Hey guys, hope all is going well.
Just wanted to tell you about a fun experiment I performed this past weekend.
I had been on the lookout for a new graphics for my B&W G3 for a while. Its stock Rage 128, although fine for OS 9 and games from that era, was lacking a little bit under OS X and the newer stuff.
While browsing my local eBay equivalent, I came across a listing for a PCI Radeon 7000 that was pulled out of a Sun Fire V210 server. Now, my understanding is that PC cards don't work (without flashing, that is) in PowerPC Macs because they lack compatibility with Open Firmware, but Sun created and used Open Firmware on their SPARC systems, so that got me thinking, could that card just work?
So I took it home to see. This card was marketed and sold by Sun as the "Sun XVR-100 Graphics Accelerator".
To my surprise, it went better than expected. It actually gave me video (kinda)!
The boot screen showed up as usual, but in the OS itself the graphics were messy. I took a look at the Graphics/Displays information pane under System Profiler, and saw that the card was detected as "SUNW,375-3181", not "ATY,RV100", which is the Radeon 7000's identifier. The OS even got as far as detecting the connected display's resolution and color depth (the reported VRAM was wrong, though, as the card has 64 MB, not 128 MB).
As far as I can tell, the garbled graphics were because of missing drivers/kexts, not ROM incompatibility. I had the exact same issue happen when I tried running vanilla 10.4 on a 2005 iBook, which lacks drivers/kexts for the Mobility Radeon 9550.
Maybe if someone were to modify the ATI Radeon kext to include this card's identifier, it could work.
After playing around with it for a while, I used Graphicclerator to flash the official Radeon 7000 Mac Edition ROM, no modifications needed. With its 64 MB of VRAM, this card is now a better Radeon 7000 Mac Edition than the official version ever was.
The takeaway here is two fold. GPUs pulled out of Sun SPARC systems are great choices for PowerPC Macs (as far as the Radeon 7000 goes; don't know about other GPUs they used), and maybe they could work out of the box if we just had compatible drivers/kexts for them.
Have any of you got experience with using cards from SPARC systems in your PowerPC Macs? I'd love the hear the stories as I'm always learning new stuff about the amazing world of PowerPC Macs!
Just wanted to tell you about a fun experiment I performed this past weekend.
I had been on the lookout for a new graphics for my B&W G3 for a while. Its stock Rage 128, although fine for OS 9 and games from that era, was lacking a little bit under OS X and the newer stuff.
While browsing my local eBay equivalent, I came across a listing for a PCI Radeon 7000 that was pulled out of a Sun Fire V210 server. Now, my understanding is that PC cards don't work (without flashing, that is) in PowerPC Macs because they lack compatibility with Open Firmware, but Sun created and used Open Firmware on their SPARC systems, so that got me thinking, could that card just work?
So I took it home to see. This card was marketed and sold by Sun as the "Sun XVR-100 Graphics Accelerator".
To my surprise, it went better than expected. It actually gave me video (kinda)!
The boot screen showed up as usual, but in the OS itself the graphics were messy. I took a look at the Graphics/Displays information pane under System Profiler, and saw that the card was detected as "SUNW,375-3181", not "ATY,RV100", which is the Radeon 7000's identifier. The OS even got as far as detecting the connected display's resolution and color depth (the reported VRAM was wrong, though, as the card has 64 MB, not 128 MB).
As far as I can tell, the garbled graphics were because of missing drivers/kexts, not ROM incompatibility. I had the exact same issue happen when I tried running vanilla 10.4 on a 2005 iBook, which lacks drivers/kexts for the Mobility Radeon 9550.
Maybe if someone were to modify the ATI Radeon kext to include this card's identifier, it could work.
After playing around with it for a while, I used Graphicclerator to flash the official Radeon 7000 Mac Edition ROM, no modifications needed. With its 64 MB of VRAM, this card is now a better Radeon 7000 Mac Edition than the official version ever was.
The takeaway here is two fold. GPUs pulled out of Sun SPARC systems are great choices for PowerPC Macs (as far as the Radeon 7000 goes; don't know about other GPUs they used), and maybe they could work out of the box if we just had compatible drivers/kexts for them.
Have any of you got experience with using cards from SPARC systems in your PowerPC Macs? I'd love the hear the stories as I'm always learning new stuff about the amazing world of PowerPC Macs!
