Flashing a PC-edition X800

[bunnspecial]

I bought a card off of Ebay that was advertised as a Mac edition, and wasn't. I should have done my research a little bit better, but made the mistake of trusting the seller and not digging through their photos better.

In any case, the seller refunded my money and insisted that they really didn't want the card back(despite my repeated offers to return) so that leaves me with card to play with(I think that I'm going to take that money and go after a 6800 Ultra that's up on Ebay now for my G5)

The exact card I have is an X800XT "All In Wonder" card. I've read about the flashing process and think that I can put together a PC out of the parts box easily enough that should be capable of doing it. I've read how-tos and downloaded the correct software, so I think(or at least hope) that I should be able to pull off the flash

I'm pretty seriously considering putting the card in my G4. I know that I'll need to tape pins 3 and 11 in order for it to work in the G4, as well as run a power connector to it.

Are there any other potential pitfalls I need to be aware of? Since the card is, at this point, a freebie, I don't really feel like I have anything to lose.



Are the

 

[Intell]

ATI All-In-Wonder cards cannot be flashed to Mac cards.

 

[bunnspecial]

Thanks-that answers that. I guess I'll find an old PC to stick it in.

 

[iMacC2D]

Removed.

 

[Altemose]

Actually, I'd be curious about this as well. Mine's a Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro 256MB AGP, Device ID 0x4a49. Looks almost identical, if not completely identical to this:

Image

It isn't an X800 XT, but it uses the same R420 (Loki) processor as the X800 XT. Same 256MB of GDDR3. It has one VGA, one DVI and one S-Video output. Most importantly, it has a 64k programmable EEPROM.

After some searching, a few things stood out:

• Only the VGA output would be functional.
• The card should be flashable using a Radeon X800 XT reduced ROM.
• The ROM is write protected, but can be bypassed with an electrical modification.

I was able to successfully modify the circuit to disable the write protection on the ROM, and testing a write from ATIFlash on a PC returned a successful result - the information changed and was retained as I wrote different ROMs to the card.

So I downloaded Gotoh's reduced X800XT ROM from the Mac Elite Wiki. One of the documents (http://www.s155158671.websitehome.co.uk/macx800xtaqua-ma.html) advised me to hex edit the ROM, changing instances of the X800 XT's Device ID 4A4B to 4A49 to match the X800 Pro card. I loaded the ROM into ATIFlash and it confirmed the changes successfully. All was looking good up until this point.

So I flashed the new ROM to the card. The write was successful, the Device ID looked correct and after reading back the ROM from the card I was able to confirm that the write went smoothly.

All looked great, so I installed the card in the G5 (and yes, I remembered to connect the extra power cable).

Nada. Zip. Blank Screen. Every port, no signal, although I only expected VGA. Nothing there either.

If I VNC into the G5, the card is identified but as a "VGA Compatible Adapter", not a Radeon X800. The Device ID and Vendor ID are both correct, but the Mac won't output a signal to that card or the card won't pass on the signal from the Mac to the display.

The only possible thing I can think is that maybe the operating system needs to be upgraded and some custom kernel extensions from ATI may be loaded even to get some basic output. At the moment the Power Mac G5 is running OS X Panther where Tiger or Leopard may deliver different results.

Failing that, all I can think is that maybe this card doesn't like working in a Mac. I would like to exhaust the other options before arriving at this conclusion though.

I would try Tiger.

 

[iMacC2D]

Removed.

 

[yangdh]

Installed Tiger and refitted the card. Exactly the same issues as I have with Panther. Detects as a "VGA Compatible Device" but nothing more. Device ID is 0x4a49. Vendor ID is 0x1002. Those values are present in the ATIRadeon9700.kext driver, but the card still isn't being detected.

Pretty well done with this one, I think.

Try to flash it on Mac, not PC.

 

[iMacC2D]

Removed.