EEPROM replacement and flashing X850 XT ROM on FireGL X3

[LightBulbFun]

So a few days ago a bunch of new soldering equipment i ordered arrived (mostly for another big project that ill be undertaking once that main part for that arrives) and one of the things i wanted to do with this was solder a larger (128K) ROM chip to my FireGL X3 and flash it with an X850XT ROM for faster speeds.

now as a few know you can flash a X800XT ROM to a FireGL X3 to turn it into a Mac X800XT now you have to flash it with a reduced ROM as the stock EEPROM (ROM chip) is too small to take the full ROM now this works because the X800XT was a retail card and there for ATI included the component that was removed to reduced the ROM as a piece loaded off the HDD as part of their software suit (specify you removed the NDRV to reduce the ROM) Now ATI only included the external NDRV for Cards that where sold via retail. OEM only cards never got an external NDRV and had to rely on the one already in ROM or one Apple placed in the OS. this is why for example there was never a reduced X850XT ROM you can reduce it but without an NDRV things dont work very well (you can end up with the broken grayscale seen sometimes, or your stuck to one screen res and it does not detect your monitor properly and the mouse curser is flickery).


now the way to get around this is to of corse solder on a bigger EEPROM that can take the Full Fcode Mac ROM. so thats what I set out to do. first I needed a larger EEPROM so I decided to use a Radeon 9000 Pro from an MDD for its EEPROM (that i also discovered only saw half its VRAM...) so I took the Card and flashed it with the normal FireGL Reduced rom (as a fail safe a known working firmware) then I Desoldered the EEPROM from it using a 858D SMD rework station/hot air gun then I took the FireGL X3 located its EEPROM (its under the heatsink) and removed its smaller EEPROM (which had a ROM that actually bricked the card but thats another story so by replacing the EEPROM i was also unbricking the card) then i soldered on the bigger EEPROM by placing it on the pads and reflowing it on with the same hot air station.

Here is a picture just after reworking the new EEPROM onto the board (the EEPROM is the chip marked U11)

after it cooled I put fresh thermal paste on and put the card back together then put it in my G4 turned it on aanndd Nothing. not one to be defeated I took the card back out took it apart made sure i did not put the EEPROM on the wrong way round. then Took my soldering iron (a digital 936 clone) and touched up the pins put the card back together into the G4 and turned it on... and BINGO it booted up all the way to the desktop woo!

now this was still with the reduced X800XT ROM so I then took the full sized X850XT Mac rom modified its 2 Device ID entries in a hex editor so it worked with the FireGLs Device ID (the same thing was done to the FireGL X800 ROM everyone uses) the I flashed the full ROM and the ATI flasher said it flashed with no problems so i rebooted and moment of truth.... i got a bong and then a Boot screen! and it booted all the way to the desktop. I was ecstatic it was fully functional. i ran open mark and it completed with no issues scoring exactly the same as a real X850XT mac edition so now I have an effective X850XT that works in G4s as well as G5s Woo!

as you can see it fully detects my monitor and it has none of the issues that a reduced Non retail card ROM would have. I am very proud of this as this is the first SMD soldering I have ever done (apart from a reflowing a MacBook Pro in an oven )

I hope you found this interesting and that it can help others wanting to try the same thing (but do note im not writing this explicitly as a guide more just a write up on how it went for me and what I did)

 

[DearthnVader]

Really interesting, I have a PC X850 PCI-E card I was going to flash with the OEM Code rom and see if I could get it to work in Qemu-PPC in PCI Passthough mode.

Any info you could share on modding the ROM maybe helpful to me.

It's been a long time since I had a PowerMac, and I mostly did nVidia cards.

If I can get this card to work in PCI Passthough mode with Qemu-PPC there maybe some renewed interest in some of the older hardware.

I have hack out a few lines of code for emulation of 3dfx Voodoo, and ATI Rage 128 Pro, for Qemu PPC, but I'm not having any luck getting the drivers to load in Mac OS 9. Tho I am able to fool the old 3dfx control panel into thinking I have a Voodoo 4/5. Under OS X all the drivers load for the Rage 128 Pro, but I'm not doing any emulation of the GPU itself, yet.

Once I figure out how to use this old hardware in PCI Passthough it will help me to write proper emulation of it.

If anyone has any old PPC graphics cards laying around, I'd be interested to know if you've ever tried to pass it off to Qemu-PPC?

