my dinosaur (MTPAV PARALLEL) have any use left in it?

[digitalmuzak]

Hi guys. My friend gave me a g4 400 today (OSX 10.4), nice IT surplus.
I don't have the right keyboard yet so no cycles, but 3 ram simm's are installed, any clues to my ram? I became a life fan of DP in my digital music production classes in CC, and swore I would someday have a mac for that prog. Now I seem to have a decent mac.. (although you guys seem to have 4 procs and 4 gigs!)

I was SO excited when I fired up my machine, but then I had a sick feeling when it hit me that there is NO parallel connection on this thing.. I should back track to the fact that I was about to control 8 hard synths with my machine, via my MTPAV parallel device. Is there any way for my g4 to work with the mptav-par? I will buy DP if I can use my setup.. thanks in advance for your help, this seems like an impressive borg mind you folks have running here, kudos.

[Jidis]

Assuming that's the one with the mini-DIN 8 as well as PC COM connections, I think I remember people getting that Griffin or something. It was called a "something port" (horrible memory here). May have been one that replaced a proprietary internal modem card on one of those.

I hope there's better MOTU driver support for that on current Mac's than PC's. You may actually be better off doing that with a 400 than some people with newer one's, as it was a pretty common dilemma during the port transition back then, so there were probably a bunch tested and in use.

Not sure about OSX though. That may have been more classic 8&9's. Seems like a classic Mac OS and maybe even a legacy DP would run much better on that hardware anyway though (guessing). I do 9.x on my 533 and it's generally pretty tight.

Who really 'wants' an OS on their audio rig anyway?

Good Luck!

George

PS- I *think* there was a related thread up a few weeks back.

[Jidis]

Found 'em!

look for:

GeeThree's Stealth Serial Port
gPort
G4Port

here's a couple pages-

http://www.welovemacs.com/serpordev.html
http://www.griffintechnology.com/archiv ... index.html

Obviously, make sure it's for that model. (probably a Yikes or Sawtooth board)
I, personally, would avoid any USB models.

-George

[digitalmuzak]

Hey Jidis-
Thanks a bunch for your info. It seems like I can add a serial port to my mac quite easily, but this OSX 10.4 is not compatible with serial. Can I run a dual OS on this machine? I just got the machine and I would love to purchase DP and do everything through such an amazing program, but maybe I should bag the idea and just send my audio files over for editing on the mac. Is OSX really special, especially for someone who won't use a mac for anything other than my music? Is a g4 400 with 512 mb even worth running OSX on? Any insights would be great. You guys are quite helpful, many thanks-

[Jidis]

I'm probably the wrong guy for that one.

I started over there and left after a few years (probably a year or two after that G4). I think it's actually the newer ones which won't let you boot into classic mode, but I'm not sure how far OSX goes with that capability. I personally wouldn't push too hard to run OSX, unless there's something you absolutely can't find in 9 or below. IMHO, 7,8,&9 had an underrated "charm" to them (mainly 7). The smaller the faster. I hated XP too, but I've learned to live with it. I still wouldn't try to put it on a PII or P3. Let each machine do what it does best, so you can make some music.

-Take Care

George

PS- Someone please correct that stuff about classic mode if it's wrong. (Thanks!)