NEC usb hack for mediator

[mechy]

Just reprogrammed the eproms on a few different pci USB cards last night with the NEC chipsets. Thanks goes out to the guy who posted about how to do this.
My process goes something like this- Desolder the eprom,stick it in a  soic adapter and that goes into my eprom burner,load some edited eprom  code, shoot it to the eprom,remove it,solder it back on the  board.Nothing too hard just takes time.
 Seem to work fine in my A4000 with 5v Mediator. i did a 3 port and 5  port.Tested keyboards,memsticks,transcend card reader,some windows usb  cam(unrecognized)and the sony camera.
The green usb card has a 3.3/5v jumper onboard(seems to run in either  position in my 5v mediator with no bad effects). the black card has no  voltage jumper.I tested these about 1 hour.
all ports seem to work fine. This was under workbench 3.9 with poseidon  4.4 (thanks chris!) ,spider.device v3.21.My config is  csppc,radeon,sb128,100Mbit ethernet.

If anyone who doesn't have the capability to do these themselves needs  one i can probabaly offer the 5 port for $15-20 ready to go if anyone is  interested but alot of you can do it cheaper i'm sure.I haven't tried  these in the newer 1200 3.3v mediators,but no reason for them not to  work work.
Don't be surprised if elbox pulls some change in the next drivers update though.
-Mech-

EDIT:
Mediator Driver install: -how i did it-
BACKUP YOUR INSTALL FIRST! you have been warned.
Simply make a drawer called usbhardware in devs: if you don't have this from a previous mediator install.

Copy the spider.device to the above drawer - it must be 3.21 (using anything earlier might have bad effects!?!?!)

Get Poseidon 4.4 (thank chris and your lucky stars for this-maybe buy him something on his wish list).

install Poseidon 4.4 as normal,but don't select ANY of the hardware driver devices(no deneb,no subway etc -deselect all)

go thru the rest of poseidon as normal installing classes and such.

Reboot

Start trident (it should be in sys:Prefs) and goto the "devices" window (it will be empty)

open a cli and enter:
AddUSBHardware Devs:USBHardware/spider.device 2
AddUSBHardware Devs:USBHardware/spider.device 0
AddUSBHardware Devs:USBHardware/spider.device 1

you should see stuff pop up in the trident devices window as you enter and hit return on each of the above in cli.

hit the save at the bottom of the trident window and you should be ready to go!

[mechy]

more pix...

[mechy]

and the 5 port board:

[jj]

Good work.  Yeah elbox bound to release updated drivers that screw with this somehow.

[Daedalus]

Veeerrrry Interesting... Some good work there mechy, well done! If I still used my A1200 I'd grab one of them in a shot!

[Darrin]

Hi Mechy,

I'm certainly interested in a card for my A4000's Mediator.  PM me a price (and make sure it reflects the amount of hard work you've done) and I'll place an order.

I told AmigaKit that I wanted a Spider from them months ago and heard nothing since, so I'll happily take you up on this offer and then I can put my Deneb in my A2000.

[Piru]

Brilliant.

[Jope]

Finally someone bothered to try this. :-) Great!

[billt]

What does this do? Correct for a bug in a driver, or

Is this Amiga/Mediator specific, or for any platform? Does it break the card for any platforms?

[mechy]

What does this do? Correct for a bug in a driver, or

Is this Amiga/Mediator specific, or for any platform? Does it break the card for any platforms?

The story goes basically like this: elbox took a $5 usb card with nec chipset,modified the eprom on it to have their vendor id,and then coded the driver to not work with a cheap card so they could gouge the amiga ppl $90 for a $5 card.

this hack changes the generic cheap NEC card's eprom  to their vendor id so it works with the Mediator.

this is a PCI card and can only be used in the mediator. i have no idea if this works in anything other than the amiga/mediator.

mech

[Jupp3]

Great :-)

So finally elbox PCI bus works as every PCI bus should - working with ALL (USB) PCI cards regardless of "manufacturer" - after all, it's probably just a single number (manufacturer ID) (well, it's pretty obvious Elbox didn't manufacture those USB boards...)

So how long until Elbox comes up with an "important security fix for all Mediator users"? :-D

Sure, they might not be able to "prevent everything", but the first post proves, they aren't f.ex. checking for "correct" amount of USB ports (whatever happened to be on those they bought to resell at huge profit). There are likely LOTS of similar things the driver can check, but didn't yet, as there was no need to (as this kind of hacks weren't at least too public until now)

-EDIT-
I'm not a Mediator owner myself, but feel happy for all Mediator users, who finally can use USB card from ANY manufacturer (as long as the drivers are compatible), just like PCI was meant to be.

[mechy]

Great :-)

So finally elbox PCI bus works as every PCI bus should - working with ALL (USB) PCI cards regardless of "manufacturer" - after all, it's probably just a single number (manufacturer ID) (well, it's pretty obvious Elbox didn't manufacture those USB boards...)

So how long until Elbox comes up with an "important security fix for all Mediator users"? :-D

Sure, they might not be able to "prevent everything", but the first post proves, they aren't f.ex. checking for "correct" amount of USB ports (whatever happened to be on those they bought to resell at huge profit). There are likely LOTS of similar things the driver can check, but didn't yet, as there was no need to (as this kind of hacks weren't at least too public until now)

-EDIT-
I'm not a Mediator owner myself, but feel happy for all Mediator users, who finally can use USB card from ANY manufacturer (as long as the drivers are compatible), just like PCI was meant to be.

I wouldn't say all cards work, i stuck with the NEC chipset cards.. I would doubt it would work with other usb cards without the nec chipset but feel free to prove me wrong :razz: .
There is no way to be sure on this stuff, they could change a driver and break it. In theory if you stick with poseidon 4.4 and don't upgrade to anything new they put out it should keep working indefinately.

We should of had access to these cheap cards from day one.

mech

[Darrin]

I think that Elbox need to change the way they now market the Mediator.  Instead of making money off the PCI cards, they should concentrate on just selling the Mediator bus boards.

When you consider the cost of adding a Zorro RTG card to a big box Amiga, a USB solution (either Zorro or clockport) and a better sound card, if you know that you can buy a Mediator from $285 upwards and that you can plug in your own dust-covered ViRGE graphics card, a $5 USB card and a salvaged SB128 card then it more than pays for itself.

[ferrellsl]

Cheap hardware for the Amiga masses?!  Surely you jest!  It's a tradition to gouge Amigans.. Common sense and decency be damned.....we have traditions to uphold!  :-)

If you don't believe me, just ask Hyperion and A-Eon!

[Heiroglyph]

I understand funding the driver development, but ouch, $70 markup for 9 years is not cool.  And if you have two mediators?  You paid $140 for drivers!  That's more than most whole OS's.

Good hack job mech!

Edit: I forgot, we're still paying for Mediator CD's on top of that...Isn't THAT supposed to be funding driver development? Yeah, I have NO problems with this little trick.  Bravo.