If you haven't tried it yet, it maybe a fun experiment if you get a free weekend. You'll need a PC that has VT-d or IOMMU, and Linux installed, I recommend Debian, as I had some trouble with it on Ubuntu, but others have had luck with it.

I don't think anyone has ever tried it, Mark said PCI Passthough should work, and I've had luck passing a few devices to it that don't have Mac OS drivers. Openbios sees the device in the device tree, so I have no reason to suspect that a device with Mac OS drivers wouldn't work.

Tho expecting Openbios to be able to display( init ) the Fcode rom of a graphics card maybe too much to hope for, without a little hacking.

I've got a PPC crosscospiler working and have done some mods to openbios, so maybe I can get it to work.

I'll be working on it later in Dec. if anyone wants to play along.

 

[weckart]

I am about to do something similar. I bought a Radeon 7000 PCI to reflash to a Sun XVR-100. Unfortunately, the only ROM around on the net is for a 32MB card and the Radeon I got has 64MB. It doesn't get on with the 32MB ROM and is pretty much unusable.

No one has leaked the 64MB ROM so I bit the bullet and found a cheap XVR-100 64MB version. I intend to dump the ROM from that and reflash the Radeon 7000 with that. The Radeon has a 64kb ROM but the Sun firmware can be cut to fit as more than half of it is zeroes. That will leave me a 7000 PCI that will take the full 128kb Mac ROM.

If the flashing doesn't work, I have a set of compatible 128kb ROMs I can replace the Radeon's with. No special equipment: Just a soldering iron, a wing and a prayer.

 

[LightBulbFun]

Really interesting, I have a PC X850 PCI-E card I was going to flash with the OEM Code rom and see if I could get it to work in Qemu-PPC in PCI Passthough mode.

Any info you could share on modding the ROM maybe helpful to me.

It's been a long time since I had a PowerMac, and I mostly did nVidia cards.

If I can get this card to work in PCI Passthough mode with Qemu-PPC there maybe some renewed interest in some of the older hardware.

I have hack out a few lines of code for emulation of 3dfx Voodoo, and ATI Rage 128 Pro, for Qemu PPC, but I'm not having any luck getting the drivers to load in Mac OS 9. Tho I am able to fool the old 3dfx control panel into thinking I have a Voodoo 4/5. Under OS X all the drivers load for the Rage 128 Pro, but I'm not doing any emulation of the GPU itself, yet.

Once I figure out how to use this old hardware in PCI Passthough it will help me to write proper emulation of it.

If anyone has any old PPC graphics cards laying around, I'd be interested to know if you've ever tried to pass it off to Qemu-PPC?

If you haven't tried it yet, it maybe a fun experiment if you get a free weekend. You'll need a PC that has VT-d or IOMMU, and Linux installed, I recommend Debian, as I had some trouble with it on Ubuntu, but others have had luck with it.

I don't think anyone has ever tried it, Mark said PCI Passthough should work, and I've had luck passing a few devices to it that don't have Mac OS drivers. Openbios sees the device in the device tree, so I have no reason to suspect that a device with Mac OS drivers wouldn't work.

Tho expecting Openbios to be able to display( init ) the Fcode rom of a graphics card maybe too much to hope for, without a little hacking.

I've got a PPC crosscospiler working and have done some mods to openbios, so maybe I can get it to work.

I'll be working on it later in Dec. if anyone wants to play along.

sadly PCIe X850 XTs cant be flashed with the X850 XT Mac ROM as the X850 XT Mac edition is an AGP R481 based card, the PCIe X850XTs use a different chipset

but PCI passthrough to QEMU-PPC is something im very much interested in and been meaning to try, sadly my only machine with VT-D and PCIe slots is my Mac Pro 5,1 which is my main machine that gets used everyday.... but I do plan to try at some point, (when I first got the Mac Pro 5,1 i did do x86 VT-d passthrough) I am very curious how the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 PCIe from my G5 Quad will react, more specifically will its fcode option ROM work with OpenBIOSs OpenFirmware implementation? I am also looking into getting an X1950 XT and flashing that with the Mac X1900 ROM.... (since much to my surprise going by the Device ID the Mac X1900 uses an X1950 XT chipset)

I am very much active in messing with Qemu-PPC and PPC KVM stuff so do keep us updated onto what you get up to in regards to it

I am about to do something similar. I bought a Radeon 7000 PCI to reflash to a Sun XVR-100. Unfortunately, the only ROM around on the net is for a 32MB card and the Radeon I got has 64MB. It doesn't get on with the 32MB ROM and is pretty much unusable.

