FW-1884 and Win8 - legacy

Kris,
I just re-read the RME posting; I'm confused.
"DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS" is NOT working for you?

Precisely why I will NOT be moving to Win 8 anytime soon...
Who needs "touch" anyway?

Tom

Kris,
I guess you are right, the "integrity checks" is after the "un-signed" install.

I don't know, hopefully someone will give us a heads up.

I (We) would love for the 1884 to work in Win 8.

Matt and Keith are you out there?

T

Well, I managed to install the Legacy driver now - it was a bit unclear how to do this :)

Because of this: 
"Once you have rebooted with driver signing disabled you can proceed. "

The clue is, when you choose this it is only once.
So the next time you restart driver signing is enabled again (I didn't catch that one...)

So, I tried again and voilà - legacy driver installed. 


I have serious issues besides that though. 
I decided to chech my latencty before I installed the legacy driver, so with DPC latecy checker it is somewhat stable around aprox 1000mUs!

This is FAR more than I had with my Win7 setup, if I remember correctly was about 100?
(sorry - quite a time since I had it up and running, maybe a year)


- Disabling 1394 FW in the BIOS does not affect the latency.
- LAN, USB3, eSATA, internal audio, and other unnecessary things are also disabled in the BIOS.

Strange part, is when I check with Latency Monitor it says it is fine...
But I can see my Nvidia uses the most - so I'll try to change the PCI slot for this. 
And also upgrade the drivers for it.

Yes Tom, some of us have to sacrifice so the rest can follow when the solution is ready :)
You know this :)

But I'm not giving up already. 
I'm not convinced it is the drivers, or should I say yet... 


It has nothing to do with the Firewire, is has the same DPC latency with:
- FW disabled in BIOS
- FW with legacy drivers
- FW with standard W8 drivers

I have disabled HPET in the bios just now. Same result.

I changed the PCI slot for the graphics card, nothing changed. 
the DAW did not like that the first boot though, I got a reboot and also Windows was not sure I had activated... 

Could it be something with shared IRQ's? 

So good news - it should be working nicely :)

My only problem now is to make the legacy driver to work at every boot. 

AFAIK, it uses the new win8 driver when you dont boot with the "special option".

Kris,
Thanks for the update.
If you had "imaged" Win 7, before installing Win 8, you would not need to re-install everything.
Just re-install the Win 7 image.
Thanks again for the update.

Tom

New update: 
 
I got a new SSD and though: "what the heck. I'll try again"
Installed Win8.1 on that, and the legacy Firewire driver. 
And, thought I should try X3, so I got the X3 trial installed also. 
 
Works perfectly! Have been really stable (better than ever!) so I'm quite happy with the setup now. 
 

Yeah, I think probably Win8 is as stable as Win7 (at least after the latest fixes) 
The main issues has been for us with Firewire units, or older firewire units which works better with the legacy firewire driver. 
 
But, I also has a Egosys ESP 1010e interface, PCI-e. I tried this (before I installed my FW1884) and that one was completely messed up. Did not get it to work at all. DAW froze and had "black startups". And this has quite new drivers, also for Win8.
 
So - my advice for everyone is to try your gear on a completely new install like I did. If it hadn't worked, the only thing I had to do was to connect my other OS SSD with Win7 and I was good to go 

kristoffer,
Thanks for the update!
Maybe there is hope for the 1884's future.
 
Tom

4 weeks since the last update, just wanted to state that the FW1884 and Windows 8.1 has been stable as a rock and no issues at all these weeks. 
 
Using it with Sonar X3(d) Studio. Using the firewire legacy driver. 

FWIW Tom, I bought Win8 for about 15$ (upgrade from Win7).
Don't know if they have the same offer still - but you can't beat that :)
 
 
 

kristoffer,
The cheap update ended this time last year. I got 2 for I think $20 each. I should have gotten more. It was great because you could install the win 8 upgrade and still keep your old OS and dual boot.
It is good to know there are still some Tascam users out there. I will keep mine until I can't fix it anymore.
Michael

As I have mentioned many times I always doubted the warm up issue. But I too have problems at 60 degrees and have to allow a little warm up time. Cycle the 1884 off and on and all is rock solid.
I think I too would be happy to contribute to having "signed" driver.
Please let us know.
Tom

I don't know about $1600 worth of "happy"!
 

 
T

A signed driver is wrapped into a .cat (catalog) file which includes a hash of the .cat files AND a security certificate that traces back to Microsoft. All x64 versions of Windows starting with Vista require signed drivers to install/run without complaints from the OS. Win 8 will not run in normal mode with an unsigned driver.
Basically for win 7 MS analyzed all the Blue-screen-of death data they had collected and determined that like 90% of all crashes were caused by faulty drivers. They came up with a Qualification program (WHQL) which requires new drivers to pass some quality tests (for a fee of course). And the drivers also had to be signed with a certificate from a Certificate Authority (Verisign,Thawte, etc) to prove they were authentic. Think of it like an SSL certificate that tells your browser the connection to an https site is secure. So if your driver has not passed WHQL, in WIn 8 you can still install it after a warning but if it is not signed, it will not even install. You have to put your PC into a special test mode (see above posts) to make it work. With a signed driver, you do not need the test mode. To sign a  driver, you need some MS utilities and you have to buy a signing certificate from one of the authorities.
So if you just want to use an unsigned driver for your own pc, you can put it in test mode. If you have to distribute a driver with some hardware (this is my case) having the end user have to use use test mode is not acceptable. I had a major customer running my USB hardware all over the world. The hardware was designed for XP so no signed driver needed. Now they are moving to Win 7/64 and win 8/64 and I need to provide a signed driver.
If I had to to do this, I figured I may as well sign the WIn7 legacy firewire driver for all of us left out in the cold by MS. Actually I may have a workaround for my customers (but I won't get into that). If I have to shell out $1600 bucks for VS 2013 forget it. The signing cert is only like $100.
Michael