ATI Radeon 7000 for PM G3 Beige

[ttyR2]

I picked up a Power Macintosh G3 Beige tower recently and now I'm looking at doing what I can to upgrade the video a bit. I found an ATI Radeon 7000 PCI 64MB and from what I've been reading willl need to upgrade the EEPROM size from 64KB to 128KB. Solder/desolder is no problem...sourcing the correct part is the issue. Both Digikey and Mouser are showing the M25P10-AVMN6TP chip as obsolete and NLA. Supposedly the Macronix MX25L1006EMI-10G is a drop-in replacement, but so far I haven't found anyone that has actually tried it. I've seen one or two comments questioning whether the atiflash utility will get hung up on the JEDEC ID.

Sources I've been reading: http://www.synack.net/~bbraun/ati7k.html, as well as https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...nd-flashing-x850-xt-rom-on-firegl-x3.2016538/

This is the first time I've tried to modify a vid card and would appreciate any input you guys have.

TIA!

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I flashed a Visiontek 7000 for use in my Powermac G3 Blue & white running OSX Tiger with Graphiccelerator with a reduced rom from themacelite that would fit on 64k eeprom (its been so long I forget which I used however). I think if I was to do it again, I would try and find an appropriate IC to flash the full rom to just because I could BUT if you are unable to find the appropriate chip to replace, you could experiment with the reduced roms on macelite. Unfortunately I am not in a place where I can easily stick that 7000 into my os9 quicksilver (everything is currently packed up while I recarpet and repaint my office).

Good luck though! Let us know if you find a replacement IC as I have another 7000 I would like to work on when I get everything back together.

 

[joevt]

Can a utility like flashrom access the memory mapped PCI Option ROM to perform flash chip identification and programming?
I have a fork of flashrom that works on Macs but I haven't looked at PCI Option ROM flashing methods.
My fork can map the PCI Option ROM and read it in the normal way that Open Firmware would read it.
I don't know if reading it in the flashing way works.

My guess is that you would write flash chip commands to the memory mapped PCI Option ROM and read results from the PCI Option ROM similar to how ROM flashing works on old World Macs (when they have a flashable 4 MiB ROM SIMM installed). I added Mac ROM flashing emulation to DingusPPC for the Old World TNT machines. I haven't finished the ROM flashing emulation for the New World Yosemite/Yikes machines.

The MultiFlasher based on ATI Utils 8.3.1 or ATI Utils 8.7 can detect these ROM types:
W29EE512
W29EE011
SST29EE512
SST29EE010
AT29C010
AT29C512
AT49C512
AT49LV010
AT49F001
AT49F001T
MX29F001T
V29LC51001
V29C51001T
V29C51001B
MX29F001B
Am29F010
SST39SF010
SST39VF010
TMS28F010B
AT25F1024 SEPROM
AT45DB011 SEPROM
ST M25P10 SEPROM
ST M25P05 SEPROM
SST 45LF010 SEPROM
ISSI SEEPROM
ST SEEPROM
SEEPROM

Instead of flashing the ROM, one could have Open Firmware load a ROM from disk. This will work for GPUs that don't access the ROMs themselves (either the GPU controller or the GPU driver).
I made a "Open Firmware Extender" for Open Firmware 2.4 of a Beige G3 that includes a bunch of stuff including a Formac GPU ROM for a Formac GPU that doesn't have a working ROM chip. It's discussed in the DingusPPC Discord.

Reducing a ROM from 128K to 64K is a simple task.
1) Use my DumpPCIRom.sh script to convert the ROM to Forth.
2) Remove the encoding and creation of the driver property.
3) Tokenize the result into a new ROM with my toke command.
https://github.com/joevt/OpenBIOSStuff
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...l-work-in-a-beige-power-macintosh-g3.2303689/

You have to make sure that a version of the driver that is removed from the ROM exists on disk. I think a normal ATI install includes the drivers?
https://gona.mactar.hu/ATI_Mac/