On 13/02/2012 15:38, "Jesse" <jesse.wm.wall...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As some of you have suspected, the card was recognized when I plugged
> it in my PC. It won't display past the Windows XP startup screen, but
> I know that's something to do with not having the correct drivers.
> Bottom line: if it displays ANYTHING, it's gotta be working to some
> capacity.
>
> So my next course of action is to flash the ROM so that it will work
> in my Mac. All of the methods I've seen involve making a PC boot disk,
> running a utility while booted up with that disk, then transfer it
> over to the Mac and flash the ROM to the newest version. Is there a
> fairly straightforward (and as foolproof as possible) guide that
> someone can point me to?
>
> BTW, the guy who sold me the card apologized for it not working and
> refunded me all of my money saying not to worry about returning the
> card. So if I can get it going, it's a dbl-win.
>
> Thanks for all of the advice up to this point.
First step is to id the rom chip as that will be the limiting factor in
any conversion to mac - it's a quite small 8 pin soic flash memory chip and
hopefully made by ST micro - and if so labelled M25P05 or M25P10 - there are
other reference numbers following the first bit but ignore them. Other
common flash memory providers were Atmel. The M25P05 is allegedly 64KB and
the M25P10 is 128KB - the allegedly is there because many P10 chips were
mislabelled as P05.
Required for flashing on a PC will be a dos boot disk and a second disk
containing the utilities and any roms needed. Flashrom will be ok for the
utility for such an old card and no other display card is required if you
'hot flash' it while it is in use for the PC display as the rom is no longer
accessed after the dos boot. FIRST save the current rom from the card -
vital if anything goes pear shaped.
If you have a P05 chip you can flash it with a 64KB or less reduced mac
7000 rom - or alternatively try the full 128KB mac rom to find out the size
of the chip. If the rom is indeed a 64KB chip the 128KB flash will fail with
an error at 65556 something odd bytes and should immediately be reflashed
with the smaller 64KB mac rom - success should result in a little tune from
the mobo. With the reduced mac rom it will work ok under OSX and classic but
pretty awful under OS9 boot - the info to enable it in OS9 has been removed
from the reduced rom.
The reduced rom/chip is also not upgradeable with any ATI updates as
they will try to write 128KB into a 64KB chip and kill the card - and
resurrecting it will require a PC with a second display card so use the
latest version reduced rom. Complete flashing info for dos commands etc
should be on the mac elite wiki. All good stuff.......let me know if you
need any more...
Pete
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