No one has leaked the 64MB ROM so I bit the bullet and found a cheap XVR-100 64MB version. I intend to dump the ROM from that and reflash the Radeon 7000 with that. The Radeon has a 64kb ROM but the Sun firmware can be cut to fit as more than half of it is zeroes. That will leave me a 7000 PCI that will take the full 128kb Mac ROM.

If the flashing doesn't work, I have a set of compatible 128kb ROMs I can replace the Radeon's with. No special equipment: Just a soldering iron, a wing and a prayer.

its always interesting to see other non x86 Video cards, there was a Machine that, IIRC was not x86, had 4 AGP slots and took 4 FireGL X3-256s, it was quite impressive

let us know how the flashing goes

 

[weckart]

its always interesting to see other non x86 Video cards, there was a Machine that, IIRC was not x86, had 4 AGP slots and took 4 FireGL X3-256s, it was quite impressive

let us know how the flashing goes

It's not that interesting, really. Sun used Open Firmware as its BIOS but a more user friendly version than the hobbled one Apple customised. Sadly, it isn't compatible with Apple firmware, hence the flashing. It also had an ATI Rage XL masquerading as the Sun PGX64. Prior to and alongside those, Sun used proprietary connectors for graphics and other cards so no cross flashing.

I also looked at some Radeon 9000 cards and came across this model, the Colorgraphic Xentera Quad Screen. Interesting card, never heard of it before. Doubt that it could be flashed but...

 

[LightBulbFun]

It's not that interesting, really. Sun used Open Firmware as its BIOS but a more user friendly version than the hobbled one Apple customised. Sadly, it isn't compatible with Apple firmware, hence the flashing. It also had an ATI Rage XL masquerading as the Sun PGX64. Prior to and alongside those, Sun used proprietary connectors for graphics and other cards so no cross flashing.

I also looked at some Radeon 9000 cards and came across this model, the Colorgraphic Xentera Quad Screen. Interesting card, never heard of it before. Doubt that it could be flashed but...

View attachment 739613

interesting, its odd to see otherwise normal Video cards branded as something compleatly different, even Mac cards had the same name as their PC counter parts more or less Just with "Mac edition" and a custom FW stuck on

I do remember seeing that Quad Output card before, its quite interesting it seems to be 2 Radeon 9000s and a PCI bridge on a card... from what I understand its quad DVI, in theory it would be somewhat flash-able if they are 2 truly independent cards with separate EEPROMs...

"than the hobbled one Apple customised" I would not be so quick to say that, while it aint exactly user friendly with a pretty GUI and buttons. its anything but hobbled its actually quite powerful and you can do some very neat stuff in OF, on the internet theres a small OF application someone wrote that displays screen rez inside an OS 9 looking window you can drag around with a working mouse pointer

the only Apple OF id called hobbled would be the OF implementation in OWR macs.

 

[weckart]

its always interesting to see other non x86 Video cards, there was a Machine that, IIRC was not x86, had 4 AGP slots and took 4 FireGL X3-256s, it was quite impressive

let us know how the flashing goes

Well, the Sun XVR-100 was a bust since what I actually received was a 32MB version of the card rather than the advertised 64MB. There are a lot of similar cards with the same part number on eBay advertised as 64MB. I think there will be a lot of disappointed buyers. It's Sun's fault with its indistinct part numbering system.

So, I went for option two, which would be to upgrade this now surplus Sapphire 64MB Radeon 7000 PCI card



from a PC compatible to a Mac compatible card. One problem is that the bios chip as seen in the following photo



Is an MP25P05AV, which is a 64kb capacity EEPROM, which is fine for Windows or Sun but too small to hold a Mac ROM. I didn't want to go for one of the reduced ROMs, which dispense with OF support so I fired up my soldering iron and got to work removing the offending chip and replaced it with its big brother the MP25P10AV, which accommodates 128kb ROMS.



Yeah, it's not pretty but looks ain't everything. I stuck it in a PC and tested with atiflash. It detected the card and saw that it had a 128kb ROM chip. So far so good. It flashed without a hitch and I tried it in a B/W G3.



Success! Goodbye Rage128.

