Fibre
Channel SIM : Developed from scratch the PCI support code for a high
end line of 2GBit PCI-X Fibre Channel cards for the Macintosh, its loader
management software, and enhanced the configuration tool. It perfectly
supports the JNI Inc. chip using their sequencer source code. I engineered
a fully compliant SCSI Manager SIM and support tools for allowing these
cards to be used with all popular RAID drivers on Macintoshes. It was coded
for safety and speed and my code achieves over 20,400 individual completed
block IO requests per second per controller channel. It transfers 185 megabytes
per second per connector, sustained, on mid-range macs. The cards are 2
gigabit per port per direction PCI-X cards capable of over 760 megabytes
per second bidirectionally on PCI-X computers, though Macintoshes are currently
limited to 488 megabytes per second (XServe). All PCI macs are supported,
and it supports FABRIC switches as well as LOOP. The SIM "driver for card"
supports unloading, and even supports switching from interrupt mode to
polled mode for ultra-high speed IP packet throughput. It supports a long
list of technical features, including supporting over 60,000 devices (using
LUNs) simultaneously and supporting 2000 IOs in the card simultaneously
and completing up to 4 IOs per interrupt. |
FWB
CD-ROM ToolKit v1.0 to 1.5.2 : Consists of three different portions:
a universal SCSI driver for CD-ROM and CDR drives, a caching and pre-scanning
acceleration module, and an audio player/controller.
The product I wrote received awards of 4 mice from MacUser magazine,
4 stars from MacWorld magazine, 4 diamonds from MacWeek, and wide acclaim
of industry luminaries in written testimonial from people such as Eric
Shapiro, Bob Levitus, and Jerry Pournelle.
Summary of CD-ROM Toolkit features:
The driver enables any popular third party mechanism to be 100% compliant
with Apples CDROM driver specifications. Additionally the driver enables
nearly any device to be Kodak Photo CD compatible, including devices claimed
to be fundamentally incompatible in public statements by their manufacturers.
The acceleration portion of the driver includes over 10 different caching
algorithms, read-ahead read-behind caching, as well as pre-scanning directory
structures and file related information to locations on the main hard disk
for very fast browsing of CD-ROMs. Pre-scanning to hard disk and memory
is transparently performed in the background and makes CD-ROM usage very
enjoyable. Version (1.2) offered fast dynamic RAM caching, scatter-gather
readahead streaming optimization, and other performance enhancements. I
also added SCSI Manager 4.3, PowerPC acceleration, multiple bus support,
asynchronous data transfer, and more.
The player portion of the program is a simple remote control audio player
(volume, speaker sourcing, fast forward scanning, play, pause, etc.), but
sports a beautiful color interface and is competently designed. The Player
was originally Macintosh Desk Accessory (DA), but I changed into a Application
when I added CD+G (CD+Graphics) video player Karaoke playback. CD+G players
are very uncommon in the computer industry, but I pioneered it with CD-ROM
Toolkit. The player also extracts digital audio directly into .AIFF files.
It also plays back 16-bit audio files better than any mac programs I have
encountered, especially with the mouse button held down indefinitely. The
driver does countless things not found in any other CD-ROM driver. I supported
over 78 different devices and Photo CD support was possible
on all of them except 5 old devices.
Over the years, after I left FWB, a few other utilities have been added
to the product, but the driver and audio utilities exist as I implemented
them. The product I wrote received awards of 4 mice from MacUser magazine,
4 stars from MacWorld magazine, 4 diamonds from MacWeek, and wide acclaim
of industry luminaries in written testimonial from people such as Eric
Shapiro, Bob Levitus, and Jerry Pournelle. It was in the top 10 unit
sales lists for Mac utilities, 7 months of its first 12 months of its existence.
The primary reason for its success was that it made browsing CD-ROMs feel
as quick as hard disks. Eventually all Mac Clones were shipped with it
such as PowerComputing and Motorola UMAX computers. Sales suffered in recent
years due to engineering neglect and errors introduced in later versions
after I left the product. (A wholly repaired and UltraDMA 66 speed-boosted
version with DVD-ROM support exists that I worked on for potential for-spec
distribution.)
Current (2000) product spec pages URL : www.fwb.com/cs/cdt/main.html |
| etc etc etc : Countless other products recently, including USB
and USB class drivers, MP3 decoding, CDR mastering to multiple drives in
parallel, live video backdrops with 3D imagery in foreground, disk volume
restoration, CD C1/C2 error correction bit analyzers in DLL and LabView,
major robotic machinery control applications, auto relauncher tools, cross
platform shells, and much much more. |