Mezzanine?

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moosemanmoo's picture
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Mezzanine?

Just out of curiosity, is the Mezzanine connector in the Mac Mini the same as the one in slot loading iMacs? If so, that would add a whole new possibility to the hacking of those macs, and effectively make a Mini-PCI slot avalable for conversion to a full-sized PCI slot.

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no.

no.

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Ah. That's too bad. Formac ha

Ah. That's too bad. Formac hasn't returned any of my emails about the iMac's mezzanine pinouts.

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ahem...
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Slot load macs do not have a

Slot load macs do not have a mezzanine port. The rev/A and rev/B iMacs did.

i have a rev/B with a voodoo2 in it (boy did that machine rock back in 99 when I got the v2 Quake 1 at 60fps!)

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Yes

That's what I was trying to get the pinouts for. I don't have anything in particular I want to do to my iMac (Rev. B).

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re: Mezzanine?

miniMez is not same as iMac mez. Interesting choice of terms by Apple though . . . mezzanine = ???

It does beg the question, exactly what sort of slot is it? And is it usable for anything besides its official function? The APx card is a PCI device, sooooooo . . . eh?!?

dan k

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The mezzanine slot is its own

The mezzanine slot is its own standard (ieee 1386) based on a PCI bus architecture from what I know. (I may be corrected here). Apple isnt the only one to use it, its used in quite a few other areas by other companies.

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however...

Apple did not follow the IEEE standard. The Mezz port on the iMac was electrically similar to the Personality slot on the PowerMacs, but not the same. Believe me, I spent months chasing down something before I got to what is in my blog entry.

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Re: Mezzanine?

The mezzanine slot is its own standard

I was referring to the miniMez, not the iMacMez. Which one do you mean? As for the term 'mezzanine', there are several standards, none of which were usably close enough to the iMac's mez to be much use. So I question whether the miniMez is related to any 'standard', or if Apple has just used the mez term to apply to a multi-bus accessory connection for adding devices (ie: APx card = PCI and BT (on the eMac at least) = USB.)

Anyone know (or wanna guess) if the miniMac uses the Intrepid I/O/memory controller? As I write, the miniMac's devnote remains yet unpublished. The devnotes for recent G4 Macs show the APx card hanging on the Intrepid's PCI bus, also PCI-bus-derived are a USB 2 controller and the bootROM. Is the APx's connector a 'standard' PCI form-factor?

dan k

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