, one o the pins bent and it shorted. I tried to bend it back using a dentist pic and it broke. Thank god I have a spare laying around. Good news is that when it finally booted, it came up clean. so I did not damage my console or my original flash drive in my experiment with the PSU. And i now have a spare console to test my new CPU when i get it built. Just to confirm one other thing. The velleman kit with cooling fins will not fit in a 1 RU case, so I am dropping that option. I will progress with the 2 RU version.

[RJH_MUSIC]

By the way, Startech flash card readers are cheaply built. This would be the third one that broke on me in three years when ejecting and re-inserting a flash card.

[Y-my-R]

Thanks for the update, RJH_MUSIC! Especially the news that the D8B you picked up came with an AGP card that works, is exciting for the Virtual Machine idea!
...and sorry to hear about the trouble with trying to find a replacement transformer, and with those Startech flash card readers!

I poked around in the files on one of the D8B drives I had lying around, and found that there's a graphics.log file on it, that gives some good information about the video card that was used with that drive.
I looked in all 4 rack units I have today (2 fully working, 3rd configured to run Win98 and an ISA soundcard, 4th has a burned out keyboard controller chip), and all 4 have Cirrus Logic video cards.

However, the grapics.log file I found on an unused D8B (spinning) drive, lists the drive as having successfully started with an ATI Radeon VE card. That might be the card you are using, too. This log does mention this as PCI/AGP, which might also point towards the AGP architecture being supported by this driver.
However (again), I just looked at the "graphics.log" file from my "daily driver" D8B (that I pulled the drive from recently, to create a clone from it for the Virtual Machine experiments), and although I never had a different video card than those Cirrus Logic cards working, the Graphics.log file ALSO said that the OS successfully booted with an ATI Radeon VE card.
This suggest to me, that the graphics chip to attempt to emulate, is an ATI Radeon VE, rather than a Cirrus-Logic specific chip. It might be the same (re-branded) chip on both kinds of cards, though. I'll try to research a little.

This doesn't mean that all Radeon cards will work, though. I tried a few other random video cards today, that I had lying around and none of them worked. I tried these:

- ATI Rage 128 AGP - no output from VGA (didn't/couldn't try DVI)
- ATI Radeon 9550 AGP - can't install physically. Needs extra cut/notch between contacts
- Nvidia GeForce 5200 AGP - hangs at "Loading MackieOS, Please Wait... *"
- Nvidia GeForce - uncertain about model (8911 Ver 3.30) - hangs at "Loading MackieOS, Please Wait... *"

Not that those tests mean anything. I guess the only case where I was hoping for a different result, was for the Rage 128 card.

Besides this, when opening the "graphics.bpd" file from the "Drivers" folder under Windows 98, it states at the beginning

"This is a Windows NT dynamic link library".

1. This suggests 2 things to me: The MackieOS may be based on Windows NT 4 32-bit. However, Windows 2000 frequently displayed "Windows NT" related error messages back in the day, so it could be Windows 2000 as well. Windows 95/98 usually did NOT display any "NT" related messages as far as I recall. So, this may suggest that the OS underlying MackieOS, is likely either Windows NT 4, or Windows 2000 (32-bit).

2. The files in the MackieOS likely use different extensions than the same files would in a true Windows environment (e.g. ".bpd" instead of ".dll"). This might allow for some experiments with installing those drivers on a different Windows test-environment, to find out what the drivers themselves actually are. And once we know that, we could figure out what devices are actually supported by the driver.

Anyway... still just poking around. But next time I'm poking, I'll doing so in the context of WinNT4 or Win2k

[Y-my-R]

...oh, and I just had the thought, that I could take a Windows NT/2000 driver for, say, the Nvidia cards, call it graphics.bpd and put it in place of the one that comes with the Mackie OS. It's unlikely that it would be this simple to "install" a different video card driver in the D8B, but it's worth a try.
I have to stop now, but will try this some time in the near future.

[Old School]

Hi Guys,
Just to be clear, I regard the D8B OS to be "orphaned software" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphaned_technology) as Transom Audio Group bought all Mackie brands and not software for discontinued products. I could be mistaken, but I believe that is the reason no one came after the hacks. The modification of orphaned software and even retailing of said modified version is not illegal.

Mike

[Y-my-R]

That's very interesting, Mike! Thanks!

I wasn't aware that software can be considered abandoned/orphaned and then becomes somewhat of a free-for-all.

I always just assumed that a copyright holder already by principle, would go after anyone who tries to mess with their stuff. But I guess if the ownership question isn't clear (e.g. if Transom Audio Group really didn't buy the rights to the software for discontinued products), then there isn't really anyone who'd sue.
...and Bob Tudor, who wrote the code for large portions of the MackieOS, from what I understand, is no longer among the living. So, he's unlikely to complain about it, either

It's good to know that I likely won't have to worry about getting in trouble for what I'm doing, but I'd still think that it would get really expensive really quickly, if trying to pay a qualified developer to make the needed modifications. As I said, though... if it would be a manageable price, like maybe $100 per nose, then I'm in!

FWIW, I just found this link, that lists an ATI driver as suitable for Cirrus Logic cards from a related family to the one used in the D8B:
https://www.driverguide.com/driver/down ... cs-Adapter

So, it seems that both, ATI cards and Cirrus Logic cards use a chip from the same family, and can run using the same driver. So, the D8B most likely comes pre-installed with the ATI version of this driver... which will then be what I'll try to get an emulation running for, in a VM (...so far, I had only tried generic and Cirrus Logic emulations. Now I'd focus on a D8B clone or WinNT4/Win2K environment, with an ATI Radeon VE 64 emulation (if available... I'll see).