 

[AphoticD]

Well, the Sun XVR-100 was a bust since what I actually received was a 32MB version of the card rather than the advertised 64MB. There are a lot of similar cards with the same part number on eBay advertised as 64MB. I think there will be a lot of disappointed buyers. It's Sun's fault with its indistinct part numbering system.

So, I went for option two, which would be to upgrade this now surplus Sapphire 64MB Radeon 7000 PCI card

View attachment 748650

from a PC compatible to a Mac compatible card. One problem is that the bios chip as seen in the following photo

View attachment 748648

Is an MP25P05AV, which is a 64kb capacity EEPROM, which is fine for Windows or Sun but too small to hold a Mac ROM. I didn't want to go for one of the reduced ROMs, which dispense with OF support so I fired up my soldering iron and got to work removing the offending chip and replaced it with its big brother the MP25P10AV, which accommodates 128kb ROMS.

View attachment 748649

Yeah, it's not pretty but looks ain't everything. I stuck it in a PC and tested with atiflash. It detected the card and saw that it had a 128kb ROM chip. So far so good. It flashed without a hitch and I tried it in a B/W G3.

View attachment 748653

Success! Goodbye Rage128.

Great work @weckart , I bet the G3 is happy now. Are there any noticeable performance improvements in general use or just for gaming?

Soldering is fun. You've seen some of my rough hacks and I had near zero prior experience before last year. It doesn't need to look pretty

At least your ROM chip only connected to 8 solder pads and not the 32 surrounding it!

 

[weckart]

I haven't had time to test it in anger but the first thing noticeable is full HD, which the poor Rage could never quite manage. That and a DVI output. I was just surprised I didn't fry the ickle, lickle chip. They can take some heat.

I looked at soldering multiconnector SMDs on the EEVBlog channel on Youtube. It looked straightforward. Just need to get some powdered flux. And develop a steadier hand.

 

[benwild_33]

I have one of those Radeon 7000s but I just flashed my one with the reduced rom, worked first time, is there any advantage to swapping the chip?

 

[weckart]

From what I could see, the reduced ROMs were achieved by deleting support for OF to keep the size below 64kb so that you only see the screen when the drivers kick in.

I would rather have a fully supported card for troubleshooting if required.

 

[LightBulbFun]

Well, the Sun XVR-100 was a bust since what I actually received was a 32MB version of the card rather than the advertised 64MB. There are a lot of similar cards with the same part number on eBay advertised as 64MB. I think there will be a lot of disappointed buyers. It's Sun's fault with its indistinct part numbering system.

So, I went for option two, which would be to upgrade this now surplus Sapphire 64MB Radeon 7000 PCI card

View attachment 748650

from a PC compatible to a Mac compatible card. One problem is that the bios chip as seen in the following photo

View attachment 748648

Is an MP25P05AV, which is a 64kb capacity EEPROM, which is fine for Windows or Sun but too small to hold a Mac ROM. I didn't want to go for one of the reduced ROMs, which dispense with OF support so I fired up my soldering iron and got to work removing the offending chip and replaced it with its big brother the MP25P10AV, which accommodates 128kb ROMS.

View attachment 748649

Yeah, it's not pretty but looks ain't everything. I stuck it in a PC and tested with atiflash. It detected the card and saw that it had a 128kb ROM chip. So far so good. It flashed without a hitch and I tried it in a B/W G3.

View attachment 748653

Success! Goodbye Rage128.

shame the Sun card was a bust

but very nice going on the EEPROM swap for the Radeon 7000!

I have been meaning to order a bunch of 128/256KB EEPROMs for some more flashing adventures (I want to mess with some Mac Pro stuff as well)

a Radeon 7000 is a card iv been meaning to get as well, I have a couple Radeon 9200 Mac editions but those need drivers installed and dont work OOB in 9.2.2 where as I think the Radeon 7000 does work OOB in 9.1/9.2.2 plus I read the Radeon 7000 has full driver support down to Mac OS 7.6

BTW as I explained in my first post, what gets removed from an ATI PPC Mac ROM to reduce it is the NDRV this is true for any Reduced ATI ROM. (if you removed OpenFirmware support aka the fcode ROM then the card would just be/act a PC card LOL!)

the NDRV is basically a kind of very basic Driver thats part of the Cards ROM that Mac OS 9/OS X can use even if the OS lacks proper drivers for it, for example this is how the Rage 128 even tho it has no drivers in Leopard is still able to function and detect the monitor connected to it properly.

or how an ATI Radeon 9200 works/detects monitors properly in Mac OS 7.6 even with no drivers in the OS (Mac OS 7.6 at 2048x1152 is something )

 

[weckart]

That's what I meant in my cackhanded way. The basic framebuffer driver gets removed so you don't see the boot up screens or OF command line if invoked until the OS loads its driver.

