Video Card Flashing Experiments

[bunnspecial]

This is one aspect of PPC ownership that I've never experienced before, but am getting ready to embark on.

The first step will be a couple of PC Rage 128s, which I'm looking at to put in low-spec G4s from the lot I just acquired.

A friend also just gave me a box full of AGP cards, and I've identified two likely candidates from it: a GE Force 2 MX 400, and an Nvidia Quadro 4.

Reading this site

http://themacelite.wikidot.com/start

It looks like the Quadro 4 effectively is equivalent to a Geforce 4 Ti, but requires modified kexts for OS X.

In any case, it should be an interesting and educational adventure, and I intend to update my progress in this thread.

The first step is going to be to dig up a PC with an AGP slot(and a floppy drive). I think I can borrow an old Dell from school that fulfills both of these requirements. We'll see how it goes from here.

 

[weckart]

As long as it has a working floppy, you'll be fine. The PC I had was ancient, (used PC100 memory), had a malfunctioning floppy/LS120 drive and could/would not boot from usb nor CDRW so I had to burn several CDs until I could get one to contain a bootable dos image that contained suitable CD drivers, a small enough ATIflash executable and the ROM image within the confines dictated by the El Torito standard.

 

[harrymatic]

Flashing nVidia cards can be a real pain - there are several versions of the NVFLASH DOS utility floating around and each has different command line parameters. To make things worse, sometimes you have to use a specific version to flash a particular card. Fortunately there are detailed manuals from nVidia that go over the process though. I flashed a GeForce 3 Ti200 last year, it was a nightmare to get working!

My top tip for flashing nVidia cards would be to write down every keystroke you make and take pictures of the screen as you go; so in case you need to start over (and you have no video) you at least know what you're doing. Don't forget to make a backup of the original ROM before doing anything else.

Flashing ATi cards is so much easier as you can just use the ATi flash utility that comes with Graphicellerator from within OS X (as long as you're using a PCI video card / screen sharing / VNC etc. so you can see what you're doing). The process is the same for all ATi cards.

 

[bunnspecial]

Thanks for the help and suggestions.

I went hunting for an appropriate PC today, and I think that what I ended up with might be overkill for the job at hand .

It has dual 800mhz PIII Xeons and two 68-pin Seagate Cheetah SCSI hard drives. It does have an AGP slot and a floppy drive, though, so I hope that it will work. I'll start with the ATI cards before I dive into the NVIDIA ones.

 

[bunnspecial]

Okay, my first rounds of flashing attempts were not so successful.

Since ATI cards were suggested above as being easier, I decided to start with those.

I installed one of the PC edition Rage 128s in the computer, booted into DOS off a floppy, then popped in a separate disk with ATIFlash.exe on it(or, more properly, atifla~1).

Following the instructions at the blog I linked to above, I first ran the command to identify any ATI cards present. The ATIFlash program reported that it didn't find any.

I'll also add that this computer has no on-board video, so everything I was seeing on the screen was necessarily coming through the installed ATI card.

I tried a big stack of ATI cards(several marked Rage 128s, several others similar vintage "3D" ATI AGP cards), and the utility didn't "find" any of them.

I proceeded with attempting to back up and then flash the ROM, but continued getting errors since the flash utility was not seeing the card.

Any idea on what could be going on?

 

[weckart]

Try a different version of ATIFlash. If you muck up the flashing, you will need a PC PCI graphics card to recover.

As a rule, if you only have the one graphics card in it will be on bus 0.

 

[bunnspecial]

I'm using 4.17, which seems to be the only version I can find for download. I'm wondering if perhaps it's too new.

I'll also add that I went ahead and tried to backup the old ROM using "0" as the ID(I figured that was a relatively safe operation), but that didn't work and I got the "no device found" error.

I'll also add that any time I do anything using the ATIFlash program, I get an error message that the program can't locate the swap file that should be located on the CI don't recall the exact path it gives to the swap file).

At the moment at least, I actually don't have a hard drive in the system that's readable under DOS. The computer actually has Red Hat installed and I assume that the drives are formatted in something other than FAT. Perhaps I should put a FAT-formatted drive on the(unused) primary IDE bus...

 

[harrymatic]

Have you tried flashing the ATi cards under OS X? The ATI flasher that comes with Graphicellerator works very well. It asks you which card you want to flash if you have more than one installed.

 

[bunnspecial]

Have you tried flashing the ATi cards under OS X? The ATI flasher that comes with Graphicellerator works very well. It asks you which card you want to flash if you have more than one installed.

I haven't.

I assume that I can install a(Mac) PCI graphics card in one of the PCI slots, and then flash the card in the AGP slot. If that can't be done, how do I see what I'm doing?

 

[harrymatic]

I haven't.

I assume that I can install a(Mac) PCI graphics card in one of the PCI slots, and then flash the card in the AGP slot. If that can't be done, how do I see what I'm doing?

That's exactly what you do. I used a PCI Rage 128 when I flashed my 9800XT to see what I was doing. You can also use an AGP card to see what you're doing when flashing a PCI card.

 

[bunnspecial]

That's exactly what you do. I used a PCI Rage 128 when I flashed my 9800XT to see what I was doing. You can also use an AGP card to see what you're doing when flashing a PCI card.

I need to order a few more PCI Rage 128s as I have a couple of B&W G3s without video cards, but I do have several of them around.

All are currently installed, but the one in my(working) B&W is probably easiest to get to so I'll pull that and try flashing some cards.

Thanks again for the help-that's tonight's project!

 

[weckart]

I'm using 4.17, which seems to be the only version I can find for download. I'm wondering if perhaps it's too new.

I'll also add that I went ahead and tried to backup the old ROM using "0" as the ID(I figured that was a relatively safe operation), but that didn't work and I got the "no device found" error.

I'll also add that any time I do anything using the ATIFlash program, I get an error message that the program can't locate the swap file that should be located on the CI don't recall the exact path it gives to the swap file).

At the moment at least, I actually don't have a hard drive in the system that's readable under DOS. The computer actually has Red Hat installed and I assume that the drives are formatted in something other than FAT. Perhaps I should put a FAT-formatted drive on the(unused) primary IDE bus...

I used a really old version. Something like 3.10 or so in order to get everything I needed to fit into 1.44MB of space.

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/187/atiflash-3-10/

I also disconnected all the hard drives etc that were not needed. All I had connected was the CD Rom and the graphics card.

I could never get Graphiccellerator to do anything. Curious to see how that pans out for you.

 

[bunnspecial]

Okay, I think I'm making progress, but I'm not sure if I'm getting anywhere.

I downloaded ATIFlash 3.10 as linked above(thanks for the link, btw!) and dropped it along with the Rage 128 ROM onto a floppy disk.

3.10 was at least able to detect the card, which was a good start. Attempting to flash gave me an error, however. Fortunately, it didn't seem to actually do anything as the card still worked fine as a PC card on reboot.

I also tried Graphiccellerator. I was running 10.4 on my Digital Audio, with the PC Rage 128 in the AGP slot, and a Mac Rage 128 in a PCI slot. I followed the instructions, but couldn't seem to get it to load the ROM into the AGP card.

I'm playing withe the Rage 128s now since I have a bunch of the PC versions of them(pulled from computers headed for recycling at work), and I figured that I'd have nothing to lose if I messed one up. I'm wondering if I should bump up to a better card, however...

I do have the two NVidia cards that I still want to flash(GeForce 2MX and Quadro 4) but was saving those for when I got the hang of the ATI cards. I'm wondering if I should just give those a shot.