Looking for Formac ProMedia 40 ROM Rip

[Phipli]

Morning folks.

Does anyone have a rip of the S3 Virge based Formac ProMedia 40 ROM (or the ProMedia 20, and 80 if they made one!)? Or do you have a card and are willing to extract the ROM?

The card should be capable of RAVE 3D and run a few 3D textured games, although it isn't the fastest. It would be an interesting project to see if we can flash a PC card. I have one on the way (hopefully it works, I'll test it in a PC before experimenting).

The card looks like this :



I'd also be interested if you have any other type of Mac card with an S3 Virge or Virge DX chipset.

 

[Phipli]

Cross linking :

Post in thread 'Looking for: Radius Thunder 3D driver version 1.0.7'

Post in thread 'Looking for: Radius Thunder 3D driver version 1.0.7'

Yesterday at 12:13 PM

Morning @stynx are you able to rip the ROM from a ProMedia 40 for me?

I'm curious if I can flash a generic PC card to work as one and get some cheap RAVE 3D PCI fun. I have one on the way.

It's getting harder to find interesting Mac cards for reasonable prices, but there isn't much love for the S3 Virge

Did any of the Formac cards use the Virge DX?

Everyone else - same goes for anyone else reading if you have a ProMedia 40 or a 20?

That would not be very fun. The Formac Virge driver is not well implemented for Rave and has a lot of bugs.
I have flashed a PC Virge (325)...

• stynx

 

[joevt]

Does anyone have a rip of the S3 Virge based Formac ProMedia 40 ROM (or the ProMedia 20, and 80 if they made one!)? Or do you have a card and are willing to extract the ROM?

The card should be capable of RAVE 3D and run a few 3D textured games, although it isn't the fastest. It would be an interesting project to see if we can flash a PC card. I have one on the way (hopefully it works, I'll test it in a PC before experimenting).

The card looks like this :

View attachment 98094

I'd also be interested if you have any other type of Mac card with an S3 Virge or Virge DX chipset.

Macintosh Garden has CDs from Formac containing many ROMs or drivers. Just search for Formac.

I think this one from February 2002 has 64 ROMs for 17 different products:
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/formac-drivers-version-2011-01-05-archive
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/formac-022001

This one is from August 2002:
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/formac-082002

They have some differences. August adds replaces GA12-ROM 2.6.2 with GA12-ROM 2.6.4.

ProMedia 40 is GA6 with PCI vendor/device IDs 5333:5631
List of S3 PCI ids:
https://admin.pci-ids.ucw.cz/read/PC/5333

GA3 has PCI vendor/device IDs 5333:88F0 (ProVision 2)

I don't see any other ROMs with vendor ID 5333.

PCI class, vendor, device, ROM name

010000 1000 000F SA1-ROM
010000 10CD 2300 SA3 -Rom

030000 5333 5631 GA6-ROM
030000 5333 88F0 GA3-ROM

038000 104C 3D07 GA8-ROM

038000 105D 2309 GA4-ROM
038000 105D 2309 GA4_8-ROM
038000 105D 2339 GA5-ROM
038000 105D 493D GA10-ROM
038000 105D 493D GA10MT-ROM
038000 105D 493D GA7-ROM
038000 105D 493D ProFormance II Light
038000 105D 5348 #9 Imagine:4
038000 105D 5348 GA11-ROM

038000 3D3D 000A GA12-ROM
038000 3D3D 000A ProFormance III
038000 3D3D 000A ProFormance III ROM

These ROMs have a pong game for Open Firmware:

GA5-ROM 1.5.6:CS_C852
GA5-ROM 1.5.7:CS_7087
GA5-ROM 1.8.0:CS_805D
GA6-ROM 1.2.6:CS_2876
GA7-ROM 1.6.5:CS_2670
GA8-ROM 1.7.0:CS_7265
GA8-ROM 1.7.2:CS_F187
GA8-ROM 1.7.6:CS_7277
GA8-ROM 1.8.0:CS_F548
GA10-ROM 1.6.4
GA10-ROM 1.6.9
GA10-ROM 1.7.1
GA10-ROM 1.7.2
GA10-ROM 1.7.3
GA10-ROM 1.7.4
GA10-ROM 1.8.0
GA10MT-ROM 1.6.4
GA10MT-ROM 1.7.1
ProFormance II Light v1.76

 

[stynx]

I have bought an original Formac ProMedia 20 in 1997 for my Power Macintosh 7200 to use a Belinea 15" Monitor besides the 14" Apple AV monitor. The Rom on that card was revision 1.0.6 which i later upgraded to 1.2.6 that i got from Formac for cost of shipping. I even upgraded the VRam from 2Mb to 4Mb to get moe colors in higher resolutions. Back then i could not get the 3D acceleration to work because the 4.5.0 Version of the GA control panel misplaces the 3D extension in the wrong directory.
When requesting the updated Rom, an engineer from Formac told me that the Virge could easily be overclocked by changing some bytes in the rom. I never bothered since 2D was fast enough. Sadly i lost the addresses for the bytes to change in the rom. I remember that by rule of thumb i was told that if the Vram was
35ns: >= 80MHz
40ns: >= 70MHz
45ns: >= 60MHz
The technician said that they did have a select Virge tested at 100MHz in the lab with 25ns VRam but that typically 65MHz was the limit on commercial cards.

-Jonas