 

[LightBulbFun]

That's what I meant in my cackhanded way. The basic framebuffer driver gets removed so you don't see the boot up screens or OF command line if invoked until the OS loads its driver.

uhhh

on some Old world machines this can happen

but on NWR macs you do still get a boot screen etc, but for example in OS X if you have no NDRV you will ether get broken Grayscale 8-bit goodness as OS X fails to use the OpenFirmware frame buffer or while you might get lucky with colours, you wont have any proper monitor support and your mouse will be all flickery.


NDRV or no NDRV you still will always have the basic OpenFirmware FrameBuffer, but you cant do much with this hence the NDRV

 

[DearthnVader]

sadly PCIe X850 XTs cant be flashed with the X850 XT Mac ROM as the X850 XT Mac edition is an AGP R481 based card, the PCIe X850XTs use a different chipset

but PCI passthrough to QEMU-PPC is something im very much interested in and been meaning to try, sadly my only machine with VT-D and PCIe slots is my Mac Pro 5,1 which is my main machine that gets used everyday.... but I do plan to try at some point, (when I first got the Mac Pro 5,1 i did do x86 VT-d passthrough) I am very curious how the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 PCIe from my G5 Quad will react, more specifically will its fcode option ROM work with OpenBIOSs OpenFirmware implementation? I am also looking into getting an X1950 XT and flashing that with the Mac X1900 ROM.... (since much to my surprise going by the Device ID the Mac X1900 uses an X1950 XT chipset)

I am very much active in messing with Qemu-PPC and PPC KVM stuff so do keep us updated onto what you get up to in regards to it

How quaint, ever seen a Geforce 6200 Mac?

Not the same GPU as the 6600 Mac, but if you remover the GPU check in the FCode rom, and do a few edits to the NVstrap and the NV,BMP, poof you have a 6200 Mac.

The Darth one knows a little about such things............

 

[LightBulbFun]

How quaint, ever seen a Geforce 6200 Mac?

Not the same GPU as the 6600 Mac, but if you remover the GPU check in the FCode rom, and do a few edits to the NVstrap and the NV,BMP, poof you have a 6200 Mac.

The Darth one knows a little about such things............

you must be new here...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/some-ppc-openmark-benchmarks.1848060/page-6#post-24270500

also im not sure I mentioned GeForce 6200 at any point during that post you quoted?

 

[DearthnVader]

you must be new here...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/some-ppc-openmark-benchmarks.1848060/page-6#post-24270500

also im not sure I mentioned GeForce 6200 at any point during that post you quoted?

Back in the day, when we were creating these roms, we had the Rom Maker, you just dropped a PC VGA nVidia Bios into the ROM Maker, and it spit you out an FCode ROM.

Arti Itra at his finest.

One ROM maker to make 64k roms, one to make 128k roms.

We even had a FCode script that you loaded in Open Firmware and it would build the properties in the device tree for an unflashed PC Card, so the nvflash for OS X would see it as a 5200, and gladly flash your Fcode Rom to it.

 

[LightBulbFun]

Back in the day, when we were creating these roms, we had the Rom Maker, you just dropped a PC VGA nVidia Bios into the ROM Maker, and it spit you out an FCode ROM.

Arti Itra at his finest.

One ROM maker to make 64k roms, one to make 128k roms.

We even had a FCode script that you loaded in Open Firmware and it would build the properties in the device tree for an unflashed PC Card, so the nvflash for OS X would see it as a 5200, and gladly flash your Fcode Rom to it.

indeed I remember reading about that on the Strange dog forums

sadly it seems all that stuff has been lost to the winds of time unless you have such tools still? (IIRC the ROM maker for the GeForce4 Tis only?)

a lot of the original guys, information and tools have seemingly vanished from the internet sadly. MacVidCards (Rominator) was one of the last guys around, but he got banned from MR sadly.

