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Reader Review: Interex/XLR8 Dual Port USB Card
By Charlie Ruggiero 3/4/99

The card looks almost exactly the same as the Entegra card. [Reviewed here some time ago] Same size, shape, and placement of ports. It was simple to install of course- just pop it into an available PCI slot. The card comes with no software or manuals... none even for Win98. It would have been nice to have something, even a plain white sheet that said, "Macintosh users must download drivers from Devworld.apple.com to make this card work."

After I put the card in, I checked the Apple System Profiler, and it recognized the card as "USB pci" which is always good. I plugged in my Cyborg3D USB joystick, but there was no response.

After sifting around on the web, I found the Apple Developer USB stuff (http://devworld.apple.com/dev/usb/download.htm) [FYI Link was in our Entrega Review-Mike] I found the drivers (you have 3 or 4 sets to choose from... so picked the one that wasn't a pre-release or a beta.)

After installing the drivers the card seemed to function correctly. All the games which had input sprockets found the joystick, and the joystick functioned perfectly.

Some important issues:

1. The computer will crash if you unplug the USB device. This is may be related to the drivers Apple is supplying because it happened with the Entrega card as well. The computer does not crash when you plug something into the port.

   Update: A reader responds to yesterday's reader mini-review of the XLR8 USB card:

   " I just read the review of the xlr8 USB PCI card, and I have some info. I have a Entrega USB card in my beige G3 (300MHz 192MB) desktop, and the problem with crashes on unplugging disappeared with the first update of the drivers, that needed to be modified with resedit before they were usable.
   Both my Epson Stylus color 740 and my Sidewinder pro joystick works perfect, including hot plugging. I currently use version 1.1f3 , but beware of a bug in version 1.1f4, that will randomly crash certain programs. I have not tried the latest drivers, because the one I currently use seems good enough to me (have not had crashes with these drivers)
   Vegard Nesheim "

2. Remember that just because a USB joystick doesn't work with every game does not mean it is USB's fault- it means that the input sprockets either are not set up correctly for that game/joystick or the game does not support input sprockets.

3. I could not try chaining devices because I did not have (A) Hub and (B) a second device. I'll be getting a USB keyboard sometime (when the iKey gets out of backorder.)

4. I did not try any of the beta or pre-release drivers for the card yet.

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