On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Andy Ball wrote:

> Hello!
> 
> it supports "wide SCSI", but I'm not sure if this means
> single-ended, hvd or lvd (I'm guessing single-ended).  I'm
> also wondering about the speed of the SCSI bus (20MHz?)

	As was mentioned, the onboard "MESH" SCSI chip is slow narrow. 
It's pretty sad to see that a G3 has not much faster SCSI performance than 
a VAXstation. Leave it to apple to be on the cutting edge of hardware 
design. So much for seeing the G5 in Q3 2002 for Apple computers. And how 
about that DDR RAM that makes the new G4's run slower than their SDR 
predecessors? 

> Next upgrade is probably IEEE-1394 'FireWire' as a PCI card.
> Are some better than others?  Do some work better with
> NetBSD? Does his beige G3 support 5V cards, 3.3V or both? As
> you can tell, I'm not all that familiar with this model.

	What exactly do you want to do with it? To the best of my
knowledge the firewire code is under devlopment in private branches and 
has not been merged into -current yet. I just booted a generic kernel that 
I compiled on Tuesday in my i386 box with a Texas Instruments TSB12LV23 
Firewire controller and it came up as not configured. USB 2.0 support 
hasn't been well tested, but it is in -current FWIW. Also be advised that 
you will not be able to boot from a Firewire or USB card. Only Macs with 
built in USB and Firewire ports have the code needed to do this.

	As for which cards are better than others, I don't know. I've only 
seen NEC USB 2.0 cards, and I'm pretty sure that Apple and most card 
makers use Texas Instruments chipsets. If you wanted to go for an all in 
one upgrade, Sonnet has an ATA133 + Firewire + USB all on one card, no 
idea what parts of it will work with NetBSD, I think it has an ACARD based 
IDE chip which might be bootable.