 

[DearthnVader]

indeed I remember reading about that on the Strange dog forums

sadly it seems all that stuff has been lost to the winds of time unless you have such tools still? (IIRC the ROM maker for the GeForce4 Tis only?)

a lot of the original guys, information and tools have seemingly vanished from the internet sadly. MacVidCards (Rominator) was one of the last guys around, but he got banned from MR sadly.

I'll see if I can get those Rom Makers added to the Wiki.

I think I know a way to add GFX Accretion to OS 9 for the Geforce and Radeon cards that didn't have OS 9 Drivers. I should have my Quicksilver tomorrow, so I'l be looking into it.

 

[LightBulbFun]

I'll see if I can get those Rom Makers added to the Wiki.

I think I know a way to add GFX Accretion to OS 9 for the Geforce and Radeon cards that didn't have OS 9 Drivers. I should have my Quicksilver tomorrow, so I'l be looking into it.

that would be pretty amazing if you could add those tools to The Mac Elite wiki site (im assuming thats the site your referring too?)

 

[Sorn]

So a few days ago a bunch of new soldering equipment i ordered arrived (mostly for another big project that ill be undertaking once that main part for that arrives) and one of the things i wanted to do with this was solder a larger (128K) ROM chip to my FireGL X3 and flash it with an X850XT ROM for faster speeds.

now as a few know you can flash a X800XT ROM to a FireGL X3 to turn it into a Mac X800XT now you have to flash it with a reduced ROM as the stock EEPROM (ROM chip) is too small to take the full ROM now this works because the X800XT was a retail card and there for ATI included the component that was removed to reduced the ROM as a piece loaded off the HDD as part of their software suit (specify you removed the NDRV to reduce the ROM) Now ATI only included the external NDRV for Cards that where sold via retail. OEM only cards never got an external NDRV and had to rely on the one already in ROM or one Apple placed in the OS. this is why for example there was never a reduced X850XT ROM you can reduce it but without an NDRV things dont work very well (you can end up with the broken grayscale seen sometimes, or your stuck to one screen res and it does not detect your monitor properly and the mouse curser is flickery).


now the way to get around this is to of corse solder on a bigger EEPROM that can take the Full Fcode Mac ROM. so thats what I set out to do. first I needed a larger EEPROM so I decided to use a Radeon 9000 Pro from an MDD for its EEPROM (that i also discovered only saw half its VRAM...) so I took the Card and flashed it with the normal FireGL Reduced rom (as a fail safe a known working firmware) then I Desoldered the EEPROM from it using a 858D SMD rework station/hot air gun then I took the FireGL X3 located its EEPROM (its under the heatsink) and removed its smaller EEPROM (which had a ROM that actually bricked the card but thats another story so by replacing the EEPROM i was also unbricking the card) then i soldered on the bigger EEPROM by placing it on the pads and reflowing it on with the same hot air station.

Here is a picture just after reworking the new EEPROM onto the board (the EEPROM is the chip marked U11)

after it cooled I put fresh thermal paste on and put the card back together then put it in my G4 turned it on aanndd Nothing. not one to be defeated I took the card back out took it apart made sure i did not put the EEPROM on the wrong way round. then Took my soldering iron (a digital 936 clone) and touched up the pins put the card back together into the G4 and turned it on... and BINGO it booted up all the way to the desktop woo!

now this was still with the reduced X800XT ROM so I then took the full sized X850XT Mac rom modified its 2 Device ID entries in a hex editor so it worked with the FireGLs Device ID (the same thing was done to the FireGL X800 ROM everyone uses) the I flashed the full ROM and the ATI flasher said it flashed with no problems so i rebooted and moment of truth.... i got a bong and then a Boot screen! and it booted all the way to the desktop. I was ecstatic it was fully functional. i ran open mark and it completed with no issues scoring exactly the same as a real X850XT mac edition so now I have an effective X850XT that works in G4s as well as G5s Woo!

as you can see it fully detects my monitor and it has none of the issues that a reduced Non retail card ROM would have. I am very proud of this as this is the first SMD soldering I have ever done (apart from a reflowing a MacBook Pro in an oven )

I hope you found this interesting and that it can help others wanting to try the same thing (but do note im not writing this explicitly as a guide more just a write up on how it went for me and what I did)

Im very happy I found this thread! Im actually in a similar situation...I have a FireGL X3-256 that I had planned on using TOME's reduced rom. This is actually going in a xenon G5 xbox360 development kit that I am attempting to get operational. Unfortunately with the current reduced rom there is artifacting that occurs. I would much rather put in a little extra work and get a card that can give a non-artifacting output, but finding compatible cards is a real pita in 2020. I was finally able to source a FireGL X3-256 with the samsung vram which is what is required to get these functional with tome's reduced rom and was looking at methods to flash since I don't have a working mac setup at the moment.

