legacy firewire drivers on windows 7?

WaveLab
#1

hello there,

because of steinbergs lack of support for xp with cubase 6 im now thinking of getting windows 7.
i have a focusrite liquidmix that should work with a legacy firewire driver which is fine BUT…

i may have to get a new interface also as emu dosnt have an official driver release ( we will wait and see about that).

so a potential new interface could and more than likly will be firewire,

would the legacy firewire affect the interface,

i know nothing about computers and drivers so this may sound stupid to some.

from what i can tell you change to the legacy driver from the control panel so that would lead me to believe that when you install a driver from a product like the liquidmix or an interface then that driver would work based on the driver settings in the control panel (hope this makes sense)

so if this is true would an interface that was based on win7 native drivers still work with the legacy one.
i would need to get a pci firewire card as i only have 1 firewire port so would i be able to set the legacy driver to one firewire port and the native win7 to another,

thanks for any help.

#2

I’ve spoken with a few folks on the Gearslutz forum who use the Focusrite firewire interfaces. They tell me they run very nicely under windows7.

I had an RME Fireface 800 for awhile. RME has a good writeup on their tech support pages (also mentioned in their user forums under their firewire devices)where they talk about using the Windows legacy firewire drivers. They provide a step by step proceedure for changing to the legacy driver…found it…as follows…

  1. Open device-manager and click on the arrow left to “IEEE 1394 Bug Host Controllers” to reveal the “Texas Instruments 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller”.

  2. Right-click on “Texas Instruments 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller” and chose “Update Driver Software”. A new windows will pop up.

  3. Choose “Browse my Computer for driver software”. A new window will pop up.

  4. Choose “Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer”. A new window will pop up.

  5. The option “Show compatible hardware” is ticked by default. You should get three optional drivers called:

“1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller”
“1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller (Legacy)”
“Texas Instruments 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller”

  1. Choose “1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller (Legacy)” and click on the “Next” button. The driver will install.


    I did it awhile back but have since replaced the Fireface 800 and I dont recall the specifics but it was’nt difficult.

Here are a few links to RME forum posts that talk about this…

http://www.rme-audio.de/forum/viewtopic.php?id=813
http://www.rme-audio.de/forum/viewtopic.php?id=6448

Hope this helps a bit

#3

hi karl, thanks for the reply

although its not quite what i asked(i know i didn’t explain it very well)it still helps a bit in the sense that there are firewire interfaces that will need the same legacy driver.

i know the steps to take to change the driver but whats concerns me is upgrading to win7 and changing the driver to suit the liquidmix only to discover that the legacy driver dosn’t work with what ever interface i buy (presuming my emu 1616m dosn’t work with win7)

at present on xp, when i go to the device manager and click on the iEEE 1394 bus controller i get one drop down option, “Texas Instruments 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller”, but i do only have one firewire port. so what i am wondering is, if i got a pci firewire card with three ports to give me four altogether, when i click on the “1394 bus host controllers”, would i then get a drop down menu of four “Texas Instruments 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller”, thus allowing me to set the driver for each port independently should i need to.

i know i can over think things somtimes, this post might make no sense because the way i think this might work is no where near how it actually does but i’d rather find out for sure how much upgrading to cubase 6 is REALLY going to cost me.

cheers for your help

#4

Ok…I think I understand now… I pretty sure that if you buy a firewire card with 4 ports, that all four will be run by the same controller and thus will run under the same driver. In other words, you may be able to set your existing port to use a legacy driver and set the new card to use the standard/new win 7 driver. I think that’s work but I dont believe you could assign different drivers to each of the four ports on the new card. They’re all running under the same controller I think so all would share the same driver.

I hope I’ve understood correctly here.

#5

I’m running a Yamaha n12 via Firewire under Windows 7 and have had no issues at all.

I’ve not messed about changing any drivers and it works fine.

#6

The situation varies from one hardware device to another and also depends on the IEEE 1394 chip manufacturer.

Cheers,
Bernard