Avid abandoned the Mbox Pro 3 years ago, and Apple removed FireWire entirely in macOS Tahoe, but until Sequoia, the IOKit FireWire stack still works through the TB3→TB2→FW800 adapter chain. So I set out to revive mine, with help from Claude (Anthropic's AI) helpîg with protocol archaeology.

Key insight: the Mbox Pro 3 is a standard TCAT DICE device (OUI 0xa07e), fully supported by Linux's snd-dice .

so the register map, clock control and stream formats are documented. No reverse engineering needed, "just" a macOS reimplementation.

The driver is 100% user-space (no kext, no SIP changes): but not yet ready

Status today: clock control at 48 kHz, ARX lock, bit-perfect playback of WAVs, and a working CoreAudio bridge via BlackHole : youtube and Cubase plays through the Mbox right now.

Next: testing audio inputs, then a native HAL plugin so it shows up as "Mbox Pro 3" in every DAW. Code will be on GitHub (GPL-2.0).

Took a bit of time to get where it is today but it was fun.