Would it be anyway possible for you to flash a eeprom with the X850T rom (with corrected Device ID's) that I could just heatgun onto my card? Would be happy to compensate you for your time.

 

[LightBulbFun]

Im very happy I found this thread! Im actually in a similar situation...I have a FireGL X3-256 that I had planned on using TOME's reduced rom. This is actually going in a xenon G5 xbox360 development kit that I am attempting to get operational. Unfortunately with the current reduced rom there is artifacting that occurs. I would much rather put in a little extra work and get a card that can give a non-artifacting output, but finding compatible cards is a real pita in 2020. I was finally able to source a FireGL X3-256 with the samsung vram which is what is required to get these functional with tome's reduced rom and was looking at methods to flash since I don't have a working mac setup at the moment.

Would it be anyway possible for you to flash a eeprom with the X850T rom (with corrected Device ID's) that I could just heatgun onto my card? Would be happy to compensate you for your time.

if you have a PowerMac G5 then it should be fairly trivial to get OS X onto the machine, then you can flash the card with it, or if you have an AGP based PC you can use that for flashing

I would first verify your card works once flashed with the X800 XT rom first before thinking about X850 XT ROMs as that does technically overclock the card and memory some, so while thankfully my card is stable with the X850 XT ROM, another FireGL X3 might not be

out of curiosity is your Xenon Dev kit a genuine one or one made with the Xenon Dev kit OS that got released/leaked finally?

I have a short video of me showing off the OS on my 2.7Ghz G5 with X850 XT-FireGL X3

 

[Sorn]

if you have a PowerMac G5 then it should be fairly trivial to get OS X onto the machine, then you can flash the card with it, or if you have an AGP based PC you can use that for flashing

I would first verify your card works once flashed with the X800 XT rom first before thinking about X850 XT ROMs as that does technically overclock the card and memory some, so while thankfully my card is stable with the X850 XT ROM, another FireGL X3 might not be

out of curiosity is your Xenon Dev kit a genuine one or one made with the Xenon Dev kit OS that got released/leaked finally?

I have a short video of me showing off the OS on my 2.7Ghz G5 with X850 XT-FireGL X3

Yes, i have one of the official kits. But none of the Alpha G5's found have had their HD intact (with exception for the single build you are running!) so I have to run recovery to get it functional on mine.

Hey nice one you got there! Nifty =) And yes, just trying to get a card working fully without artifacting for the setup! I think a friend may have a 128 eeprom that he can flash for me, will see if he can sort me out before bugging someone across the pond

 

[LightBulbFun]

Yes, i have one of the official kits. But none of the Alpha G5's found have had their HD intact (with exception for the single build you are running!) so I have to run recovery to get it functional on mine.

Hey nice one you got there! Nifty =) And yes, just trying to get a card working fully without artifacting for the setup! I think a friend may have a 128 eeprom that he can flash for me, will see if he can sort me out before bugging someone across the pond

ah very cool! when you say run recovery, does that mean you have other buildsyou could potentially run, or do you mean you plan to eventually install 1529 (the leaked/public build)

the Xenon OS should work fine with the X800 XT Reduced ROM as long as your Card does/works in OS X, so I recommend flashing that to the cards stock EEPROM so you can test things out before faffing around with soldering etc

(make sure to install the ATI displays 4.5.7 update https://www.amd.com/en/support/graphics/mac-graphics/radeon-x-mac-series/radeon-x800-xt-mac-edition if your running OS X with the reduced X800 XT ROM so everything works )

and yeah, was wondering where you where located im guessing then your username is not an acronym for Statutory off road notice then? ?

 

[Sorn]

LOL, definitely not a acronym hahahaha. Its actually short for Sorntor, a second name for thorondor king of eagles from LOTR.

Thanks for the tips! Yea I'll get OSX installed on it first and test everything out. Yes, I want to install the leaked build. Alpha (guy who wrote the fraken wiki) said that there is artifacting on tome's reduced rom when flashed to this card, so I assumed there would be issues. I'll get it all functional first before I play around with swapping the eeproms!

thanks !